handling judgement passages - a few ideas (Monday Morning Mail)

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Good morning!

Yesterday, we finished working through Numbers 11. In some ways the end of Numbers 11 is quite a difficult passage – we are (rightly) uncomfortable with passages about God's judgement on groups of people. After all, we understand that God is love and relates to his people with love. So this morning, I thought I'd offer three quick perspectives to help us see what the God of Love is doing in judgement passages like Numbers 11.

1. God judges the worst offenders to give the rest of the people a chance

When we read stories like Numbers 11, it's important to remember their place in the bigger story of God and Israel, and in the bigger story still of God and the whole human race.

In the story of God and Israel, God is leading Israel through the desert towards the Promised Land, and they're probably only a month away by this stage – they reach the edge of the Promised Land in chapter 13. Before they get there, they need to learn to trust God, otherwise they will all be annihilated. But at the moment, they are still self-focused and grumbling.

One year before (Numbers 16), God took a very patient attitude to their complaining and provided them with quail. Now the people are running out of time, so God takes much more of a boot camp-type approach. The worst offenders die, in a bid to save the whole nation from the same fate.

2. God's judgement works through the natural consequences of the people's sin

The way God judges those worst offenders is by letting them suffer the natural consequences of their sin.

They people grumble because they want meat; even though they didn't ask him directly, God graciously provides meat in the form of a huge swarm of badly-flying quail. People catch it and get a huge surplus. The people who had been craving meat (and therefore also rejecting God's generous provision of manna) eat far too much and die. We see in Psalm 78:27-31 and Num 11:19-20 that it wasn't just people taking one bite of quail and dying – it was the people who ate far too much who died. Maybe it was Coturnism (poisoning from wild quail who've eaten poisonous plants); maybe it was food poisoning from greed and bad food preservation. Whatever the exact cause, it seems that God judges the people by letting them take the natural consequences of their ingratitude and gluttony.

3. God takes the judgement that we deserve

In Numbers 11, some of the people who had done wrong died as a consequence of their own actions as God gave the people one more chance to trust him.

In Jesus, God has done something far greater. In Jesus, the God of Love took on himself the consequences of our own actions. Jesus died not as the fair result of what he had done but as the fair result of what we have done, so that we can have the chance to put our trust in him.

May we know his love and blessing on us this week!

God bless,

John

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