Taking a step back
The inspiration for this post comes from a friend who commented on Facebook: I can be "mean" by keying your car. But to bring down fire and brimstone to wipe out entire villages, killing the first born of an entire nation, ordering followers to forced marriages of conquest, now that is past "mean". I want to look at each of these cases, and take a step back. I want to ask the question: Is God's wrath really beyond justification in each of these cases? Or is there a bigger picture here? Let's start with the Sodom and Gomorrah story. We start learning back in Genesis chapters 13 and 14 that the people in this region were really, really bad news. In chapter 18 , we learn that "the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave". Things are so bad that the Lord goes down to Sodom himself to investigate. What does He find? A town full of ruffians who were into gang-raping travelers. The only halfway decent guy in the town was Lot