Today’s reading: Zechariah 1-2; Hebrews 12
I’m not entirely sure if I’m thinking about this the right way, so I would love peoples’ thoughts on today’s post even more than normal, but I have been hung up all day on this verse:
“Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am exceedingly jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion. And I am exceedingly angry with the nations that are at ease; for while I was angry but a little, they furthered the disaster.”
God has said many times, and we have talked about it here many times, that He was using Assyria and Babylon as His hand of judgement against Israel, but that He would ultimately judge these nations when He was done using them because they were not acting for Him, but for their own pride and glory. But here, it seems, God is saying that, while He was intending to use these nations to bring judgement upon Israel, they acted way beyond what God desired. I take this to be, while maybe not exactly this, something like that God sent them to destroy their cities and carry them into exile, but they also raped, tortured, and humiliated God’s people, going way beyond His intended judgement.
My first thought was, “How could a sovereign God ‘mess up’ like this?” If God only intended a certain amount of judgement, couldn’t He have only allowed that little bit to be inflicted? Certainly He is strong enough to intervene if things are going too far, so how did it get to this place where God is exceedingly angry at the weapon He raised up for inflicting more damage than He had wanted it to inflict?
I think where I’ve landed though, as I’ve thought more about it, is that this is what happened when, having ramped up His judgement again and again and again, God finally fully gave His people over. We know that God started with smaller things, trying to get His people’s attention, but as they continued to ignore Him, turning further toward apostasy, corruption, and injustice, He continued to ramp up His efforts to get their attention. So maybe it eventually got to the point where He more or less withdrew from them, leaving them in the hands of their enemies for a time, meaning He was no loner holding things back, but just letting them experience the fullness of their rebellion.
And if I’m understanding that right, this could be a very important warning to believers in Christ as well. Often, when we indulge in sin, God operates with us much the same way He operated with Israel. He lets us experience greater and greater repercussions to our sins, trying to get our attention so we repent, turn from our sin, and give that area of our life back over to Him But what if we ignore those warning shots for too long, and continue, like the Israelites, to callous our hearts to His voice? The result could be, if I thinking about this right, that God eventually withdrawals His hand entirely, with the result that we experience, as a result of our sin, much more than is really needed or justified based on our sin, because God is no longer throttling what we are experiencing.
Obviously we, as Christians, shouldn’t be indulging sin to this point anyway, but if this is how God operates, it gives a greater reason to be vigilant about sin and not count on experiencing a “measured response” to choosing continued rebellion.
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