Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Though we often are not consciously aware of it I believe there is something in us that actually craves the coming of God’s final judgment on the world. We desire to see all things put right that we sense are wrong in our existence. This holds true even when we know that some of those we love have not yet come to the truth. It even holds true as we ponder how that judgment might affect us personally. Despite the disturbing message of 1 Peter 4:17, which tells us “that judgment must begin in the house of God” (at least in the sense of chastisement) we find ourselves looking at the evil in the world and longing for that evil to be cleansed no matter what the cost. This is how deeply the moral imperative has been built into us by our Creator. Such an imperative is inherent to beings created in His image and it remains despite our fallenness.
As the human race as a whole appears to continue to descend into deeper levels of depravity the unchanging righteousness of God comes into even sharper focus for those who, by His grace, have had their spiritual eyes opened. For instance the sensitive Christian in the 21st Century West must sometimes feel as Lot did in while living in Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a righteous, though admittedly imperfect, man who was horrified by what was going on around him. He lived in the midst of a society that was literally hell-bent on rejecting biblical moral boundaries and it grieved his soul to the core. As the way of life of these doomed cities of antiquity continues to become the new norm in our own “progressive” culture we will increasingly feel the same dissonance that Lot did (or at least we will if we do not succumb to the deceptive blandishments that led Sodom and Gomorrah to their destruction, a very real possibility in a Church that today sometimes seems more captive to the world than ever.)
This dissonance is not just felt in perceiving the sexual license that many Christians tend to peg when they think of Post-Modern moral decay. It can manifest itself when we look at runaway self-indulgence of any kind. We behold greed, vanity, social injustice, casual cruelty and a litany of other evils when we look even fleetingly at the world around us. We see it in our fellows and sometimes, terribly, we also see it in ourselves. One response to such awareness is fear. We know that God is not forever mocked and we sense that his wrath truly is being stored up for the Day of Judgment. The fact that it may not be too far away, if we are correctly reading the signs of the times, can amplify this fear.
But in the midst of that apprehension we may also experience a sense of relief that the wickedness which seems so hopelessly pervasive at times is soon to be banished through the righteous hand of God. This is a kind of paradox. The believer can dread the coming of the Day of the Lord while at the same time welcoming it. Perhaps this is analogous to knowing that a doctor is about to decisively cut some diseased tumor out of us. We fear the deep pain such an operation will most likely cause while simultaneously welcoming its effect, the removal of a horrible and deadly thing from our being.
It does not profit us to think of this paradox as somehow strange. Even we who are being sanctified by the blood of Christ are not yet without any trace of darkness in our souls. We may already be perfect from the perspective of eternity, but in “real time” we remain predisposed to fall into the same kind of evil that we often see in the normal behavior of our unbelieving neighbors. The flesh, though dying, remains and the honest Christian knows this to be true. Under such circumstances is it really in any way extraordinary that we long for God to do something about it in a final and comprehensive way, both in ourselves and in the world around us?