The Judgments of God

So far we have learned that the "judgment" of God is an evaluation process, where God looks at both the heart of the person and their behavior. He comes up with a place of action based on what He finds; and then He implements that plan. If He likes what He finds, then His plan is to positively reinforce the desired behavior and attitudes. But if He doesn't like what He finds, His plan is a strategy to move them from where they are to where He wants them to be.

In our last lesson, we looked at how God judged Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18. When God examined Abraham's heart and actions, He was very pleased with what He found, so the plan that He came up with was to promote Abraham. Among other things, Abraham got an increased revelation of God, was he given an important role in God's plans and purposes, and God even consulted Him before judging the city where Abraham's nephew lived (Genesis 18:17-20). Sarah did not do as well. When God looked at her, He found a lack of faith that displeased Him. So He came up with a plan of action to gently confront her disbelief, and to help her to embrace faith. In short, He corrected her but He did not punish her. And the correction empowered her to walk out her destiny and bare a child years after her body had already menopaused.

We discovered that God's judgments are a "good thing" for those who belong to Him and have a heart after Him. When we walk close to God and live to please Him, His judgment brings rewards and/or promotion.

If we love Him, but have gotten "messed up" in some area of behavior or attitude, then God's judgment will result in a correction designed to restore us, to move us back to that right place with Him. His corrections are usually pretty gentle, as long as we yield to Him. But if we resist or fight His correction, we will discover that He is very serious about requiring this change in our life. And He will apply as much pressure as He needs in order to get the job done. In other words, the more we resist Him, the more pressure He applies, until we finally submit to His will. If we resist Him a lot, we could end up with a relatively harsh correction. But if we submit right away, His correction might be so gentle that it doesn't even feel like a correction.

The same principle applies to the ungodly. God's desire in judgment is not to make them suffer or to punish them for their sin; it is to get them to repent, to change both their hearts and their behavior. The bible makes this clear in many places, and we will look at one of them: Joel 2:12-14.

But before we look at this passage, let's get a bit of background. God had examined (judged) those who were supposedly His people, but they had hardened their hearts to Him and embraced a lifestyle of sin and idolatry. So God announced that He was about to release a horrible judgment, one that would destroy many people. In chapter 1, He threatened to destroy their food sources and reserves, to dry up their water sources, and cause all of their livestock to waste away. He continued to describe the upcoming horrible judgment in chapter 2, verses 1 and 2, "...Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble; for the day of the Lord is coming, for it is at hand: a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness..." In verse 3, God predicted horrible painful death by fire, and said that everything they have will be destroyed in those flames. In addition, God predicts horrible natural disasters in verse 10, including terrible earthquakes.

When you read all that, He sounds very angry at them, and it seems like His main agenda was to punish them and make them suffer because of all of their sin. But God said something totally different about His motives in verses 12 to 14:

12 "Now, therefore," says the Lord, "turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. 13 So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.

14 Who knows if He will turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind Him..."

In short, God said that He not looking for revenge, He was looking for repentance and restoration. He didn't want to destroy the people, He wanted to bring them into a right relationship with Himself. All the same, He is a holy God, and He couldn't allow them to continue going in the direction they had been going, nor could He allow them to keep doing the evil things they'd been doing. But He said that if they would repent, He would bless and restore them instead of destroying them.

This sounds counter-intuitive if you think of His judgment only as a punishment for sin. But it makes sense if you think of judgment as God's "plan of action" to correct the "bad" things He found when He evaluated people's attitude/behaviors. God's goal has always been the same, it hasn't changed. He wants the people to stop embracing sin/evil and start embracing Him and His ways. He wants them to come into a love relationship with Himself; He wants them to stop loving evil and start loving and serving Him.

We saw this with Nineveh in the book of Jonah. You know the story: God told Jonah to go to Nineveh to declare is upcoming judgment in hopes that the city would repent and be spared. Jonah knew what God wanted to do, but he hated Nineveh and wanted it to be destroyed. So instead of obeying God, he went the other direction, moving by boat as far away from Nineveh as possible. But God caused a great sea storm and prepared a "great fish" to carry Jonah back to Nineveh so he could proclaim God's judgment. And when he did, the people responded to God with genuine repentance, expressing a desire to change their ways.

We see God's response in Jonah 3:10, "Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it." Jonah was extremely unhappy with God's decision to spare the city, a lawless city that had done many horrible and wicked things. So God explained it to Jonah this way in the last verse of the book: "Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left--and much livestock?"

Again, the goal of God's judgment is not to punish, but to restore; and God won't be any harsher than He needs to be in accomplishing His purpose. In Nineveh's case, all God had to do was to threaten to punish them, and they repented. Since He got the desired result, He did not actually punish them. To put it another way: even though they were completely unsaved and ungodly, He was no more severe with them than He had to be.

Now let's go back to the passage in Joel, because I want to point out one more thing. Chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2 spell out a lot of horrible punishments. First we see destruction of their crops by locusts and drought in Joel 1:4-12. Then we see the destruction of their storehouses (reserve food supply) and of their livestock (an alternate food supply) in verses 15 to 18. Then we see destruction by fire in verses 19-20 and on into chapter 2. Then we see thick darkness (volcanic ash?) in Joel 2:1-2, and more fire destruction in verse 3. Then we have what might be an invading army in verses 4-9, followed by severe earthquakes in verse 10. God says this is going to be so horrible that "...the people writhe in pain, [and] all faces are drained of color" (Joel 2:6).

When most people read a judgment passage like that, they assume that this is all being unleashed on the people at the same time. But that is not actually what is happening here. God is describing phases of what He will do to try to get them to repent. First He will send the famine/drought. If that works, then He would be done with it. But if not, then the next step is destruction of their other food sources (livestock, storehouses). Again, if that achieves the desired effect and the people were to repent, then that would be the end of it. But if they continue to be hard hearted, sinful and rebellious, then He will proceed to the next phase...and so on. There could be some overlap between the phases, but the gist of it is that the more they resist God's correction, the more severe that correction gets.

We see the same thing (phases of judgment) described in the book of Revelation. The events in the book of Revelation don't all happen at the same time, but one after the other. In Revelation 5, God presents the scroll which is sealed with 7 seals, and He asks who is worthy to open it. At first it seems that no one is worthy to do so, but then Jesus comes forward as the lamb who was slain, and He is found worthy because of what He did to redeem humanity. Then in chapter 7, He begins to open the scroll. He doesn't just rip it open and read it, He undoes one seal at a time. And each time He opens a seal, a judgment is poured out on the earth, and it takes some time to complete. The judgments are not all poured out together, but one at a time, and it apparently a noticeable amount of time passes between when He opens the first scroll and when He opens the last one.

This makes sense when you understand what "judgment" really is and what God's motives are for releasing it. He wants to give people a chance to reconsider and repent instead of being forced to totally destroy them. In the end, it is up to them...if they keep resisting God, it will lead to their eventual destruction. But if they repent and get right with Him, then He will restore them and enter into a personal love relationship with them.

The thing that really astonishes me is that people don't immediately choose to repent and get right with God. It seems stupid to choose punishment over blessing and the outpouring of God's care. But in the end, each person has to choose how they will respond to God. God put it this way in Deuteronomy 30:19: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live."