As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“God is present in every council of those gathered to legislate and to lead. He is a silent witness to the actions of men; He hears every word; and, He understands exhaustively the motives of the heart. God does not take lightly the stewardship of ruling.” - P&D
“Yes, Scripture speaks of death, destruction, and perishing in relation to judgment. But in no way does the external philosophy of conditional immortality and annihilationism follow from that.” - Christ Over All
“Our problem, as spokesmen for God in our culture, is when judgment comes and we have been negligent in warning. If we told them so beforehand, saying ‘I told you so’ when trouble comes is unnecessary (and unkind).” - P&D
“According to the Bible, the answer is “Yes.” Now a fair response would be to say, “Ok, how? What does that look like?” The best description I know of in the New Testament comes from Romans 1” - Tim Augustyn
“We feel sorry for Uzzah, don’t we? From our perspective, he was simply a man with good intentions. He was just trying to help, we say. Yet Uzzah had sinned against God.” - C.Today
“The Judge of all the earth will surely do what is right. No innocent person will ever suffer at His hand.” - Ligonier
“All the effects of the curse are God’s judgment upon the sin of humanity, and [are] God’s continual, providential engagement with creation (cf. Isaiah 24:1-13, Lamentations 3:37-39).
Some Christians have always been troubled by God’s command to the Israelites to kill all the pagan inhabitants of the Promised Land. Moses ordered the people to “devote them to complete destruction,” (Deut 7:2). Why would God do this? Where’s the mercy? Where’s the love?
There are at least two reasons why God did this.
First, God did it because of the terrible sins of the pagan nations
These are sobering, uncertain, and anxiety producing times. I can recall nothing this severe in my lifetime. The coronavirus is a danger unlike anything our nation has faced for many decades. Some have likened it to conditions during World War II, and I can well imagine that to be the case. Nearly everyone is concerned about scarcity of supplies as they survey empty store shelves. Many are afraid of sickness and possible death. Others are panicking about the sudden evaporation of their retirement accounts. Fortunes have vanished in a moment.
The expression “the Day of the Lord” is sometimes thought to refer to the time of the end of this age.2 Unquestionably, there are passages which do refer to the eschaton, and we shall look at them, but not every usage of the phrase can be slotted into the last days—the locust plague in Joel 1 being a case in point.
Discussion