CHARLO, New Brunswick, August 6, 2023 – When I was first born-again and started reading the Bible, I was shocked by how coolly the holy angels condoned God’s wholesale destruction of entire cities and nations. I remember thinking that the angels were cold-hearted and almost robotic in how they stated the suffering was deserved. I remember wondering where God’s mercy was in these cases.

But as I grew as God’s daughter, I came to understand the connection between sin and holy judgement, sin and holy chastisement, and holy chastisement and holy judgement. I came to understand that holy judgement is definitive and final, and that after it’s been decided there is no going back, whereas holy chastisement leaves room for repentance and renewal and only occurs after God’s repeated and increasingly urgent warnings have been ignored.

Holy chastisement is God’s last-ditch effort to get people to turn back to him. It may be delivered on an individual basis or spread across an entire region or nation, but it’s purpose is to stop sinners in their tracks so that they reevaluate their lives and turn back to God before it’s too late. When God is chastising individuals, they may experience extreme financial problems, relationship meltdowns, employment implosions, etc. Nothing will go well for them; they’ll feel that their lives are entirely out of control and there’s nowhere to turn for help. When God is chastising people collectively, he usually delivers it through natural disasters or plagues. But again, the impact of the event on each person within the collective is so extreme, they feel that everything is beyond their control and no-one can help.

Most of former Christendom is now under God’s holy chastisement. It’s mainly coming in the form of extreme weather events like floods and heatwaves that are being described as biblical in scope and intensity, but it also involves wars, wildfires, double-digit inflation, plunging standard of living, mass non-Christian immigration, insect invasions, widespread “turbo-charged” disease, family and societal breakdown, and rampant sexual deviancy. Climate change, of course, along with the usual suspects of racism and capitalism, have been fingered for blame for these events, but their real cause is widespread unrepented sin.

Some of us suspect that these plagues are contrived (manmade). But even if they are contrived, they’re still being permitted by God, which means they’re being allowed for a purpose. God needs people to feel the full consequences of their actions so that the shock of the pain will give them a chance to turn back to him before things get much, much worse. God is the only one who can help them once they’ve reached the chastisement stage. In other words, it’s either repent or suffer the inescapable and earned final consequences.

God’s holy judgement is the time of annihilation. When his holy chastisement is unsuccessful at getting either an individual or a collective to stop sinning, God has no choice but to render a final judgement of “guilty” against these people. His perfect justice demands that he do so. If God were not to condemn in these cases, he would be in violation of his own justice.

The full-scale destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (other than for Lot and his family) is probably the best-known instance of God’s condemnation of a collective, but the Flood was also a judgement against everyone except Noah and his family, as was the total annihilation of entire cities and towns by the armies of the children of Israel under the command of Moses and Joshua. God instructed his armies not only to burn these places to the ground, but to slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal in them, to spare none. Nothing was to be left but a smoldering heap. Their bloodlines were to be obliterated.

God renders a similar judgement of guilt on individuals, even among his own people. We see the same instruction to utterly destroy given to the angels in Ezekiel 9 and throughout the book of Revelation. In each case, God has warned his people of imminent destruction if they don’t turn back to him, but they double down on their sins, ignoring his warnings and cursing him for his holy chastisement. This leaves God no choice but to follow through with the intended annihilation of all unrepentant sinners.

Scripture says that God chastises those whom he loves. Chastisement leaves room and time for repentance, but there is an urgency about it that should never be dismissed. Even born-again believers can find themselves on the receiving end of God’s holy chastisement if they go astray. We should thank God when that happens to us – THANK God, not curse him, not grumble, and not blame the devil. We should thank God for his chastisement because it means he loves us and there’s still time to get right with him. We should thank God and do whatever he’s telling us to do or endure whatever he’s asking us to endure because ultimately, he has our best interests at heart – not his best interests, our best interests. God does everything he does for us.

As former Christian nations spiral ever downward in every conceivable way, we need to remind ourselves that we, as God’s children in right standing with our Father, don’t need to suffer the chastisements meant to bring sinners to repentance. God doesn’t want us to suffer those chastisements. He will always give us a way and means to avoid them and we should follow his guidance and avoid them. We don’t get spiritual brownie points for choosing to suffer what God doesn’t want us to suffer: We only get suffering that has no redeeming purpose. So if God tells you to leave a place because it’s under his chastisement, leave it. Again, you don’t gain any reward for choosing to suffer what you haven’t earned. The only one who gained a reward for suffering what he hadn’t earned was Jesus, and we’re not Jesus. If God advises us to leave, we need to leave.

God had Noah build the ark to escape the flood, and he sent angels to rescue Lot. God always looks after those who love him, even during times of chastisement and judgement. God knows his children and is known of them. He keeps us safe in his secret place, but it’s up to us to do what he says when he says to do it. We cannot defy God’s guidance and then expect to be rescued at the last minute. That may work once, when we do it out of ignorance, but it won’t work twice.

If you love God, stay in right-standing with him and do whatever he says, without complaining and without delay. That’s the only way you’ll escape his chastisement and final judgement.