Does God Delight in Destroying Sinners?
00:00:00.000 | Here's an email from a podcast listener named Luke who writes in to ask this.
00:00:09.440 | "Pastor John, how do we reconcile Ezekiel 18.32, 'For I have no pleasure in the death
00:00:15.600 | of anyone,' declares the Lord God, with Deuteronomy 28.63, 'And as the Lord took delight in doing
00:00:22.740 | you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you
00:00:28.280 | and destroying you.'
00:00:30.080 | How do you handle this apparent contradiction in Scripture between Ezekiel 18.32 and Deuteronomy
00:00:36.040 | 28.63?"
00:00:37.040 | What would you say, Pastor John?
00:00:39.600 | When I meet passages like this in the Bible, especially passages relating to the emotions
00:00:47.280 | of God, I am very slow to think that God cannot have these seemingly contradictory emotions.
00:00:59.960 | One expressed in Ezekiel 18.32, "I do not have pleasure in the death of anyone," and
00:01:05.320 | the other expressed in Deuteronomy 28.63, "The Lord will take delight in bringing ruin
00:01:11.120 | upon you and destroying you."
00:01:13.440 | Instead, my assumption is that there is a true way that God takes pleasure in the just
00:01:21.160 | destruction of the wicked, and there is a true sense in which He does not delight in
00:01:28.280 | the death of anyone.
00:01:30.920 | In other words, both are true, and our job is to discern as much as we can in what different
00:01:37.920 | ways or senses they may be true.
00:01:42.480 | It may be, Tony, that since this is such a huge issue, I should point to a couple of
00:01:47.400 | places where I've written about it.
00:01:49.120 | Desiring God, pages 38 to 40, and The Pleasures of God, pages 55 to 59, I tackle precisely
00:01:59.600 | those two texts that were mentioned.
00:02:03.360 | It's as if they were reading what I wrote and wanted some clarity on it.
00:02:08.160 | That's where I've written about it if you want to pull down the book off the shelf.
00:02:12.320 | But let me try to give a brief answer here, not depend on people going there.
00:02:17.640 | God's emotional life must be infinitely complex.
00:02:22.520 | Who can comprehend that the Lord hears in one moment of time the prayers, for example,
00:02:29.800 | of 10 million Christians around the world and sympathizes with each one personally and
00:02:36.400 | individually as a caring Father, as Hebrews 4.15 says He does, even though among these
00:02:43.120 | 10 million prayers, some are brokenhearted and some are bursting with joy?
00:02:48.280 | How can God weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice when they are both
00:02:53.200 | coming to Him at the same time?
00:02:54.960 | In fact, they're always coming to Him with no break at all, day in and day out, century
00:02:59.680 | after century.
00:03:00.780 | This is unfathomable for us how God in His infinite complexity of emotions can relate
00:03:09.120 | intimately, personally, in a present wonderful way to the brokenhearted and not be a spoiled
00:03:16.940 | sport at somebody's wedding at the same time while He's delighting in the joy that they
00:03:23.740 | are having.
00:03:25.420 | So consider, maybe this would help.
00:03:27.700 | It helped me anyway.
00:03:28.820 | The most relevant analogy I could think of was whether or not God delighted in the death
00:03:35.620 | of Jesus.
00:03:38.500 | Now clearly, God chose that His Son would be killed.
00:03:44.660 | Isaiah 53.10, "It was the will of the Lord to crush Him or bruise Him.
00:03:51.780 | He has put Him to grief."
00:03:54.220 | What's not clear is that the word "will," the Hebrew word "will," "hafeitz," is translated
00:04:02.380 | most often with delight or take pleasure or enjoy or be glad or be the good pleasure of.
00:04:11.500 | In other words, nobody twisted God's arm to send His Son to die.
00:04:18.220 | The death of the Son of God in one sense pleased God.
00:04:24.780 | It was a good and right and hard thing to do.
00:04:30.780 | In fact, Ephesians 5.2 says that Christ gave Himself, quote, "as a fragrant offering and
00:04:38.980 | sacrifice to God."
00:04:41.660 | You want to stop and say, "Fragrant offering?"
00:04:44.580 | Like to whom was it such a good smell?
00:04:49.220 | And the answer is God.
00:04:51.300 | And yet Romans 8.32 says, "God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all."
00:04:59.020 | Now that word "did not spare" is intended to communicate to us that this was not easy.
00:05:06.900 | This was His only Son.
00:05:08.620 | This was His much-loved Son.
00:05:12.020 | This was emotionally difficult in one sense for God to do.
00:05:17.380 | He loved His Son.
00:05:19.020 | He did not relish the thought of the pain that would come to His Son, the darkness that
00:05:24.380 | would spread over His Son.
00:05:27.140 | And yet, in another sense, He did.
00:05:31.340 | So another analogy that has helped me with that and the other passages from Ezekiel and
00:05:37.580 | Deuteronomy is to suggest that God's infinite complexity is such that He can look at the
00:05:45.620 | world through two lenses.
00:05:47.940 | He can look through a narrow lens or a wide-angle lens.
00:05:52.660 | And when God looks at a painful or wicked event through a narrow lens, He sees the tragedy
00:05:59.740 | of sin for what it is in itself, and He's angered or He's grieved at what He sees.
00:06:07.380 | I have no pleasure in the death of anyone when God looks at a painful or wicked event
00:06:14.100 | through His narrow lens.
00:06:16.220 | But when He looks through His wide-angle lens, He sees the tragedy of sin in relation to
00:06:23.900 | everything leading up to it and everything flowing from it.
00:06:29.180 | He sees it in relation to all the connections and all the effects that form a pattern or
00:06:35.060 | a mosaic stretching into eternity.
00:06:38.500 | And that mosaic in all of its parts, good and evil, bring Him delight.
00:06:44.460 | Psalm 135.6, whatever the Lord pleases, He does.
00:06:49.220 | He's pleased by all that He does and all that He permits in the world.
00:06:53.860 | He has His reasons for doing it in the wide-angle lens of things.
00:06:59.820 | So that's my effort to stay faithful to the Scriptures and come to terms with the
00:07:06.540 | infinitely complex emotional life of God.
00:07:11.220 | Through one lens, He does not delight in the death of anyone, and through another lens,
00:07:17.120 | as He sees it as part of the whole, He does.
00:07:21.840 | That is brilliant balance.
00:07:22.840 | Thank you, Pastor John, for tackling these important issues.
00:07:25.620 | And Luke, thank you for the question.
00:07:27.840 | Every weekday we answer questions like this, and we are now over 700 episodes in.
00:07:33.540 | That is a lot of grace.
00:07:35.340 | And to find our entire archive, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:07:41.860 | We have a guest joining us on Monday and Tuesday of next week, because I want to know, how
00:07:46.420 | is it that non-Christian novelists who suppress the truth in unrighteousness also know so
00:07:52.620 | much about the human condition?
00:07:54.220 | This is a doozy of a question, and we will call on theologian John Frame to step in and
00:08:00.200 | help us out.
00:08:01.200 | I can't wait.
00:08:02.200 | That's Monday and Tuesday of next week.
00:08:03.600 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:08:05.400 | Have a great weekend, and we will see you here on Monday.
00:08:07.880 | Thank you.
00:08:08.880 | [END]
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