Sometimes, the things that I sense God is calling me to pray for are more than a little bit scary. It’s not that I’m worried he won’t answer; I’m worried he will, because those are prayers for things I’m not sure I want. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say, things that I’m pretty sure a part of me doesn’t want. Recently, I’ve felt that I needed to pray that I would start to see sin, including my own sin, the way God does. That’s definitely a scary prayer, partly because it might result in me having to give up something that I don’t want to give up.
The result of this prayer has not been any sudden flashes of insight; at least not yet. Instead, I’ve found myself wrestling with passages of Scripture that are challenging my preconceptions about who God is, who I’m supposed to be, and what it means to love. And getting uncomfortable in the process.
One such passage is in Revelation 11. At this point in the book John, the author, has just finished describing a series of disasters that devastate the land, the sea and the vegetation, and that result in the torture and death of vast numbers of people. And then we read this:
The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said:
“The kingdom of the world has become
the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
and he will reign for ever and ever.”
And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying:
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
the One who is and who was,
because you have taken your great power
and have begun to reign.
The nations were angry,
and your wrath has come.
The time has come for judging the dead,
and for rewarding your servants the prophets
and your people who revere your name,
both great and small –
and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”
(Revelation 11:15-18).
This passage is, to say the least, jarring. The earth has been devastated. Humanity has been devastated. Pain and death are everywhere. And heaven is rejoicing. The angels in heaven are rejoicing that God is unleashing his judgment on the world.
I have to admit that my first reaction to this passage was to gloss over it and quickly move on. And my second was to try and think up a quick “answer” to the apparent problem that passages like this – and there are plenty of others, both in Revelation and in the rest of the Bible – present for my understanding of God’s love. But both of those reactions are, at heart, dishonest. As portrayed in Scripture, God’s love and God’s judgment do not contradict, but there is definitely a tension between them that I think we need to be willing to wrestle with if we’re ever going to be fully mature as believers.
God is love (1 John 4:8); that’s undeniable. But God, who is love, also says, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35), and
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness (Romans 1:18).
These two concepts are not easy to fit together. Some skeptics would say that they can’t fit together, and God, therefore, does not exist. But I think the real truth is that our own understanding of good and evil, by which we judge our own actions and the actions of others as right or wrong, is unreliable. This is not to say that the human conscience is always wrong; that’s clearly not the case, although it would in some ways make things easier if it were. It is true that people who make a habit of ignoring their conscience risk becoming unable to hear it at all. Their consciences become seared (1 Timothy 4:2), and I do think there are cases where the conscience can become fully corrupt. But for most people, it does not become so twisted as to be always, or even usually wrong.
But neither does it become perfect, and that’s a big problem because we tend to treat our consciences as though they were always right. The thought, “my conscience might be leading me astray” is one that, I suspect, never even occurs to most people. And yet, in the Scriptures we find:
My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me (1 Corinthians 4:4).
and
Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled (1 Corinthians 8:7).
and
To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted (Titus 1:15).
This is why the Bible tells us that it requires practice and maturity for even believers in Christ to be able to distinguish good from evil (Hebrews 5:14). And if we can not reliably distinguish good from evil in our own actions, we should hesitate before trying to evaluate God’s actions.
I’m not writing the article for skeptics, however, but for those who genuinely want to follow Jesus. But to be a faithful follower myself, I need to have the humility to let him teach me what good and evil really are, rather than assume I already know. And the humility, also, to understand that God is not like I am. He is righteous (Psalm 145:17), he is holy (Isaiah 6:3) and he is just (Romans 3:26). Because of who God is, his vengeance, his wrath, and perfect justice, are just different words for the same thing. That’s certainly not true of me! I am only beginning to get the faintest glimmerings of what it might feel like to have a godly attitude toward others, so my own experience is an even less reliable guide than my conscience.
We know from the Scriptures that God’s judgments are perfectly just (Revelation 16:6). The prophet Isaiah wrote:
When your judgments come upon the earth, the people of the world learn righteousness (Isaiah 26:9).
Which puts the Revelation 11 passage I quoted at the beginning of this article into a different perspective. Heaven is not rejoicing in destruction or pain or death, but in the fact that justice is being done.
This, at least, I can somewhat understand. On January 3rd of this year, American forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U. S. to stand trial. The world’s reaction was mixed, but I was struck by the fact that one particular group of people seemed to all be out dancing in the streets. That group was Venezuelan expatriates. A little less than two months later, on February 28th, I saw the same reaction from Iranian expatriates after they heard the news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed. These were not random strangers rejoicing in the misfortune of others; they were Maduro’s and Khamenei’s victims, and the families of their victims. And I think back as well to May 2nd, 2011, when I joined in with much of the western world to celebrate the death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
From this perspective, and looking back again at Revelation 11, I am brought face to face with the very unpleasant fact that sin, even my own sin, has victims. It’s not just harmless fun. Even so-called private sins have an impact on my thoughts, my attitudes, and ultimately my character, which then come out in my actions. Every single one of us is a perpetrator of evil, even as every single one of us is also a victim of the evil perpetrated by others. What’s worse, in the light of Matthew 10:28, I have to recognize that the most evil thing anyone can do to another person is not rape or torture or even murder, but enticing them to sin.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! (Matthew 18:7-8).
And I’ve done that. A lot.
And that, I think, is the piece that brings it all into focus. God’s desire is not that the wicked die in their sins, but that they repent (Ezekiel 18:23, 2 Peter 3:9). The angels in heaven, also, rejoice over each sinner who repents (Luke 15:7). We are to pray and work and hope for the repentance and salvation of everyone, even those who hate us (Matthew 5:44, Romans 12:14). But if those who are intent on evil do not repent, it is right to celebrate when God puts an end to their evil. And it’s right, also, to trust that, even if I do not see the full extent of anyone’s sins, including my own, God sees, and his judgments are just.
We are commanded to love our enemies, but we are not commanded to love only our enemies and no one else. Compassion for evil people that has no regard for their victims is participation in evil. Compassion that has no regard for justice is not godly compassion.
My discomfort with Revelation 11, then, stems from my failure to see the true face of sin. To believe the lie that it’s not that bad; that no one is really getting hurt. And I want very much to believe that lie, because it would mean that my own sin is not that bad, and I never really hurt anybody. Who wouldn’t want to believe that? But I know that it is a lie.
I have been praying that God will show me the true face of sin. As I said, that’s been a little scary, because when God answers that prayer, I usually don’t like what I see. What started as a deep dive into heavenly rejoicing in God’s judgment of the world has let to a much darker view of myself. But at the same time, I know that being mature in Christ requires that I see things as they are, and train myself, through constant practice, “to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14). And to the extent that I see that my sin is more damaging, more straight out evil, than I had let myself believe, I also see that God’s mercy is greater than I had known. The more I recognize who I am, the more I see who he is. And, ironically, the times when I am the closest to Jesus are exactly those moments when I am most aware of my own failures. And of the fact that it’s not my failures that define who I am, but God’s mercy.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.