Monday, February 17, 2014

18

Will God allow our disobedience and idolatry to go unpunished?
No, every sin is against the sovereignty, holiness, and goodness of God, and against his righteous law, and God is righteously angry with our sins and will punish them in his just judgment both in this life, and in the life to come. (Ephesians 5:5-6) (from here)

Lord, I don't like this dwelling in the shameful, guilty, terrifying part of reality. Knowing the hopeful truth, I want to hurry there - but today I'm to consider your punishment for sin. Whenever I think about it, my mind and heart turn tricks to explain it and, so doing, minimise it. I want to say, 'Hell is the absence of God', but then I realise that I am trying to exlude all the cruelty and perversion and abuse that humans commit in this life, as if somehow your absence will create nothing more than a neutral, melancholy place. Lord, I know that the people there will grind their teeth with hate for you. And that somehow you will be present to punish-

Lord, I don't see that our sin is worthy of such a place, though I believe it is. For a psychopath or dictator, sure. But for my friends, for me as I once was, and would still be but for you? Yet I know that what lies at the heart of every respectable, egoist sin is your dismissal and that there is nothing more grotesque.

Help me see you better that I realise the unbridled evil of this. Help me know you better that I appreciate the precious goodness of submitting to you. Help me warn my friends even when they do not want to hear. Let me show them the wrongness of their lives lived without reference to you, and the danger of continuing like this, in a way they will hear. Thank you Lord that you are not only a God of righteousness, but also a God of incredible mercy. Have mercy, Lord, have mercy.

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