What this is about
Here is roughly how it sounds. The first line is the sentence this page is about. The rest is written by this page as an example — it is not a quotation from anybody, and no church, ministry or person is named anywhere on this page.
— and don’t you forget it. He is not your buddy. He is not safe. Ask Uzzah what happens when you touch what you should not touch. We have made God small and comfortable in this generation, and it is time we learned to be afraid again.Written by this page as an example, apart from the first line. Not a quotation from any person, church or ministry.
Start by agreeing with the parts that are right, because a lot of it is right:
- God is not manageable, and anyone who thinks he is has misunderstood something.
- Sin is not trivial.
- Judgement is real. This page says so and keeps saying so.
- A lot of modern preaching really has gone soft, and the reaction is understandable.
So the question is not is God serious? He is. The question is narrower, and it is about which word goes first. If someone asks you what God is like, is “deadly” the answer the Bible and the historic Church would give — and what happens to people in a church where it is?
What this page is not doing
It is not saying God is soft, that sin does not matter, or that there is no judgement — it affirms all three the other way round and says so on every screen. It is not arguing about hell: what hell is and who is finally lost are big questions, and this page deliberately leaves them alone, because the point here works whatever you think about them. It names no living person, church or organisation anywhere, everyone quoted is long dead, and every quotation is dated so you can go and check it. And it gives no advice about what to do — nothing here tells anybody to confront anyone or to leave anywhere.
The short answer
- Christ says what he came for, quite a few times, and the answers are lopsided. To seek and save the lost. To give life more abundantly. To call sinners. To serve, and to give his life as a ransom. And twice, flatly: “I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (John 12:47; see also John 3:17). Gather every “I am come” sentence and count them — eleven out of fourteen are rescue.
- The hard ones are still there, and they are narrower than they look. He does say “I came not to send peace, but a sword”. The next two verses say what the sword is: families split by whether they follow him. He does say “I am come to send fire on the earth”. The next sentence says he means his own death. In every case the hard thing is something he walks into, not something he throws at you.
- When God is asked to describe himself, mercy comes first and goes on for six clauses. “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” — and then the turn: “and that will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6–7). Both halves are there. Look at the order.
- The Old Testament then quotes that sentence back at itself at least eleven times — Moses, a king, the Levites, four psalms, and three prophets. Ten of the eleven lead with mercy. The eleventh is Nahum, who takes the same words and cuts them the other way, about the very city Jonah had quoted them about. Nobody added a word. Somebody chose where to stop. That is the whole argument of this page in one example, and it is inside the Bible.
- Christ once stopped reading in the middle of a verse. In the synagogue at Nazareth he read Isaiah 61 out loud, stopped at “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”, closed the book and sat down (Luke 4:18–20). The next words in Isaiah — the same sentence — are “and the day of vengeance of our God”. He never says they are untrue. He just does not read them that day, in front of an occupied people who would have loved to hear them.
- There is a rule for settling arguments like this, and it is a face. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). Philip had just asked to be shown God — meaning the cloud and the fire — and was told he had been looking at the answer for three years. So the test is simple: could the God you are being told about be read off the face of Jesus Christ?
- The disciples once suggested the deadly God, and were told off for it. A Samaritan village refused to have him, and James and John asked to call fire down on it — exactly as Elijah had done, so they even had a verse. “But he turned, and rebuked them” (Luke 9:55). No fire fell.
- The hard verses say something more specific when you read the paragraph. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” is about people who have knowingly trampled on Christ — and eight verses later the same writer tells the same readers he does not think that describes them. “Our God is a consuming fire” comes five verses after “the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel”, in a chapter whose whole point is that the readers have not come to the terrifying mountain.
- Uzzah and Ananias are famous because they are rare. That is the argument, and it is easy to test. David arranged a murder and got a prophet and twenty more years. Aaron made the golden calf and became high priest. Peter denied Christ with oaths and got breakfast and a job. The Corinthians were drunk at communion and got a letter. If God struck as often as the sentence implies, the Bible could not get past chapter three. Paul reads the fact that you have not been struck as meaning something: “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance” (Romans 2:4).
- Christ’s hardest words go almost entirely to religious leaders. The woes of Matthew 23 name the scribes and Pharisees in the sentence. The millstone is for whoever harms a child. The whip is for traders in the temple. Meanwhile the woman caught in adultery, the dying thief, Thomas who wanted proof and Peter after three denials all get something else entirely. The one group who never get the woes is the one this kind of preaching is normally aimed at: ordinary frightened people wondering if they are all right.
- What he says to the people killing him is the clincher. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Paul makes the same point as doctrine: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us… when we were enemies, we were reconciled” (Romans 5:8–10). Maximum provocation, and it runs the other way.
- And then there is what the Church actually says to God, which you can count. In the Orthodox liturgy the congregation says “Lord, have mercy” about forty times in one service. The Roman Mass has nine of them before anything else happens, plus “Lamb of God… have mercy on us”. The English Prayer Book calls God the one “whose property is always to have mercy”. One prayer, used every year for about fifteen hundred years, says God “declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in shewing mercy and pity” — and Thomas Aquinas quoted that prayer as proof of what God is like. Asked where God’s power shows up most, the Church answered: in mercy.
- Even the scariest hymn the Church ever wrote does not end where this sentence ends. The Dies Irae opens with the day of wrath and the world in ashes. Halfway through it turns, calls the terrible King the “fount of mercy” who “saves freely”, points out that the sinner is the reason he came at all — and finishes by asking him to grant them rest.
The first exercise: what did he say he came for?
This is the argument in one exercise, and it takes three minutes. Below are eight sentences in which Christ says, in his own words, why he came. For each one, mark what it says he came for. Answer before you read on.
0 of 8 answered.
The second exercise: where did he stop reading?
Christ stands up in the synagogue at Nazareth, is handed the scroll of Isaiah, reads, closes the book and sits down. Luke says every eye in the room was on him. Then he says: “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”
Here is what was on the scroll, clause by clause. Click the clause where you think he stopped.
What the Church actually prays
Arguments about verses can go on for ever, because both sides have verses. So here is a different kind of evidence, and it is the strongest thing on this page: you can count it.
What a group really believes about God shows up best in what it says to him when it is not arguing with anybody. That is what a service book is. It was written down, it is dated, it was said out loud by millions of people every week for centuries, and the people who wrote it had no idea this argument was coming.
That last box matters as much as the others, and this page insists on it. Every one of those services also contains, weekly and compulsorily, the line that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead”. The old Church never chose between mercy and judgement, and neither does this page. What it did was decide which one to say forty times.
Three quick facts, in case you think the mercy language is a modern softening:
- “Lord, have mercy” was made compulsory by a council in France in the year 529. It was not a popular request; it was legislation.
- “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us” was ordered into the Roman Mass by a pope in 687.
- The prayer calling God the one “whose property is always to have mercy” was written by a man who was later burned at the stake for the book it appears in.
None of that was written by people looking for a comfortable God. They lived with plague, war and a very vivid idea of hell. Those are the people who decided that the thing to say to God, over and over, was have mercy.
The third exercise: a checklist for a sermon
This is a checklist for thinking, not a test of anybody. It is about a sermon, never a person, it says nothing about anyone’s sincerity or standing before God, and it tells you to do nothing at all.
It is built so that a hard sermon can pass. A sermon about judgement, or about sin nobody has repented of, or about hypocrisy in the pulpit, can score clean here without any trouble — and if it could not, it would be measuring taste rather than shape. Have one sermon in mind and answer for that.
What a good hard sermon sounds like
None of this means never say anything hard. Christ said hard things constantly, and so did the prophets, and a church where nothing is ever serious is a church that has stopped believing anything. The difference is what the hard thing is about. Both of the following are written by this page as examples. Neither is a quotation from anybody.
Notice the second one is not softer. It asks for something the first never does: go and make it right, which is costly and specific. The first leaves a person with nothing to do but feel unsafe.
Check it yourself
Six things, all free, most of them short. If you only do one, do the second.
- 1. Exodus 34:5–9. Then Jonah 4:1–3 and Nahum 1:1–3, one after the other. Fifteen minutes. Read the first, then watch two prophets quote it about the same city and produce two different Gods, without either of them adding a word.
- 2. Luke 4:14–30 next to Isaiah 61:1–3. Do this one. Ten minutes. Put the two passages side by side and put your finger on the place where the reading stops. It is in the middle of a sentence.
- 3. Hebrews 12, the whole chapter, in one go. Ten minutes. Read all of it before you get to “our God is a consuming fire” in the last verse, and see what the chapter has spent twenty-eight verses saying.
- 4. Matthew 23 — then John 8:1–11, Luke 19:1–10 and John 21:1–19. Half an hour. The woes first, at full volume, then the three encounters. Ask yourself, honestly, whether it sounds like the same person — and if it does, what changed between them.
- 5. Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the whole thing. Forty minutes, free online. This is the strongest case on the other side, and it is a magnificent piece of writing. Read all of it, especially the last third, and see what it is asking people to do.
- 6. Any old service book — the Book of Common Prayer, an Orthodox liturgy, a missal — with a pencil. Twenty minutes. Mark every time the congregation asks for mercy, and every time it confesses the judgement. That is Part IX of the full dossier, and it is an experiment rather than an argument.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has fourteen interactive sections, every quotation dated and attributed, the objections answered where they arise, the published prompt so you can run it yourself, and the whole record — the liturgies, the fathers, Aquinas, Luther, the Dies Irae, and Edwards read whole.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →