Our God Is
a Deadly God

What is this page about?

Here is how it sounds. The first line is the real sentence from a sermon. This page wrote the rest as an example.

First, agree with the parts that are right. Much of it is right.

• Nobody can control God.
• Sin is not a small thing.
• Judgement is real. This page says so again and again.
• Much modern preaching has become soft.

So the question is not “Is God serious?” He is. The question is smaller. It is about which word comes first. When someone asks, “What is God like?”, would the Bible and the old church answer “deadly”? And what happens to people in a church that answers this way?

The short answer

1. Christ says many times why he came, and most of the answers are about saving. He came to look for lost people and save them. He came to give life. He came to call sinners. He came to serve and to give his life. Two times he says it very clearly:

For I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

John 12:47 · World English Bible

The full page counted every sentence where Jesus says “I came”. Eleven of fourteen are about rescue.

2. The hard sentences are there too. But they are smaller than they look. Jesus says: “I didn’t come to send peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) The next verses explain the sword: families will be divided about following him. Jesus says he came to bring fire on the earth (Luke 12:49). The next sentence shows that he is speaking of his own death. In each case, the hard thing is something he walks into. He does not throw it at you.

3. When God describes himself, mercy comes first.

Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty

Exodus 34:6–7 · World English Bible

In simple words: The Lord! The Lord is a God of mercy and kindness. He is slow to become angry. He is full of love and truth. He keeps his love for thousands of people, and he forgives every kind of wrong and sin. But he does not let guilty people go free. (“Yahweh” is God’s name in the Old Testament.)

Both halves are there. Look at the order. Mercy comes first, and it has more words.

4. The Old Testament uses this sentence again at least eleven times. Ten of the eleven begin with mercy. The prophet Jonah uses it about the city of Nineveh: “you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger” (Jonah 4:2). The prophet Nahum uses the same words about the same city, but he cuts them the other way: “Yahweh is slow to anger, and great in power, and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.” (Nahum 1:3) Nobody added a word. Each one chose where to stop.

5. Christ once stopped reading in the middle of a sentence. See Part 3.

6. There is a rule for questions like this. The rule is a face. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So here is the test: can we see the God that we hear about in the face of Jesus Christ?

7. The followers of Jesus once asked for the deadly God. Jesus corrected them. A village would not welcome Jesus. James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven on it, as the prophet Elijah once did. “But he turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:55). “Rebuked” means he told them they were wrong. No fire fell.

8. The hard verses say something more exact when we read the whole paragraph. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31) This is about people who knowingly throw away Christ. A few verses later the writer tells his readers that he does not think they are such people. And “our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29) comes at the end of a chapter with this message: you have not come to the mountain of fear. You have come to Jesus.

9. The stories of Uzzah and of Ananias are famous because such things are rare. King David planned a man’s death. God sent him a prophet and gave him twenty more years. Aaron made a golden calf, and he became high priest. Peter said three times that he did not know Christ. Jesus gave him breakfast and a job. Paul says that God’s patience has a purpose: “the goodness of God leads you to repentance” (Romans 2:4).

10. Christ’s hardest words go almost only to religious leaders. The hard words in Matthew 23 are for the teachers of the law. The warning about the heavy stone is for anyone who harms a child. But the woman caught in sin, the dying criminal, Thomas with his doubts and Peter after his failure all receive something very different. Jesus never spoke his hardest words to ordinary frightened people who ask, “Am I all right?” But this kind of preaching usually speaks to exactly those people.

11. Listen to what he says to the men who are killing him. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34) Paul says the same as teaching: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

12. And we can count what the church says to God. See Part 4.

What did Jesus say he came for?

Here are eight sentences. In each one, Jesus says in his own words why he came.

Five are about rescue:

• “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:10)
• “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
• “For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him.” (John 3:17)
• “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32)
• “For the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45) A ransom is a price paid to set someone free.

Three are hard:

• The sword (Matthew 10:34). It means that families will be divided about him.
• The fire (Luke 12:49). He goes on to speak about his own suffering.
• “I came into this world for judgment” (John 9:39). He says this after he has healed a blind man. The religious leaders had thrown that man out. The judgement falls on them.

Not one of the eight makes an ordinary, frightened believer the target.

Where did Jesus stop reading?

Jesus stood up in the meeting house at Nazareth. Someone gave him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He read:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to deliver those who are crushed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Luke 4:18–19 · World English Bible

In simple words: The Spirit of the Lord is on me. He has chosen me to tell good news to poor people. He has sent me to heal people with broken hearts, to tell prisoners that they are free, to give sight to blind people, to free people who are crushed, and to announce the year of the Lord’s kindness.

Then he closed the book and sat down.

Now look at the book of Isaiah. The sentence goes on. After “the year of Yahweh’s favor” come these words: “and the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2). “Vengeance” means paying back wrong with punishment.

Jesus stopped in the middle of the sentence. He did not say that the next words are untrue. He just did not read them that day. The people in that room lived under foreign rulers. They would have loved to hear about God’s punishment on their enemies. He stopped, closed the book, and said that the part he had read was coming true that day.

What the church prays

People can argue about verses for ever, because both sides have verses. So here is another kind of evidence. We can count it.

A group shows what it really believes about God in what it says to him in prayer. A service book is exactly that. It was written down. It has a date. Millions of people said its words aloud every week for hundreds of years.

• In one Orthodox service, the people say “Lord, have mercy” about forty times.
• The old Roman Catholic service begins with this prayer nine times.
• One prayer about mercy has been used every year for about 1,500 years. It says that God shows his almighty power “most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity”. In simple words: God shows his great power most of all when he shows mercy.
• The old English prayer book calls God the one “whose property is always to have mercy”. That means: it is God’s nature always to have mercy.

There is one more number, and it matters as much. Every week the same services also say the creed. The creed says that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead”. “The quick” is an old word for the living.

So the old church never chose between mercy and judgement. This page does not choose either. But the church decided which one to say forty times.

Was this a soft, modern idea? No. A church meeting in France made “Lord, have mercy” a rule in the year 529. The people who wrote these prayers lived with sickness, war and a strong fear of hell. They were not looking for a comfortable God. And these people decided to say to God, again and again: “Have mercy.”

A checklist for a sermon

This list is for thinking about a sermon, never about a person. A hard sermon can pass it. A sermon about judgement, or about sin, or about false leaders can pass easily.

1. Who is the hard part for? Is it for a named sin, or for people with power over others? This is how the Gospels do it. Or is it about whether the listeners are really Christians? That gives them nothing to be sorry for and everything to fear.
2. Is there something to do? Is it something clear: put a wrong right, go to someone, come to the Lord’s table? Or is the sermon asking only for a feeling?
3. Where is safety? Is it in something already done: the cross, God’s promise, baptism? Or is it in how well people are doing, or in a feeling they must keep checking?
4. Where is Christ? Is he in the centre, with what he did? Or is God described almost without him?
5. Is there an open door at the end? Is there an invitation? Even the most frightening sermon in American history has one. Jonathan Edwards preached it in 1741. He said: “Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open”.

What a good hard sermon sounds like

None of this means that a preacher should never say hard things. Christ said hard things often, and so did the prophets. The difference is what the hard thing is about. This page wrote both examples.

In this example, the danger is God. You do not know if you are all right, and you cannot find out. There is nothing to go and do.

In this example, the sin is named, and the judgement is real. But the danger is the sin, not God. The rescue has already happened. And there is somewhere to go.

The second example is not softer. It asks for something that costs: go and make it right. The first example leaves a person with nothing to do but feel unsafe.

Check it yourself

1. Read Exodus 34:5-9. Then read Jonah 4:1-3 and Nahum 1:1-3.
2. Do this one. Put Luke 4:14-30 next to Isaiah 61:1-3. Put your finger on the place where Jesus stops reading.
3. Read all of Hebrews 12 before you come to “our God is a consuming fire” in the last verse.
4. Read Matthew 23. Then read John 8:1-11, Luke 19:1-10 and John 21:1-19.
5. Read the strongest voice for the other side: the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards, from 1741. Read to the end and see what it asks people to do.
6. Take any old service book and a pencil. Mark every place where the people ask for mercy, and every place where they speak of judgement.