Justice

2 Peter 3:8 ESV

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

As I walk to and from work, wondering how long God will put up with American pretensions. As our nation constantly sits in judgment of God and his ways. Calling good evil and evil good. I wonder if it will be in my lifetime, my children’s, or perhaps my grandchildren’s. Not even thinking of the final judgement, but simply the judgment that the nation I love deserves, for the killing of babies, the mutilation of bodies, and the abuse of confused children. Peter makes it very clear that I do not know the timing of God. I do not know the extent that he will let the wickedness of this nation ripen as he did with those nations that who held the land before the Israelites came.

Reading though the kings of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, readers of holy scripture, come to Ahab and Jezebel. The wickedness of this couple is of mythic proportions and even that is probably selling them short. Yes, they were successful leaders, the nation thrived, economically, under their care. They even enjoyed gardening. This led them to murder Naboth and take his land that they might enjoy what he would not sell. As God executed his decree against him, through Jehu, this line is quoted by Jehu, “As surely as I saw yesterday the blood of Naboth and the blood of his sons-declares the LORD- I will repay you on this plot of ground.” (2 Kings 9:26) Jehu then throughs the dead body of Joram (not Ahab) on the ground his family had purchased with the blood of Naboth.  Jehu continues this purging with the death of the King of Judah (Ahab’s grandson), Jezebel (Ahab’s wife), and all the royal sons. God waited a generation to give justice to Naboth and he did not save Naboth from Ahab.

He did not save Uriah from David, he did not save the priests of Nob from Saul. God allows the fruit of the wicked to ripen, even as the righteous are slain. Yet, how do I call such men righteous? These righteous men are only men better than those who killed them. To be righteous before God they must hold to a righteousness alien to themselves. For even these “righteous” men are saved not through their works, offerings, or burnt sacrifices, but saved by trusting in the savior to come. A savior who was to die a far more scandalous death than they, that they might live forever with him. God does judge the wicked. He does so in his time and not ours. Even as some would look with earthly eyes and judge with feeble sense the moving’s of an eternal God, let the Christians take joy in their sufferings, recognizing that God has given them eternity with him, and calls them sons and heirs of a Kingdom, they did not deserve or earn!

“Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.”

 – William Cowper, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”

CRUCE, DUM SPIRO, FIDO