I have been thinking about judgment, since last Sunday’s sermon on the 8th chapter of Amos.  The pastor is preaching through the book, and it is not pleasant. Amos’s visions of impending judgment are bitter, horrific, appalling.

I don’t enjoy unrelieved doom and gloom. I don’t really want to listen to this. This preaching doesn’t seem balanced, it’s not the way we preach today. And yet, I find myself pondering why so much, so very much, of the canon, talks about judgment!  Whether it’s the curses vs. the blessings described in Deuteronomy, or the grim pictures of starvation, plague, and heaped-up bodies of the prophets, or the apocalyptic terrors of the book of Revelations! God must not only think we need to hear it, but that we need to hear it again and again.  It violates all marriage manuals—God describes himself as the spouse of Israel, but seemingly keeps on, and on, even when it falls on deaf ears.  And, it seems, we must not only read it, we must visualize it, in the disturbing, ghastly, images of the prophets’ poetry.

And, I argue inwardly, God is love.  The major story of the Bible is Love finding a way to get lost, rebellious children back again. Isn’t that what preaching should focus on?  I can't help but wonder, do we really need this? 

I think of the Puritans, and that last Puritan (or first evangelical), Jonathan Edwards.  They seem to never tire of talking about judgment; for them it was front and center.  Yet, at the same time, there is in Edwards such a sweetness—his mark, for many of us, is his insight into what it means to have an embracing affection for Christ, a “going out of the soul”, not just orthodox belief.  The distinguishing mark of the Christian is his affection for his Savior.  This affection shapes his life, spills over in love of others whom His Savior loves.  Is it possible that we cannot grasp the sheer glory of our salvation without knowing the judgment that we are delivered from, in all its devastating, brutal, ugliness? 

Puzzling over this, I think again of the visions in Amos.  It occurs to me that they are organic—the basket of “summer fruit” that Amos sees is, in a case of Hebrew wordplay, also the “end.” God has told them for the last time.  Judgment has arrived.  They will starve, they will die, they will be captured and exiled from the land. The disasters described are indeed the “fruit” of their choices.  When sin has conceived, it brings forth death, says James.  It is an alien thought in today’s pastoral climate—the cartoon doomsayer waving his sign is passé.  We are eager to tell hurting people, plagued with shame and guilt, of God’s unconditional love. And that welcome message is a blessed Biblical truth.

Yet, I wonder whether our sense of failure has more to do with being disappointed with ourselves or our lives than with disappointing God.  At bottom, we have a hard time not believing that we are really pretty good and deserve affirmation, not judgment. We have a problem believing God’s judgment of us is just.  (Oddly, we don’t seem to have the same problem when we judge others.) Part of its justice is, ironically, that we, like Israel, have been deaf when God has spoken. It seems we do need to hear about judgment again, and again, and again. (God evidently thinks so.)  And be shown pictures, to keep it from being abstract.  Pictures disturb  us.  They revolt  us.

Only then, confronted with what judgment looks like, feels like, smells like, we turn with tears of gratitude to Jesus, filled with inexpressible joy that “justified by faith, we have peace with God.”  Yet we do so with the sober realization of the bitter judgments that fell on Another, a volunteer victim.

I’d welcome others’ thoughts on this.