Joshua 11:20 says, "For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses."
The question we may ask is, How can God be righteous if He hardens peoples hearts and then destroys them when they do not repent?
We may say that they also hardened their own hearts. The sun that melts wax will harden clay.
We may also say that God was only giving them over to what they we already doing as we read in Romans 1.
But in the end we are only clay and we cannot call the potter to account. How quickly we want to call God to our standard of righteousness but the question comes back to us from God Himself as recorded in Romans 9, Who are you? We do not have a perfect standard of righteousness and it is the essence of extreme pride to think that we can call God to our standards, that we are more righteous and just than He.
Yes, God is guilty but He is guilty of being perfect in righteousness and someday we will understand that.
This is difficult for me to understand and I want to think that I have a perfect standard by which I can measure others but I must remember, I am not God. I do not know the end from the beginning. If He is God then let us let Him be God and not created in our image.
No comments:
Post a Comment