The “No-Win” Option
The Lord has become like an enemy. He has swallowed up Israel; He has swallowed up all its palaces, He has destroyed its strongholds and multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and moaning. Lamentations 2:5 NASB
Like an enemy – We live in the “God is Love” age. I’m not sure when we transitioned from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” but it happened. Theologians may have led that way, proclaiming that the angry God of the Old Testament had been replaced by the sacred heart of Jesus. Maybe they just didn’t like a God who exercised judgment on humanity. I suspect that the Greek paradigm of justice under the law was also applied to God’s behavior—and it found that God was in need of anger management therapy. At any rate, we grew up believing in the Santa Claus God without the “naughty or nice” phrase.
But that’s not the biblical God. It’s the God of our wishful excuse thinking; the God who overlooks our arrogant obstinacy because He loves all of us. What hogwash! First, it requires that we ignore completely the warnings of the prophets. Okay, those were “Old Testament” views that needed correction, right? But secondly, it ignores the “New Testament” declarations of coming judgment, of gnashing teeth in outer darkness, of the decimation of the wicked. By the way, Yeshua says things like that, so I suppose “like Father like son,” he’ll need anger management counseling too. Finally, and most importantly, it places a particular concept of “Justice” over God, as if God must live up to our universalized Western ethics. All of these mistakes lead to a half-Bible where the “bad” things are blotted out. The hard truth is that even life doesn’t work this way.
In the Bible, justice must be understood in conjunction with mercy. “Even God’s relation to the world is characterized by the polarity of justice and mercy, providence and concealment, the promise of reward and the demand to serve Him for His sake.”[1] This polarity is captured in a midrash:
“The midrashic reading transforms this rhetorical cry into a profound either-or statement: ‘The judge of the whole earth shall not do justice—if it is a world You want, then strict justice is impossible. And if it is strict justice You want, then a world is impossible.’ To judge the earth is to annihilate it (perhaps a pun on shofet-shotef, to judge/to sweep away). Mishpat (justice) is the modality that human beings can never appropriate as their own. Ein midat ha-mishpat midat ha-adam, as Maharal says: mathematical exactness is not existentially suited to human life. . . For weal or woe, mishpat, absolute standards of justice, cannot be realized in this world as God has created it. To adhere to such standards is to destroy the world; in order to build the world, ḥesed, the generous perception of alternative possibilities, is necessary.”[2]
The point is clear: you can’t live in a world of strict justice or in a world of unfettered mercy. You need both—and God delivers both. That is the biblical perspective, and the reason why the rabbis pray fervently that on this day, God’s mercy will outweigh His justice. “Jewish existence is thus a very insecure one. There is no way of knowing whether, in any given situation, the justice or the mercy of God will predominate.”[3] But that’s precisely where we are, as parents, as leaders, as friends. What shall we do this day about this situation? Shall we exercise the law or shall we show mercy? Every relationship, if it is a real relationship, must deal with this question. If God is in real relationship with the world and with us, then He faces the same dilemma. His response is not predetermined, fortunately for us, and to pretend that it should be is to treat God as a principle, an automaton, a balance scale rather than a Father who loves His children.
Sometimes God seems like an enemy. Sometimes it’s necessary. “Severity must tame whom love cannot win.”[4]
Topical Index: enemy, justice, mercy, anger, Lamentations 2:5
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 178.
[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 110.
[3] Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise, ed. and trans. R. Kendall Soulen (Eerdmans, 2004), p. 196.
[4] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 76.
