More to The Story - Chapter 8 - Judges

HOW CAN A GOD WHO IS LOVE ORDER THE DESTRUCTION OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE?

After the death of Joshua, the Israelites asked the LORD, "Who will be the first to go up and fight for us against the Canaanites?"   JUDGES 1:1(NIV)

Reflection

The following is quoted from the writing of Yale theologian Miroslav Volf. I hope it helps your thinking about God as it did me.

“I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath. God is love, and God loves every person and very creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My village and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? Doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion by refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world of evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love."    

Prayer
 
“Lord, thank you for the reminder that anger and love are not necessarily opposites, rather two aspects of the same passion to see others experience the best life possible. Help me Lord to recognize that Your love is not beyond wrath. Amen”