Last Sunday we explored 2 Kings 25:1-12, the very uplifting passage about Zedekiah’s sons being killed before his eyes were gouged out and the burning of the city of Jerusalem, including the temple. It’s not a very uplifting passage at all, but a crucial event in redemptive history. So, allowing the True Story of the Bible to shape us means sitting with these hard, disturbing, sad passages too.

I raised a few questions on Sunday, but there are a more I want to consider (or come back to).

First, Is it fair for God to judge whole nations? It’s clear from the different texts that Judah’s fall to Babylon wasn’t an accident or just the tides of history running their course. God did it; it was his judgment. And this isn’t an isolated event in the Bible. God judged the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, threatened judgements against Nineveh (Assyria), and through his prophets told of judgements that would come upon Tyre, Sidon, Assyria, Babylon, and others. These judgments are not eschatological (at the end of the age) or hypothetical, but judgments what would be meted out in history.

We wince at the idea of corporate sin and corporate punishment. I remember as a high school senior, our senior trip got cancelled because of some bad actors doing some bad things on senior skip day. It didn’t seem fair that everyone got punished for the misdeeds of several dozen.

So is it fair that God would judge whole cities or nations? Maybe not. But it’s just. Fairness speaks of equity – everyone being treated the same. We don’t see that – some lepers are healed, some are not; sometime wicked men prosper while righteous men suffer. Some wicked cities continue on, others are destroyed. It’s not fair. But it is just! No one receives from God a punishment they don’t deserve.

When it comes to punishing cities or nations for sins, it may not be true that every person in that city was personally cruel, personally oppressed the poor, was immoral, or idolatrous. When Jerusalem fell, good and faithful people suffered, including Daniel, Jeremiah, and others. But that suffering was not, strictly speaking, beyond what they, for their sins, deserved.

Additionally, we must always remember that when calamity strikes a city or nation (because God sent it), it may be designed for the punishment of one group (the idolatrous in Jerusalem), but be a sanctifying trial for another (the faithful remnant).

Second, Does God still judge whole nations? I think we must say the God can judge whole nations, that God has judged whole nations. I don’t see any indication that God has changed this pattern; however, I also can’t point to any clear indications in the New Testament that God is still judging nations in history. However, since that was the pattern, and absent evidence to the contrary, we should conclude that God does, yes, still judge nations in history.

Third, How do we know if a particular calamity or crisis is God’s judgement? Short answer, we don’t. We should avoid proclaiming something as God’s judgments or connecting the dots between some disaster and a particular sin! Didn’t the prophets do just that? Yes. The prophets were speaking as God’s inspired mouthpieces. We should humbly acknowledge that we are not inspired. The prophets knew God was judging Assyria because of her pride (Isaiah 10). They knew that because God told them. We do not speak with the same inspired authority. We should should avoid this at the national level and the personal level. We should not tell someone sick in the hospital that they are there because of immorality or greed. We don’t want to be one of Job’s counselors!

Fourth, So God doesn’t punish sins anymore? No, I didn’t say that. It’s clear in the NT that he does – in eternity and in “real time.” Ananias and Saphira, Herod are good examples. So is the church at Corinth. There, some believers had fallen sick and some even died because they were sinfully misusing the Lord’s Table (1 Cor 10:29-31). Sometimes, the sin is the punishment – God hands us over to our sinful desires (Romans 1). Refusing to connect specific sins with specific ailments, we should not swing the pendulum so far the other way that we refuse to entertain the notion that God may be afflicting us with trials or sufferings because of sin we harbor. So, as I said on Sunday, if you say to me “Pastor, God sent this to me because of my in,” I won’t say, “Oh no, certainly not.” Together, we will discuss whether there is some unrepentant sin you are harboring. Maybe God is using the trial to soften our hearts, bring us to repentance, etc. Or maybe its not due to any particular sin, but as a sanctifying tool in God’s hands.

Lastly, not a question but an important restatement: no modern nation holds the place of ancient Israel in God’s redemptive economy. America is not the modern Israel. America has no more place in God’s redemptive purposes than any other nation – we are not the city on a hill. We should not read the Bible through the lens of current events in our nation. When things are going poorly and Christians are being maligned in America, it is often taken as a sign that the end is nearing. But Christians outside the west have been persecuted and maligned for centuries. And when we bemoan that the church is shrinking in the U.S., we ought also recognize the boom of gospel churches and the vitality of Christian witness in other parts of the world! Even modern Israel isn’t a parallel to ancient Israel. The only parallel is between the church, the church universal, and Israel.