Question 2

Jesus said “in this world you will have many troubles” (John 16:33) and over the past couple of weeks I have had my share, and they have kept me from writing. But more on that some other time, here I am back again.

Question two is: Is what we are experiencing the judgment of God upon us for our sin?

This is a more complicated question than I thought it would be when I first asked it.

I have often thought, as I have reflected on our present times if God is trying to get our attention. One of our participants in a small group a few years past said in reflecting on the same question “it is like God is saying ‘. . .  can you hear me now?’”

I have long believed that God deals differently with humans now than He did before the cross. We are told that there will be a Judgment Day (see Revelation 20:11-15) and that there will be eternal consequences thereafter for those whose names are not in the Book of Life. But does God put a stop to man’s sin when he goes too far? Does He bring down those nations and leaders who do things so awful that they are a danger to the rest of the world? To what extent does God temporally punish sin? Frankly, I have more questions than answers at this point.

At this moment in history, and particularly as I look upon what is going on in our own nation, there is a passage of scripture that comes to mind:

“For he who does wrong will receive the consequences of the wrong which he has done . . .”     (Colossians 3:25, NASB)

I have to confess that I know more about the practicing of sin than I do about the theology of it, but one thing that seems to stand out in the Scriptures is that God doesn’t just declare something arbitrarily to be a sin, but that sin is bad because it carries with it bad consequences. I my earlier post, “It is time for me to weigh in” I talked about how we have abandoned the so-called Judeo-Christian ethic, for a more egocentric ethical system and are reaping the consequences for this. The same is true for our economy. One has neither to be a prophet or an economic genius to realize that a 17 trillion dollar debt, fed by borrowing an additional one-and-a-half trillion dollars every year to make ends meet in our budget, is an unsustainable model. The consequences of all this could be indeed dire.

So is God punishing us? Perhaps. What I think I am seeing however, is less the direct involvement of our God in the woes that have befallen us as a nation, and more the withdrawal of the hand of blessing and protection from our once Christian nation. It seems to me that God cannot protect, much less bless the blatant unrighteousness in which we are indulging as a nation. The phrase repeated in several places in the first chapter of Romans “. . . God gave them up . . .” seems singularly appropriate to describe what is going on in our world and particularly our nation today. I acknowledge that there are many of our brethren who are standing up for righteousness today, and I do not believe that their efforts will be in vain, or go unrewarded. We will talk about that later. Yet I cannot help but believe that the consequences of what our nation is doing will not be avoided. And I must recognize at the same time that many of our Christian brethren are participating in the wrong things regarding all this, and as we used to say back in the 60’s and 70’s “if you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”

So I guess that my answer to this question is in a way, a qualified “yes”. And certainly we have indeed, as the Prophet said: "sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7)

Next time we will tackle the question: Is the world stage being set for the coming of the Antichrist?

Thanks for sharing this moment with me today.