Does God still judge nations?

The four last chapters of the book of Judges has some of the most perplexing materials in the Bible dealing with divine judgment. When neither side of a conflict are in a righteous position, even when they are God's chosen people, He will allow them to suffer disaster.

911 was such an extraordinary event that its not hard to see how people would see God's judgment in those events. But, what is a greater sin being in the ACLU, being gay, promoting vulgarity, or living your life as if God didn't matter? We're all unrighteous and our enemies are unrighteous.

Images of Babylon, the harlot, described in Revelation 17 and occurring in real time in New York occur to one familiar with scripture. But, the destruction of Babylon in Revelation was at the very end of days, and we must note that the days have continued. So, 911 seems like a symbol of God's judgment. Let us use that horror to take time to examine our lives and get right with God. Many people did that very thing at the time, but have since fallen back into worldly distraction.

A frequent topic of conversation at our house. If you want to say that bad events are God's judgments (Katrina, 9/11) then how do you interpret the positive things that happen? Maybe Russia fell because we had Roe vs. Wade and God was blessing us? Unparalleled economic prosperity in the 90's because God thought we should be rewarded for having an adulterer as president?

Maybe God is telling us that the Muslims are right and thats why 9/11 happened. Maybe China is booming because they kill their female babies. One can go on making these absurd kind of correlations forever.

In the case of Islam I find this kind of thinking really dangerous. There are a lot of their fundamentalists who believe that if they just follow their beliefs strictly and smite the unbeliever they will achieve the kind of prosperity they enjoyed hundreds of years ago. It couldnt possibly be that their corrupt governments, repression of half their intellectual pool and suppression of any research not approved by the mullahs that keeps them from prosperity despite having the single best natural resource ever.

While I remain unconvinced that abortion should be across the board made entirely illegal I can see how people can reach that conclusion. I think people should vote their beliefs if that is what important to them. I am really quite leery of those who claim God is rewarding or punishing us for specific acts.

Steve

I'm not so sure I believe that God judges nations or countries (there is a difference, by the way).
There are plenty examples of God judging the nation of Israel and the Jews in the Bible. But that is because God made a covenant with the Jewish people through Abraham, which they fell away from, from time to time. God has not made a covenant with any other group of people. He sent his son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for the sake of every human being and we each, individually, have a choice to follow Christ, but there was no group covenant.

That is not to say that all sorts of people haven't made covenants with God. My wife and I did when we got married. The pilgrims on the Mayflower did as well. But God has not made a covenant with us or any other group of people or country. Maybe I’m forgetting something in the Bible (very possible) but someone please let me know if I am.

(For what it’s worth, the belief that God judges nations is pretty popular among the fans of Jim Wallis’ blog elsewhere on Beliefnet. They seem to believe that because our government doesn’t provide enough for the poor and oppressed that the people of the United States are going to be judged harshly for that. In order to get right with God we all need to advocate for nationalized health care, a living wage, protectionism, fill-in-the-blank Democrat party policy objective, etc)

Well, of course God allowed it. It doesn't follow that he sent it.

Rod: no, it's not Biblically believable that G_d allowed America to be chastised via 9/11. Yahweh was the Lord of Israel, and, if the OT accounts are to be believed, Yahweh intervened--on occasion. And once in a great while Yahweh is alleged to have intervened in the affairs of nations and states intimately involved with Israel. But I can't find any evidence that Yahweh intervened in the affairs of non-Israeli nations, such as the Etruscans, or the early Irish Celts, or the tribes of the American Indians.

So, unless you think Yahweh is thinking that various judgements can be called down on us due to our involvement with latter-day Israel, how can you think Yahweh is paying attention to America? Yes, it happened--but is that different from allowing the tsunami to strike south asia? (I admit I didn't check all previous Comments, which I will now do, but I can't believe it would make much difference.)

God judging individuals for their sins...I get that. God judging nations via the infliction of calamity sounds a lot like collective punishment to me. Analogous to America nuking Afghanistan after 9/11. Inflicting great hardship upon the innocent for the crimes of the guilty doesn't strike me as being terribly just.

Even if divine judgment "merely" involves God withdrawing his protection from a nation, and allowing wicked men to wreak harm upon innocent & guilty alike...well, if a man has the power to save another from harm, and willfully refuses to do so, don't we judge him to be grossly negligent?.

I meant Rod of course, dyslexia strikes again...

The Hebrew Bible is pretty clear that God's dealings with Israel were the result of the covenant established, and thus completely unique. Israel freely and willingly accepted the blessings and the responsibilities of her covenant with YHWH, and were dealt with accordingly. Unless events at the Continental Congress were much more dramatic than I learned in high school, America as a nation has entered into no such agreement with YHWH, and it would therefore be unjust of this omnibenevolent being to punish us collectively for a covenant we never made.

The United States are not Israel, literally or figuratively. If Ms. Lyons doesn't want to vote for Sen. Obama because she finds his abortion position immoral, that's fine. But muddying it up by painting it as a matter of God's Divine Wrath is both unnecessary and a misunderstanding of Scripture.

There is just so much wrong with this evangelizing of theism supposedly proven by history. So I'll just go at some details here.

her very real conviction that God's judgment will fall on this nation if it fully embraces the legalized extermination of unborn lives (nearly 50 million of whom have died at the hands of abortionists since Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973).

And no collective accountability for the abortions prior to 1973? It's all individual?

In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor said that one reason we modern Americans are uncomfortable thinking about interpreting history in this way is that we are opposed to the idea of collective guilt. We judge individuals, not groups, in our legal system. We expect God's judgment to conform to that model.

Actually, we use our political system and military to impose collective punishments.

And that is reconcilable with Abraham Lincoln's beliefs. It was noted at the time that the number of soldiers known killed in the Civil War was just about the same number as of black slaves at the time the ratification of the Constitution (i.e. formal instituting of slavery in the new country). It was rhetorically attractive to link them closely, but that glosses over that the instituting of slavery was the glaring but at the time incorrigible defect in the 1790 framing of the Constitution- the Framers were acutely aware of it. Simply getting past monarchy was hard enough.

Causally, over a third of the soldier deaths in the Civil War were simply from common diseases, and it's not obvious why more Northerners had to die than Southerners or why slaveholders weren't made to hang or die horrible deaths if Divine judgment is a serious held idea.

the symbolic meaning of the targets would lead us to conclude that He was trying to teach us a lesson about the corrupting power of wealth and materialism (the Twin Towers), and about American militarism (the Pentagon). That interpretation wouldn't suit the political purposes of the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, but it makes a lot more sense to me.

You might be surprised to learn this, but Al Qaeda's public justifications for the attacks were, removing rhetorical devices, in essence those you admit.

Integrity probably requires admitting substance to their other major complaint: too much Christian American and especially Jewish-American backing of Israeli colonialist actions and the onesided tally of abuses and killings in I/P. (The Israel army long had an inofficial quota from the government to see to 10 Palestinians killed for every Israeli, which is documented in Haaretz; maybe it still does.)

Anyone who takes the Bible seriously as a record of God's dealing with His people in history cannot escape the testimony in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) of God withdrawing his protection from Israel in response to its stiff-necked behavior. God sent the Prophets to call Israel back to holiness. And when that didn't work, He allowed chastisement to humble his Chosen Nation.

Anyone who takes the Bible seriously also knows that the archaeological record of Ancient Israel often does not agree with the sequence or material causality of events portrayed.

The Hebrew Bible is a religious book which uses, but provably rearranges and in some parts fully invents or utterly distorts, portions of Israelite history for its purposes. The Exodus from Egypt and the Conquest of Canaan never materially happened in any form resembling that described.

The HB can be fully explained with a religious logic, using Israelite history more as analogy or illustrations than claims about material things. As can the otherwise not very explicable arrangement of the OT canon and its extensive borrowings (e.g. the Wisdom of Solomon from the Egyptian Book of the Dead) or fictions (the Book of Esther).

A lot of the Hebrew Bible works for easy historical analogies not because it's materially accurate but because it's psychologically acute and accurate about rulers, rulers' designs, and how groups of people act under the circumstances imposed on them.

I have thought about this issue before and I think our discomfort with the idea of divine retribution on nations isn't about individualism. I think that most of us just find claiming to know the mind of God in such large scale events to be far too presumptuous to be acceptable. There have just been too many instances where people presumed to know God's mind in these matters and were clearly wrong.

However, the fact that claiming to know when God's hand is at work in judgement against a nation is unacceptable, doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't happen. I'm pretty sure that it does. However, one of the things we are largely missing today is a recognized prophetic voice to warn us of God's judgement and explain what is happening when it comes down. Then again, prophets have rarely been listened to and at any time there are probably a fairly small number of people with the faith and maturity needed to "test the spirits" of those prophetic voices which do come along.

One group of people who might (and I do mean might) be playing this role here are people who have had near death experiences. It is not uncommon for people who claim to have had in depth near death experiences to claim that they were given knowledge of impending events caused by our sin (usually not caring for each other, war and abortion). Some of these claims were recorded before 9/11 and seem to predict those events.

I don't know what to make of all that, but I think that bible girl is right to be concerned about how God views our country. I would also point out that if you read scriptures carefully, you do see that God seems to deal with people as groups. When he deals with people individually, it pretty much always seems to be for the benefit of the entire group. As a matter of fact, Job is the only exception to this rule that I can think of off the top of my head. However, it could be that it was only those large scale events which got recorded in scriptures and therefor it might be wrong to assume that this is God's primary modis operandi.

Anyhow, I'm babbling. Go back to bickering now :)

"Some time later, though, I had to confront the possibility that they were right, that the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God as a judgment upon America."

Rod, would that you were to confront the possibility that ... the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God as a judgment upon America but for a different reason than the one put forward by Messrs Falwell, Robertson, et al. Namely, that God is p!ssed off at a so rich a country treats its poorest with contempt and disdain. Or at a country that promises liberty and justice for all, and yet routinely denies justice to certain groups of people systematically. Or at a country that promises equal treatment before the law for all citizens and yet routinely denies it to the aforementioned group of people blamed by Falwell and his ilk?

Ezekiel tells us that the true sin of Sodom was its inhospitality to the 'other', the strangers/angels, despite its clear abundance. Seems a fiting parallel to America today.

Perhaps the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God, but I sincerely doubt it was in the "sense" that Falwell asserted.

And God did not judge Israel so much as have murderous hissy fits.

All the great cities of the ancient world, Rome, Athens, the cities of Egypt (albeit with different names) China, India are still there. Only Jerusalem got leveled over and over again.

And it is true, if there is a God who gets emotional, he must really hate Africans.

God, obviously, is a racist.

Wait a minute ...

This is the man who by his own testimony was cowering on the Brooklyn Bridge on September 11, but now he says, "You know, G-d might have been using the terrorists to try to teach this sinful country a lesson, so if I'd gotten killed in the process with the other 3,000, that would have been OK."

Rod, does your ideological and theological rigidity know no bounds? (Wait, I just answered my own question ...)

If God is trying to punish us, then God is a chump. If he wanted to kill lesbians and the ACLU, why did he hit the fire department instead? Why kill Spc. Craig Amundson, age 28, and Yeoman Second Class Melissa Rose Barnes, age 27, and all the rest of the Pentagon dead? What kind of an ass is this God of yours? He's not only mean and dumb, but he has really bad aim for someone who's supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent.

Normally I try to avoid inflammatory language (really, I do) but in this case, the very idea under discussion is so offensive that I'm going to use my most offensive word ever: it is STUPID.

Nobody expects you to take any of this seriously, Jaybird. You're an atheist. Why waste your time commenting?

Sigaliris, you may think it offensive, but serious Christians have to come to terms with the God of the Bible. Not the God we wish were in the Bible, but the actual God who's there. I prefer an atheist who says it's all clearly hooey to a Christian who says he believes it, except the icky parts.

Well, great, then, Rod, let the stonings begin. Let blood and fire obliterate the earth.

Here is what's offensive about the discussion, if you need to have it spelled out. Imagine yourself to be the father or mother of one of the young people who died, in the service or on an airplane or in the towers. Imagine yourself to be the husband of a woman who never came home to her children. Imagine yourself the wife of a man who was last seen falling, in flames. And now picture that a bunch of pious Christians are using the death of your loved one to make political points, and discussing, with a straight face, whether God killed him/her on purpose or merely allowed it to happen in order to teach the rest of us a good lesson about our ballot selections.

Here's what else is offensive about the discussion, to me--a damn serious Christian. You are describing God in terms that place him on a level with a father who gets mad, pours gasoline around the house and burns his family alive because they have displeased him. Go ahead--explain how that squares up with the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. I don't think I'm the one who has explaining to do here.

Sig, imagine that you are Job. Or Job's wife.

I'm not saying that this or that specific act is God's judgment. As Scott points out, that would be presumptuous. But would you have told Lincoln that he was offensive in characterizing the Civil War as God's judgment on the nation for slavery? I think it conceivable that Lincoln was wrong, but I also don't think it was out of the question. You can stomp and shout all you want to, but I don't know how we wish away the Old Testament, which tells us that God is a god of history, and that He judges nations.

I do not know why God allows children to die. But I know He does. You cannot have an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good deity, and also have evil and suffering, without Him allowing, for His own purposes, evil and suffering. We are told that His ways are not our ways. I don't understand why the God of the Bible did some of the things He did as recorded by the Old Testament. But there it is.

Jesus predicted that all of Jerusalem would be destroyed within the lifetimes of the present generation. And it was, and all its inhabitants sent into diaspora, not to return for nearly 2,000 years. Did that event, foretold by Jesus Christ, have no deeper theological meaning, simply because it involved hideous destruction and suffering?

What if God's judgment is not for abortion and gays and "decadence," but for warmongering, racial intolerance, and a failure to abide by the spirit of Christ's message?

I do not know why God allows children to die. But I know He does. You cannot have an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good deity, and also have evil and suffering, without Him allowing, for His own purposes, evil and suffering. We are told that His ways are not our ways. I don't understand why the God of the Bible did some of the things He did as recorded by the Old Testament. But there it is.

I do not know what ends could possibly justify such means. I don't believe that Yahweh exists, but if I did I would still not worship such an arbitary, jealous and insecure deity as described in the Old Testament. That god is worthy of no one's devotion.

"What if God's judgment is not for abortion and gays and "decadence," but for warmongering, racial intolerance, and a failure to abide by the spirit of Christ's message? "

The judgement of God address all those things.

Nobody expects you to take any of this seriously, Jaybird. You're an atheist.

I'm an atheist? News to me. I always thought I was a deist. Thanks for the heads up.

Why waste your time commenting?

Because one belligerent comment on the interent deserves another, I guess.

Jim, I am unaware of any "doctrine" holding that God judges nations. It's not the kind of thing one would likely see codified as doctrine. But I may be wrong here.

I would be convinced (and perhaps even comforted) by some actual argument that the God of the Old Testament, who did judge nations, has ceased doing so. Indignation over the failure of the God of the Bible to measure up to our standards is not the same thing as refutation.

Actually, I want to modify what I said in my little "polemic" above.

Only a fool would say that there are not national consequences to national political or cultural behaviors. I hope I am not so foolish as to try to argue against that.

And I think setbacks in my life are calls from God to reflection, to search out and differentiate between what is consequence for bad/mistaken action on my part and what is beyond my control (see my rumination on personal responsibility yesterday in the original Bible Girl vs. Obama post). Consequence or happenstance that I have to deal with, the setback reminds me I am not God and that my "connection" may need some recharging/renewal, that I may need to go "further up, further in" (keep seeking, in other words).

Obviously for a group of people, group setbacks are similar opportunities for reflection, discernment and changes in course.
So from that standpoint, I surely do think it is appropriate for us to look at 9/11 and understand to what extent it is a consequence of bad/mistaken actions on the part of our nation, to what extent we are the victim of an unwarranted attack, and with some humility examine both our conduct in the world and our defense priorities (were we too arrogant pursuing boatloads of nukes and Star Wars while ignoring investment in intelligence/investigation, for example? That is a rhetorical example I pull from my feeble mind that is not a national defense expert, so I make no claim to knowing what priorities for defense should be).

I think the phrase "judgement of nations" is what unsettles me so much. It reeks of "God smote the Egyptians".

If we believe in free will, then each terrorist who got on that plane had the free will to act or not act in the murderous, destructive way that they did. That they saw themselves as agents of God makes their actions more monstrous to us, doesn't it?

If we believe free will is God's plan, then the consequences of free will being exercised are God's plan only to the extent he gave those men free will to do what they did. Our free will allows us to choose, individually and collectively, how we reflect, how we assess consequences resulting from our past national behavior, how we choose to respond, renew ourselves and conduct ourselves in the world.

Oh my, it appears that Rod has donned the sandwich board and has once again starting ranting that 9/11 is God's judgment.

This is nonsense, and why you would choose to worship, much less love, an "all powerful" god who chooses only the most brutal means of communicating his displeasure with his subjects is beyond my understanding. One would think are more englightened god would sent a cast of angels to parade about the heavens saying, "I wouldn't do that if I were you." But I suppose even deities have trouble shruggin off a lifetime of thuggish behavior. But leave all this aside for the moment.

If you indeed consider the possiblity that the 9/11 attacks were the judgment of god, then you should have the courage, on this blog of yours, to entertain the possibility that the killers, and by extension, Osama bin Laden, were in fact holy instruments or messengers of god sent on a righteous mission. And if they are, in fact, holy instruments, then it would be wrong to seek vengance and justice for the attacks. For wouldn't attacking these terrorists be the same as attacking God?

The fact is simple. These killers and the mission's engineers were and are disgusting, delusional religious fundamentalists who desire nothing more than the destruction of human life.

Connie, Connie, Connie...

You miss the true, devious beauty of Rod Dreher's train of thought. You ask, if we are being punished, then for what sins? "Allowance of abortion? Not providing national health care? Tolerance of Islam? Instigating unjust war?"

The answers are yes, yes, yes and yes.

Of course, it depends on your bias and agenda, but the great thing about god is that you can make him/her/it into whatever you want, and most people make him/her/it just like them, only in a more perfected form. The twin trolls Falwell and Robertson said 9/11 was caused by acceptance of gays and the existence of the ACLU. Perfect! Rod thinks it might be because we are a greedy, war-like society. Also perfect! Muslim fanatics think god adores suicide bombings and beheadings. Again, perfect! God is really a Republican, some argue. OK, if the self-proclaimed king of the universe chooses to demote himself to a Rovian political operative, I guess that's his perogative, but still, it is perfect.

Rod's god, like Falwell and Robertson's god, happens to be just like them, only invisible and more powerful. Maybe Rod thinks god frowns on illegal immigration. But if Rod was an illegal immigrant, god would surely not believe this.

I could say that god caused 9/11 because he hated the first Star Wars prequel, and that maybe 9/11 was the Almighty's version of a movie review. Why is that anymore insane and pathetic than what Dreher, et al have suggested?

Now, I DO believe that 9/11 was inspired by god. There was not a single non-believer among the 9/11 hijackers. Sept. 11, as it unfolded, was impossible (OK, highly improbable) to execute without belief--a strong belief--in god. Sept. 11 was a religious attack, but god had nothing to do with it.

Much of what is called Christianity in the US is nothing more than a nationalistic folk religion.

Case in point.

As a matter of belief: "In my travels, in encountering setbacks, hardships and acts of evil, God is calling me to examine my own life and my responses to those things." This is an act of self-examination, an attempt to broaden and strengthen awareness and identity on a personal level. I don't care who says it, I don't care what religion they espouse, I give it an unconditional standing ovation whenever I encounter it.

As a matter of the abandonment of morality: "God sees the evil in our world/country/city, and He allows it to be punished." This is an act of moral surrender, an acknowledgment that the speaker is incapable and usually unwilling to be personally engaged in his community or the world at large. I give it no respect, and I find it offensive when the speaker attempts to use it as leverage over others who, regardless of what they believe, are the victims of said punishment.

The former person is taking a moral stand. The latter person is committing a moral violation. That's how I see it.

I would prefer to not ignore divine warnings so I have a request.

If God wants to send a message to America could he please modulate a radio signal with the desired information? Preferable it would contain specific information like "If US citizens don't do X then Y will happen on Z date." This would be much less ambiguous than allowing a catastrophe which appears unrelated to the misdeeds of which we are guilty. Such signal could have no obvious source so its divine origin would be apparent.

Failing that a website or bulk mailing would be helpful. Even a prophet would be OK if they published this specific information before the event in question.

Granted any of these could be faked, but if they were published before the event, then people couldn't say they weren't warned. After the event we would understand the nature of the judgment and the corrective actions required to prevent future calamity.

Otherwise skeptics like myself will claim people are fitting facts to fit their world view after events have happened.

I would be convinced (and perhaps even comforted) by some actual argument that the God of the Old Testament, who did judge nations, has ceased doing so. Indignation over the failure of the God of the Bible to measure up to our standards is not the same thing as refutation.

Rod, your opening post is a plausibility argument for theism constructed on a literalist Biblical interpretation, which is in turn constructed on a theological dogma (that wherever the Hebrew Bible is translated as "God", insert the God Of Theism) which in Judaism is not considered an adequate understanding or interpretation of the Hebrew names of the deity.

So, in summary, you presented us with an argument from assumed exclusive theism proving the plausibility of exclusive theism. And, in the fact of criticism, you then insist on a rule that we refute your plausibility argument for exclusive theism...by assuming the underlying exclusive theist assumptions and buttressing literalism to be correct. If your best case argument for a premise amounts to tautology, experience says the premise is usually wrong. (I'm glad you're in a profession where this sort of thing doesn't mean a massive hit on your reputation, though; mine is a great deal crueler and prides itself on its standard of rigor and integrity of argument.)

I'm not saying theism per se is an entirely useless theory; I'm sure it's a good and perhaps necessary station on the spiritual journey. But it really shouldn't be treated as the final stop, and it simply doesn't work as exclusive or ultimate idea/theory. While they try to use the label 'God' in an understandable way for theists, the prophets and mystics proper and great saints are historically in conflict with the theist dogmas of spiritually substantially less matured Believers and authorities.

For descriptions of the general but unnamed doctrine of those high souls which is alternative to the immanence and transcendence concepts, there are e.g. the "transparence" doctrine that Boman says lies in the Hebrew notion of deity, identified with the cryptic YHWH theonym (in 'Hebrew Thought Compared to Greek', 1960), and the Ultimate Person doctrine of Martin Buber (appended to 'I and Thou', 1923).

Well, let's W's business partner's brother masterminded 9/11. He also stated clearly that this was done because of the US support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.

Rod says that 9/11 was God's judgement.

Therefore, God is sending a warning to Incurious George to stop supporting Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.

QED