Proverbs 16:14 ESV
A king’s wrath is a messenger of death, and a wise man will appease it.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+16%3A14&version=ESV]
The authority of God is a hard pill to swallow, even for those of us used to swallowing hard pills. We want a pleasantly schizophrenic deity- vicious towards our enemies, blinds to our faults, flattering of our virtues, amenable to our desires, making everything easy. We want His priority to be our comfort, not justice, not righteousness, not even our eternal good. We chafe under discipline and rebel under judgement; we rejoice when He abandons us to our iniquity. In other words, we are immensely foolish.
God’s wrath is most plain with the unrighteous. Consider history. As men descend into evil, God warns them. They stub their toes, their consciences scrape at them, and His prophets (His sons) castigate the sons of perdition, calling them to repentance. This course is true of individuals and of those societies which the individuals create.
Then, if they persist despite warning, God judges mankind more thoroughly. The individual’s life begins to break down; his old pleasures fade, his old pains increase, his relationships crack apart, and what he thought was surety turns out to be worthless. The society suffers similarly. Its flaws grow, its cohesion dissolves, and every small problem fractures it just a little more. In time, this destruction will be complete; in time the man will die, and in time the society will crumble. Whether it’s from the inside or the outside, by suicide or by disaster, is a matter for providence, a question of which wins the race.
Among the tools of judgement, we must not forget that of abandonment. When God would judge man, Romans 1 states, He “[gives] them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves”’ (24). God removes some of the protection of His common grace, the permission-to-persist which He extends for a time to the sinful, and their vices are unleashed upon themselves and the world around them. The effect is such as we have begun to more clearly see in modern Western society- rampant sexual immorality, a contempt for truth, a catastrophic degradation of not only morality but functionality (for the second relies eventually on the first).
In the end, if he does not repent, the wicked man has only one end: Hell (2 Pet. 2:4). All men should consider this warning with sober minds. God’s children are given by it a call: pluck away those who are on its course (Jude 23). Call men to repent, to recognize the damnation they enjoin upon themselves, to cede their pretension of autonomy. All the above may sound very pleasant as we apply it to our enemies, but three considerations must stay us from taking easy pleasure in it. First, we all know those who are bound for this fate, know them as people and even friends. Second, we ourselves would rightly walk this course, save for His unearned mercy. Third, most importantly today, His wrath towards sin is not missing from His interaction with us; He is the same God to all men, save that some He has changed so that His character is to them a terrible healing and not final destruction.
The righteous man has been delivered by Christ’s death from the fear of damnation, but that does not mean he should despise God’s wrath, consider it a problem for others. To start with, he is liable to be caught up in the outpouring of wrath upon others- the faithful in Israel were taken into captivity along with their apostate brethren. Yet God doesn’t do ‘unavoidable collateral damage’. If He didn’t want His people to feel any ill effects from the judgement of the wicked, they would not. Consider the miracles of Scripture and the various stories of miracles from history if you doubt this.
Why, then, does God bring suffering to His people? To the wicked, suffering is fruit of sin, God’s wrath poured out upon them. To the righteous, though, suffering is God’s love and His wrath at once: His love upon His child, the sinner whom He is re-shaping to His image, and His wrath to the sin of that most blessed sinner. In other words, the suffering of the believer is discipline; it is the fire which burns away impurity. Fire hurts. Yet discipline should be to us a great encouragement, “For the Lord disciplines the one He loves” (Heb. 12:6). He does not leave us to our sin, as with the wicked.
How do we know it is discipline-to-righteousness and not judgment-to-death? We know by how we respond and what succeeds it. If it is discipline, we respond, eventually (always slower than we should), by turning to Him for succor. Sometimes this does mean repenting of a particular sin, mind, body, and soul. Too often for our liking, though, this discipline is not precise punishment but, like with Job, a chastening to greater virtue, God engraving righteous into our souls, heating the metal so that His finger may write in it. Further, if it is discipline, it is succeeded, even in the midst of its shocks and aftershocks, by healing. This healing is first of our relationship with Him, second of ourselves, now forged more beautiful of heart and more clean of soul (Is. 6:5-7); third, of our relationships with others and with His creation. On this earth, the healing is imperfect, painful beyond our desire to endure, but in the end it will be perfected in our glorification after death, and with new eyes we shall see Him, in His light each other.
God Bless
Written by Colson Potter.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
