Punishment is an uncomfortable thing. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be punishment at all! However, sometimes entire groups of people (nations, families, congregations) have allowed wickedness to thrive within their community and incite a corporate judgement.
In these cases, not all members of the group have acted exactly the same. Perhaps some have not participated in the wickedness for which punishment is due. Some may even have spoken out against it. Yet even then, they often suffer to some degree as the community in which they are situated is judged.
God Preserves a Remnant
God doesn’t promise to preserve the comforts of those whom he is redeeming out of a wicked culture. However, the purpose of his judgement is refinement, which means he will preserve for himself a people who love and obey him from the midst of these judgements.
In Ezekiel 14, we find God sending a message to a nation that has become extremely idolatrous. In verses 12-20 he demonstrates how severe the situation has become by saying that even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in the nation, even their own children would be wrapped up in the judgement and only they would be spared!
However, even with a nation that wicked, it is not completely hopeless.
Rejoice in Salvation
“For thus says the LORD God: How much more when I send upon Jerusalem my four disastrous acts of judgment, sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast! But behold, some survivors will be left in it, sons and daughters who will be brought out; behold, when they come out to you, and you see their ways and their deeds, you will be consoled for the disaster that I have brought upon Jerusalem, for all that I have brought upon it. They will console you, when you see their ways and their deeds, and you shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it, declares the LORD God.”
Ezekiel 14:21-23
Those whom God preserves are refined by the judgement. Their ways are a consolation to someone who would mourn for the destruction of the community, because they are the evidence that he has refined it. He has a purpose. All is not lost, though the punishment may be severe.
Again I Say Rejoice!
We may all have gone through this already. Maybe a Bible study or congregation in which we were part went wildly off the rails and fractured. Maybe, as I believe is the case for many across the globe today, the nations in which we live have become so wicked that God begins tearing them down. Our comfort, as was the case for Ezekiel all those years ago, is that God’s people will come out of the tribulation refined.
We may see communities at all levels of society collapsing around us, yet we can still be consoled by the fact that God is working to purify and produce for himself a community which he will bless again. Rather than mourning the lose of what was, we can be excited for the good that God is working.
