Picturing God’s Judgment

The reader may have a question about the nature of God’s judgment on both Judah and the pagan nations. How could God use the pagan nations to execute his will and then punish those same nations for accomplishing this? This is a New Testament question as well since God brings judgment on Jerusalem through the pagan nation of Rome.

God is not causing the disobedience of anyone, and God is not punishing them even though they have in some manner been obedient or compliant. These are nations that had opportunities to respond to God but have rejected him. They are being recompensed for malicious acts of injustice toward God’s people. They carried out those acts without regard for God’s opinion about Judah’s disobedience. In other words, had Judah been a nation seeking God, these nations still would have wanted to act against them. They were in no sense compliant to God’s will. God had simply chosen to leverage their sin for his good.

God is not forcing the pagan nations such as Babylon to sin. They were participating of their own free will. God is allowing their evil to be untempered against his people because it was carrying out other purposes.

In a sense God still does this today. Perhaps the best modern example of this is the country of Romania. Under the evil hand of Romanian dictator Nicolae CeauSescu, the people of Romania suffered greatly, especially the Christians. Christian pastors were treated as enemies of the state. They were persecuted, abused, and in every way marginalized. Why God allowed this evil to continue is something we will never understand. However, we can see the effects. After CeauSescu was removed from power and the Romanian Revolution occurred in 1989, the church flourished. In fact, the largest evangelical church in Europe and the largest evangelical university in Europe are in, of all places, Romania! Romanian believers are among the strongest on the continent. Few believers in history have faced greater persecution; few have displayed such spiritual prosperity. The evil in this man’s heart God chose to use for his own purposes. God demonstrated his sovereignty by facilitating evil for good—something he still does to this day.

Jeremiah 25:30-38

The judgment that is coming now extends from Judah to the nations, to the whole world. Note how inclusive the language is: “all the inhabitants of the earth” (v. 30), “to the ends of the earth” (v. 31), “from nation to nation” (v. 32), and “from one end of the earth to the other” (v. 33).

Since God’s judgment is coming on all the nations, the only response is to mourn. Jeremiah speaks with burning poetry (v. 34). Verses 35-38 spell out why they should mourn: escape is impossible. In the end God’s judgment will sweep the entire earth.

One might ask, isn’t judgment an Old Testament theme? This is not in the New Testament and certainly not something we can relate to, right?

The reality is that the judgment of God is a thread woven through all of Scripture. Paul notes in Romans 1:18, “For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” And later, concerning the end of the age, John says of the one that worships the beast and the false prophet, “He will also drink the wine of God’s wrath, which is poured full strength into the cup of his anger” (Rev 14:10).

The wrath of God that was poured on the nations that rose against Judah will be poured out on others. This is because God has not changed. Judgment is an expression of his holiness as it responds to those who reject him. He is still holy, and he is still rejected. Therefore his judgment is still very much alive.

Scripture is clear that not one sin that has been or will ever be committed will not be punished. Daniel Hays offers a simple and clear illustration one could use in preaching and teaching this text (see Jeremiah and Lamentations, 191–92). If you stood before your congregation and held a ball about as high as your head you could ask them what would happen if you dropped it. (In a typical crowd some prompting for response might be necessary.) The livelier crowd will respond immediately that the ball of course will drop, which you demonstrate as you let go. Then you could ask, What if we were to do this a hundred times, how many times of the hundred will it drop? The answer is of course a hundred out of a hundred. After all, it’s a natural law. It will happen. Every time.

God is clear. The wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness, no exceptions. No sin you have committed will be immune to God’s wrath. Jesus is pictured in Revelation as having laser-like eyes (Rev 1:14). He knows everything because he sees everything. Everything. No one, no person, no man, no woman will escape his wrath.

God is bound by his own knowledge to know all things and to punish all expressions of sin against him. This is why there is no way for us to get right, no way for us to reconcile the wrong we have done against God. If we stopped sinning today, we would still need forgiveness for all the things we have done in the past. This is a situation we cannot fix.

Enter Christ. Christ stood before the Father and drank the full cup of God’s wrath. Knowing the power and depth of God’s wrath, he prayed in Luke 22:42, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me.” This was an educated prayer. He knew what he was about to endure. God’s wrath would be in no way tempered. Christ was taking on himself the sins of the world. Yet out of obedience to the Father, and considering our salvation, he drank every last ounce. When Jesus put down the cup of God’s wrath, not a drop was left. He consumed all of it.

The weight, the grief, was all clear to Christ, so he prayed, “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

When sinners look at the cross and walk away, they are saying in effect, “I do not fear tasting the wrath of God from which Christ drank. I think I can handle that.” What Christ endured is unspeakable. We only talk of a cross and a whip and thorns and beatings because these physical acts are the best ways we have of explaining this. In reality what Christ experienced is so much worse than we can describe because the anguish was as much emotional as physical. No one has at any time been more troubled than Christ was at that moment.

Sadly, many wink at what made Christ weep. He sweat drops of blood, yet it is ignored as so much religious talk. This is sad. This is real.

There is a word of warning here for the believer. The only way to sin is to ignore the cross. The greatest deterrent against sin is to meditate on his sacrifice for us. To say it another way, he endured horrible agony so we would not have to suffer but also so we would not have to sin.

Philip Graham Ryken (Jeremiah and Lamentations, 367–75) insightfully outlines Jeremiah 25:15-38 this way:

Since Christ took of the full wrath of God, we can come to the Lord’s Table. We can come to the Lord’s Table and drink. We drink of his blood as a symbol of the reality that he drank of God’s wrath. What was to him the bitter cup is to us the sweet wine of salvation. By this atoning elixir we are healed.