The Love of God in Destruction

Hmmm. So when God says He is going to destroy something in the scriptures does He? Yes and no. God wants to get our attention. He wants us to turn away from our sins and our sinful behaviour and in fact that is the destruction that He is aiming for. However, when we humans and followers of God do not listen and start to worship and idolize other things, and start to act in a evil way towards God and other people, God calls us back to repentance. Unfortunately we do not always want to listen.

As I'm writing this blog I am really hit by what it means to be evil. While I do not think that we were created evil, I do think that sin is prevalent in our lives and as John Calvin suggests, without the work of the Holy Spirit making it possible to choose God, we wouldn't be able to thus making us totally deprived. Yet even knowing this little bit of theology, I realized that there are things that I might say are not as bad as others and yet if they are going against God, these not so bad things are evil also. I wonder if the Ninevites realized before Jonah came and told them that God was going to destroy them in 40 days that their actions were evil? I was once confronted by a friend about my actions not being good. Until that friend had told me I didn't realize that what I was doing was hurtful.

I think that too often we think that people should just know how to act, and yet we assume they have had the same opportunities to learn that we have had and they should know and act like us. I know that I have not had the same opportunities as others and others do not have the same training as myself. When God calls on us to help someone else are we going to go or turn the other way because they should know better. Are we going walk with them or hide ourselves in the water so that we don't have to worry about anybody else? The Ninevites heard God's words and changed, others have heard God's words and gotten worse. It is not for us to decide and condemn.