I use different coloured markers to mark different themes in my Bible: blue for God’s character, green for God’s promises, purple for God’s kingdom, orange for prayers, red for redemptive themes, and yellow for everything else. It’s occurred to me this year that I’m missing a colour to represent another important theme: God’s judgment. Each time I read Scripture, I’m relearn one of its lessons: don’t trifle with God.
James Hamilton puts it well: God’s saving and judging glory stands at the centre of biblical theology.
In Scripture we see God rightly judging sin. He exiles Adam and Eve; he floods the world; he destroys cities; he sends plagues; he exiles his own people. When Isaiah sees God, he cries “Woe!” because he understands that he stands unclean in the presence of the holy God.
He is the “God who is transcendent, majestic, infinite in righteousness, who loves justice as much as He does mercy; who hates wickedness as much as He loves goodness; who blazes with a fiery, passionate love for Himself above all things,” writes Timothy Stoner. Never trifle with God.
The Smallest Indication
That’s why I’m surprised by one of God’s characteristics that shows up alongside his justice.
2 Chronicles recounts the reign of Manasseh, one of the last kings of Judah. The chronicler’s evaluation of his reign is blunt: “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel” (2 Chronicles 33:2). He followed the practices of neighbouring nations; he rebuilt high places and altars, even in the temple; he worshiped idols. He burned his sons and engaged in fortune-telling and sorcery. He “led Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem astray, to do more evil than the nations whom the LORD destroyed before the people of Israel” (33:9).
We’re primed for God’s response. Reading Israel’s history to this point, we know how God responds to this kind of evil. He judges. And that’s what happens: after warning Manasseh, the Assyrians capture him and imprison him in Babylon.
What happens next is shocking.
“And when he was in distress, he entreated the favor of the LORD his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. He prayed to him, and God was moved by his entreaty and heard his plea and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the LORD was God.” (33:12-13).
Manasseh is one of the worst kings with one of the worst records, and yet at the first hint of repentance, God shows him mercy. Alongside the evil he committed, Manasseh’s humbling and God’s mercy become part of his epitaph. “His prayer, and how God was moved by his entreaty, and all his sin and his faithlessness, and the sites on which he built high places and set up the Asherim and the images, before he humbled himself, behold, they are written in the Chronicles of the Seers” (33:19).
I sometimes hear people accusing God of being trigger-happy. I agree, but not in the sense they mean it. God is quick to dispense his grace and mercy. He gives it at the first inclination of someone turning to him, becoming humble, and asking for his mercy. God’s inclination is grace.
“God is merciful; and he is infinite in every attribute, so that he is prepared to be greatly gracious,” writes Spurgeon. “Oh, yes, if there are any little sinners about, and they trust in Jesus, he will forgive them; but, oh, how he delights when there comes along a great sinner, and he blots out all the sins of the Jerusalem sinner, and makes him perfectly clean!”
God’s justice stands as a warning to us all. Don’t trifle with God; don’t take sin lightly. But his justice highlights his mercy. “He rules, He reigns, He rages and roars, then bends down to whisper love songs to His creatures,” writes Stoner. And what a song of love and mercy it is.
