More on God Punishing Sinners

One of the most widely held beliefs in Western society is that God simply does not punish sin. True. This has always been an issue. Sinners don't like to believe that God will punish sin. However, it seems that most people in our society have no understanding of God's justice or holiness at all. The general view is that God simply does not punish human beings for their sins.

In my post on this issue on January 20, I outlined a brief defense of the idea that God is terribly displeased with sin and determined to punish it. I'm more and more convinced that the best way to get at this is to ask why people believe that God won't punish sin. If you look at the world around us, there is death, sickness, war, famine, and all sorts of suffering. This certainly does not make it look like God does not care about sin or punish it. That's the point that Martin Luther made in the post linked to above.

In my reading over the past couple of months, I've come across two others who made similar arguments. The first is the 20th century defender of orthodoxy, J. Gresham Machen. He wrote in Christianity & Liberalism:

The other objection to the modern encouraging idea of God is that it is not true. How do you know that God is all love and kindness? Surely not through nature, for it is full of horrors. Human suffering may be unpleasant, but is real, and God must have something to do with it (p. 133).

If they respond that they learn this from the Bible, then they must take all of what the Bible says and not simply what they like. Otherwise, they are using a standard above the Bible to determine what is and is not true in the Bible. What is that standard? They are still left with the question, where do you get the idea that God is all love and kindness?

The second quotation is from the 19th century Presbyterian Pastor and Theologian, Thomas Chalmers. You can read the entirety of his excellent sermon Gal. 6:8 here. I provide here only one portion of this sermon where he seeks to drive home to us the importance of coming to grips with God's judgment on sin:

The awfulness of the first of these events, even death, bears in it experimental proof to God's intolerance of sin. If He indeed felt our guilt, as little as we feel our danger—if His displeasure were a thing as slight and as gentle as our alarm—why so dreadful a visitation upon our species as death...If God be as much at peace with the world, as the world is at peaceful complacency with itself—why keep up so hard and so hostile a dispensation against it? Or if sin be of as trivial account in the estimation of Heaven, as it is in the estimation of human society—how should it have brought down such a vengeance upon earth, as to have smitten it with a plague of mortality throughout all its borders; and swept off to the hideousness of the grave, all the life and beauty and intelligence of its successive generations. That surely is no trifle, which has turned this bright and blooming world into a vast sepulchral abode for the men of all ages. Its moaning death-beds, and its weeping families, and its marred and broken companionships—these are all emphatic testimonies of God's hatred of moral evil; for that sin brought all this calamity upon the world, is a principle announced to us in scripture—and it is the only principle which resolves to us the mystery of death. And when the same scripture announces that after death cometh the judgment—O let us not give in to the treacherous imagination; that He who hath made such fell exhibition of severity in the one, will in the other but manifest and indulge his tenderness. But let us be very sure, that, as death is to every unrepentant sinner but the beginning of his sorrows, so judgment will be to him as a second death.