How Divine Truth Works

God does not punish people; He punishes sin. People get hit with wrath because they are clinging to the sin He punishes. This is why it looks random to so many Westerners, because they simply cannot grasp the notion of what constitutes sin. They keep pushing their reason and logic into the equation, when the whole point of Scripture altogether is that reason is not up to the task. Revelation alone establishes what is good and evil.

So the crazy stuff going on around us in America today is symptomatic of God’s wrath. A critical element in wrath is giving people the rope to hang themselves. It looks like there is no God to restrain sin, but that’s the false assumptions of Western minds. Sin has built-in consequences, so if you demand the “right” to sin, it will destroy you one way or another. The madness of humans doing such awful things is part of the punishment.

That some of it will splash on His people is just a feature of this fallen existence. We are supposed to sense that from our hearts, not bristle at God’s “failure” to protect us the way we would like Him to do. Even with the Passover blood on the doorposts, there was still a lot of hassle involved in the Exodus. The hassle was what God decreed for moving His people closer to His divine will.

They could have had it easier, but they longed for things that were the consequences of sin. Not so much their own sin, but natural results of the fallen condition. This life is not where we belong, not where we should want to be. We endure it as the necessary passage between birth and Heaven. Stop expecting anything good in this life.

On the other hand, know that we can receive a lot of blessings from obeying revelation. But they aren’t direct rewards; they are samples of Eternity. If wrath falls on sin, and not people, then blessings fall on righteousness, not people. Clinging to simplistic and legalistic readings of Scripture will get you into trouble every time. God expects us to be sophisticated, just like the moral reasoning of the folks in the Ancient Near East. That is a long way from the self-congratulatory “sophistication” of Western thinking.

We are required to understand things from the heart, not from the intellect. This is convoluted and obscure to the intellect, but that’s how divine truth works. How do you suppose Jesus, the sinless Son of God, was saddled with the guilt of all of humanity’s sin? God’s wrath falls on sin, and it has to be punished. But someone else can pay that price, precisely because the accountability is not calculated in terms of Western logic of culpability.