Hello All,
(Just a general disclaimer that I must insert here at the beginning. I am but a lay person, like most of you. And these weekly “thoughts” are but my own. Not the definitive word on this or any topic. Just my own conclusions derived from my own study and faith in God. The greatest hope I have for these weekly “thoughts” is to have them be a springboard for further study on your part. Not to be a weekly treatise to be blindly accepted. So, please read them with this intent, this motive in mind).
This week’s lesson from “The Adult Sabbath School Guide” is titled “The Seven Last Plagues”. This week we look at the plagues that take place after the sealing of the saints. As the quarterly states, “the seven last plagues are poured out just prior to the Second Coming… God’s righteous judgement on the choices people have made and at that time the lost are reaping the consequences of their own choices” (Quarterly for Sunday, March 10). We can interpret God’s actions here in so many different ways. We can look at God as pronouncing a verdict on each person for being naughty… punishing them for their wayward behavior (like a stern disciplinarian). We can look at God as dispassionately dispensing justice (like an earthly magistrate). We can look at God as very vindictive, faulting people and destroying them for their failure to choose Him (like a heavenly Nebuchadnezzar). Yet Jesus did not call God a disciplinarian, nor a magistrate, nor a despot like Nebuchadnezzar. Jesus repeatedly called God “our Father”; and John the beloved disciple tells us that “God is Love”. We often say that God is “love”. BUT, we say, He is also “just”. Implying that “justice” is not “love” or even that “justice” is opposed to “love”. That God is, in effect, two-faced. “Love” when we are good, and “just” when we are bad. So is there another way to describe God’s actions here at the end of history that does not do insult to our “Father” who “loves” us?
Sinners that we are, we are so prone to interpret God in light of our own experience. As such, we are guilty of making God in our image. Guilty of not seeing God as He really is. Guilty of interpreting God as no-different than ourselves. “Up to the time of Christ's first advent, men worshiped cruel, despotic gods. Even the Jewish mind was reached through fear rather than love. Christ's mission was to reveal to men that God is not a despot, but a Father, full of mercy and love for His children. He spoke of God by the endearing name of ‘Father’.” (Signs of the Times, 9/23/08). So if “God is Love”, how can we look at the plagues as “love”? Plagues that are not redemptive in any way, for “the last plagues will not bring anyone to repentance…” (Quarterly for Sunday, March 10)? Part of the meaning is found in the concept of God’s “judgement”.
God’s judgement is different than our human judgement…“the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). And God’s judgement at the end is not some mere Divine decree. “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His saints, to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him” (Jude 14-15). God’s “judgement” is only to reveal the truth. The truth that lies in each heart and mind. The irreclaimably wicked at the end have continually denied God’s convicting Holy Spirit. Have persistently denied the truth that lurks in their own heart. So a God of love must reveal each person’s true condition to each person. Words and irrefutable logic will not convince the wicked that they have destroyed themselves. Our loving Father must show them themselves. The irreclaimably wicked are God’s children still and as such God still loves them with everlasting love.
“Divine wrath is God’s righteous judgement on the choices people have made (see Romans 1: 26-28)” (Quarterly for Sunday, March 10). Actually, read Romans 1: 18, 24, 26, and 28. In these verses you will see what God’s “wrath” really is. It is not like our human anger at all. Paul tells us that God’s “wrath” is “letting us go”. Sadly letting us have the sin we are hell-bent on having. God is not pleased and happy about having to “let us go”. But what else is a God of Love to do when His child says for the last time, “leave me alone”? A child who has persistently refused the Holy Spirit’s promptings and denied the very leading of His Father-in-Heaven? In the end, that Loving Father must let the child go. But not without first allowing that child to see for themselves the extent of his own rebellion and how it has destroyed the very image of God within themselves. The last plagues reveal to the irreclaimably wicked the true nature of themselves. A nature that Divine love (or a million more years of Divine love) will never change. Yes, they have destroyed themselves and there is nothing more that God can do. So before he lets them go, He will demonstrate the truth to them. The truth about themselves. And when they are “handed over” and “let go”, they will die. Fully loved by their Father, but die they will. For they want none of that love. Are all God’s actions love? Rightly understood, yes! Remember “that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” Romans 8:38-39. Nothing… no thing… can separate us from God’s love. Even the plagues at the end… and the everlasting fire… are but expressions of God’s eternal love for the wicked.
With brotherly love,
Jim