Blogging toward Sunday

Luther contemplated the righteousness of God, and recoiled. “Love God?” he wrote years later, “Sometimes I hated Him.”

It
won’t do to tell Luther not to worry because we’ve discovered that God
is cuddly after all. Brother Martin knew his Bible too well to fall for
that kind of subterfuge. The God revealed in scripture is a God of
flood and fire, whose storm tears down houses built on sand. Luther was
right: to speak of the righteousness of God is to speak of judgment.

What
Luther couldn’t see was how God’s righteous judgment could be good
news. The story of Noah tells us this. The world has become so full of
violence that God regrets having made it and determines to blot it all
out, turning the world back to the watery formless emptiness of the
primordial creation. If ever there was righteous judgment, this is it.