"I have trodden the wine press alone...I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments...for the day of vengeance is in my heart....
"Surely they are my people...so He was their Savior. In all their affliction He was afflicted...He bare them, and carried them all the days of old...We are thine...." Isaiah 63:3, 4a, 8, 9, 19a
I think many misunderstand God's actions because they do not understand His intimate involvement with creation and history. Though He is independent from those things, He is also enmeshed in it, involved with it, and this drives skeptics insane. The God they hope and image to deny is aloof and distant, and thus any dealings with us come off as cruel or irrational, or both. The fact that God involves Himself in human affairs, as if He had a stake in its outcome, is not grasped properly by skeptic and believer alike.
What if God's wrath and judgment truly are not arbitrary? What if they are vengeance, i.e., God Himself has been offended against, and thus will repay the offender? We see Sin as our problem and our business; what if it is God's business? What if it is truly what the Bible calls it: outright rebellion against a deserving superior, a slap in God's face, to spit in His face, something upon which He must be avenged? Skeptics claim that God is merely immoral in His judgments; the Bible is actually much harsher in its opinion of God's judgments: He is not immoral, but vengeful, dishing out retribution to those who have committed a personal transgress against Him. The problem with skeptics is not that they view God's wrath too seriously; actually, they treat it with much levity. The wrath of the God of the Bible is more intimate in His judgments, as though He actually cared about what we humans do in this life.
Likewise, what if God's favor truly is not arbitrary either? What if it is truly based on love, i.e., the sovereign preference of another over yourself? Do we grasp the fullness of His love, that intimate connection that arouses jealousy and devotion even in the Divine? What if we took the Bible seriously that God is love, that He desires fellowship with us, that He is filled with indignation towards those who harm His beloved just as any husband would feel towards a man who attacked his wife? As with wrath, it is the intimate aspect of all this that skeptics either miss or stumble over. They desire an aloof God (or no God) because the God of the Bible is too close for comfort. He is in the very air they breath, in the midst of their truest lovings and hatings; for when we love and hate correctly, we reveal the image of God stamped upon all of us.
"Your vengeance and Your love
Reveal a God Who is with us..."
-Jon Vowell
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