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Discovering God 5: His Response

Psa 2: 1 – 23

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 5 Sep, 2004

ONE OF the most difficult things most of us face is reconciling God’s love and his justice. A loving God is great! But we also expect justice, as long as it doesn’t land on me.

  We have seen that God created us for fellowship with himself. We have grasped something of the passion with which he approaches us, wanting to be a Father to us, and facing our constant rejection of his approach.
  Last week we saw that rebellion which separated the man and the woman, the representative human beings, from fellowship with God and from the blessing he had planned for us all to experience.
  The last, sad scene showed the two humans shut out of the garden, separated from the hope of eternal life. Yet, even then, God did not abandon them. Before they left, he made them clothes from animal skins. He made sure they were cared for even when they were far from him, and perhaps did not even acknowledge his gift to them.

  When I was very small, probably three or a bit less, I decided to run away from home. I can’t remember why I wanted to do this, but I know I was not very happy about something.
  Being a responsible youth, I told my mother that I was running away, because you should always tell someone where you are going.
  So I left.
  I got to the top of the second hill, perhaps half a kilometre from home, perhaps not even that far.
  At that point, I realised that I didn’t really know where I would go after that. I was heading the wrong way to reach either grandparent, and I didn’t know how to get to my aunt’s place from there. So I stopped.

  Its a bit scary to be on your own in somewhat unfamiliar territory.

  I remember looking around in front of me and to both sides. I started to feel panicked.
  Then I looked behind me. There was my mother, not close, but close enough. She asked me, did I want to go home, or did I want to go further?
  I decided to go home.
  For years afterwards, I dreamt about that piece of road, that point I had come to when I could go no further.

  When we choose to go our own way, God lets us do it. When we go our own way, we can only see in front and to both sides.
  But, somewhere behind us, God is there, watching and waiting for each of us to turn around and see he is ready, asking us, “Will you go further, or do you want to come home, now?”

  However, the Bible gives us a much broader picture of God’s responses than just that he waits for us to turn.
  Today, I want us to look at three aspects of God’s response to human sin. He scorns, he warns and he judges. God scorns our hubris, our sense that we can stand up to him. He warns that our rebellion is taking us away from safety. And he judges those who don’t listen.

GOD’S SCORN
  In our passage from Psalm 2, we read,

PS 2:1 Why do the nations conspire
    and the peoples plot in vain?

  PS 2:2 The kings of the earth take their stand
    and the rulers gather together
  against the LORD
    and against his Anointed One.

  PS 2:3 “Let us break their chains,” they say,
    “and throw off their fetters.”

  PS 2:4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
    the Lord scoffs at them.

  PS 2:5 Then he rebukes them in his anger
    and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,

  PS 2:6 “I have installed my King
    on Zion, my holy hill.”

  God doesn’t dither around. When we rebel, whether we are marching around with our wooden swords and our cardboard helmets, of whether we are just getting by in the villages of the enemy territory, God sees that rebellion, and he laughs at it. It is not an indulgent laugh. It is a scornful laugh, it says, “How stupid can you get? I’m in charge here! I am the one who has installed my righteous King. You can’t stand against me or him.”

  If you look at the Kings of Judah and Israel, you will see that many of them were highly unrighteous, they were part of the problem, not of the solution.
  When this Psalm was written, nearly 1000 years before Christ, they had only the vaguest concept of the coming Messiah, the coming anointed King who would rule in God’s power and authority. But this Psalm points to the Son, the Christ. And he shall reign forever and ever. Somewhere behind the everyday run of good and bad kings, there was the coming ideal king, the one who would be so in tune with God himself that the rule of one was the same as the rule of the other.

  God’s plans will not be thwarted, and those who think they can be are laughably stupid.
If God is as powerful as we all know he must be, it has to be ultimately impossible to defeat his plans. Yet, so often, we act as though we think we can.
  Is it any wonder that God scorns our puny efforts to resist him?

GOD WARNS
  I used to work with a chap who hated God. I imagine that he didn’t want the idea of God to interfere with his lifestyle. He went through a string of girlfriends in the couple of years I knew him. He'd get them to move in with him and, when he grew tired, he'd throw the latest one out and find a new one. There is something evil about that lifestyle, and most of the people I worked with recognised it.
  He used to blaspheme and dare God to strike him dead. Of course, God never did. As we read in the letter to the Romans, the truth about many people is that
God gave them over to their lusts.

  God’s way of dealing with our sin depends less on bolts from heaven and more on letting us face the consequences of our own sin.

  But there are times when he does act — generally against nations rather than against individuals. That’s one reason why we, as a Nation, must repent of our mistreatment of so many groups. That’s what saying “sorry” was about. It’s what  lacks in our treatment of people claiming refugee status. It’s what’s wrong with our treatment of the Timorese over gas reserves in the Timor Gap. There is no repentance, no softening of heart.

Today, if you hear his voice,
    PS 95:8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
    as you did that day at Massah in the desert,
  PS 95:9 where your fathers tested and tried me,
    though they had seen what I did.

...as the Psalmist wrote.
  Throughout the history of Israel, the prophets continually returned and spoke to the people:

MIC 6:7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousand rivers of oil?
  Shall I offer my first-born for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

  MIC 6:8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
    And what does the LORD require of you?
  To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

  Or, as Amos puts it,

AM 5:22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them.
  Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
    I will have no regard for them.

  AM 5:23 Away with the noise of your songs!
    I will not listen to the music of your harps.

  AM 5:24 But let justice roll on like a river,
    righteousness like a never-failing stream!

  God is never pleased with mere religious rituals. The best that a ritual can do is to help me keep focused on God. But the ritual means nothing if it doesn’t achieve that aim.
  Israel thought that sacrifices or religious performances would please God and turn away his anger. And God says,
  “I can’t stand these things! Get them out of my sight, and do right instead!”

  Repeatedly, the prophets speak out about the wickedness among the surrounding neighbour countries, and then speak out against the wickedness of Israel itself.
  The book of Jonah is about how God sent Jonah as a missionary to Nineveh in Iraq, with a message of God’s judgment on their sin.
  Jonah was totally rebellious, totally unwilling to do what God sent him to do.
  The entire book is about God’s plans for Israel. He wanted them to be a prophetic people. He wanted them to live for himself and to go to the nations around them saying, “God loves you. God wants you to repent and follow him.” And they always ran away from the task. And the nations perished in their sins.

  God scorns rebellion, but, over and over, he warns that judgment will come if we don’t turn around and come back to him.

GOD JUDGES
  In the end, God has to judge.

   GE 18:20 Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

    GE 18:22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. 23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

    GE 18:26 The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

  The picture is that God has been keeping his distance in the hope that Sodom and Gomorrah would repent.

  Many people think that the reason God judged these cities was the homosexuality, but that’s not what Ezekiel says.
  He says that they were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They didn’t help the poor and needy. Detestable practices come a long way down Ezekiel’s list of things God judged them for. And it’s not even certain that he was talking about the homosexuality in the cities.

  The point is that God is primarily concerned about how we treat the weak and vulnerable. That’s the bottom line issue.

  Eventually he has to act. You can’t let a Hitler, a Pol Pot, and Idi Amin go on forever. Eventually God will judge even Usama bin Laden and George W Bush. The longer they go on, the more people suffer. If they will not stop voluntarily, God will stop them.

  Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?

  There are times when it is right to stop people — even you, even me.
  If we don’t treat people rightly, if we let radical self–interest control us instead of the love and compassion of God, then he must judge you and me, too.
  Some people say, “I am no fat capitalist boss, forcing migrants into sweatshop labour. I am no political leader, persecuting the helpless and the homeless.”

  There was a popular saying in the late ’70s: “If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.” There’s a truth in that. Hitler was hard to stop, but would he have been able to do everything he did, if the German people hadn’t let him?
  Hitler was evil, but everyone who went along with him had to bear some responsibility. That’s one reason why I believe we have to be responsible in our voting, and why we have to act when our leaders take us down wrong paths: what we condone we become responsible for before God.

 And a just God must punish if we take no advantage of the grace and mercy he grants through Jesus Christ, if we repent and trust him.
  A God who left sin unpunished would be a God who doesn’t care. And our God cares with  a passion beyond human understanding.

  To recapitulate then,
  God scorns our puny efforts at rebellion. All he can do is laugh that we think we might be able to outsmart the one who made us all.
  Nevertheless, God is never cruel or arbitrary. He scorns our childish rebellion, but he still warns. He wants us to get it right. He wants us to change. He warns us to give up our rebellion, to repent, to believe, to return to him in faith.
  But, in all fairness, God eventually has to judge — whether his judgment is to let us wear the consequences, or comes in some other way.

  I want to add a brief comment here, and that is that Jesus came to bear the judgment that our sin deserves. We should die for our sin, Jesus, the holy Lamb of God, did die for our sins.
  In repenting faith, I accept that that death is for me. I trust that Jesus paid my penalty in full. I turn back to face God with my eyes lifted up. I am no longer afraid, because I am set free to become part of the very household of God.

  If you want to find that same salvation, the steps are very simple. Admit and confess your sin, trust in Jesus as Lord and Saviour, and begin living as his person from today forward.
  Do that, and you'll have salvation, and eternal life in the company of our Lord and of his heavenly Father.

  May we all know this to be true by experiencing it.!