Does God have the right to judge anyone?

Throughout the bible it’s taken for granted that God has every right to judge humanity for sin. He created us, created this planet for us to take care of, and set the terms and conditions for us to live by. Either we trust him, follow them, and be blessed by his aid and comfort… or we don’t, won’t, and fall subject to every natural disaster there is.

For that matter, as spelled out in God’s TOS, he also reserves the right to sic some of those disasters on us—triggering recessions, causing droughts, provoking invaders, starting fires, dropping meteors, blotting out the sun. And that’s not just Old Testament behavior either. Revelation tells of him doing that stuff during the Christian Era as well.

And pagans and nontheists find the very idea of this behavior really offensive. God judging humanity? God condemning humanity? God punishing humanity? How dare he?

To pagans, that’s not the behavior of a loving God. A loving God would never. He’d bail us out of all our problems and clean up all our messes. He’d never send a giant flood to wipe out sinners; he’d never dump burning sulfur on Sodom to destroy its rapists; he’d never kill all the firstborn Egyptians to convince their pharaoh to free Israel; he’d never task Israel with genocidally wiping out the Amorites to take their land; he’d never task Assyria and Babylon and Rome with near-genocidally wiping out the Israelis who’d gone pagan. A loving God would at the very most mitigate evil, or make it very very hard for humans to commit it. But he would never stop it cold in its tracks by smiting the evildoers.

Or he would… but they’d have to really be evildoers. Like murderous dictators and their soldiers. He’d strategically smite them. But the “collateral damage,” as our militaries call it, of civilians who lived near by, or innocent family members who somehow weren’t actively or quietly supporting them in their evildoing: God would somehow spare them. He’s God; he could figure out how to target them precisely, and spare innocents… and then somehow make sure those “innocents” never get radicalized against God and his people for taking away their loved ones.

As for nontheists, they insist there is no God judging humanity or mitigating evil. That’s just people murdering other people same as always, and using God to justify ourselves. The bible is merely a book of myths; Israelis conquered their neighbors, then inserted God into their stories and claimed it was all his idea. Then Jesus showed up centuries later and said no, God is love—which is a nice idea, but Jesus must be talking about a different God than the one his ancestors invented, ’cause that guy is all smitey.

Okay. There are gonna be various pagans and nontheists who come at this issue from other directions, but I think I’ve laid out the general idea here: The scriptures reveal God as someone who represses or stops evil, and doesn’t rule out destruction and death and war as ways of doing so. And the skeptics argue he can’t do it these ways, for that’d make him evil. Captain America can shoot bad guys and remain noble and virtuous and good… but God can’t.

Okay, so how would they stop a bad guy?

Whenever I’ve talked theodicy with someone who insists God doesn’t and mustn’t smite sinners, I usually don’t argue with them. When I first got into Christian apologetics I’d argue with them a bunch, because even though argumentativeness is fleshly, apologists figure it’s okay to argue for Jesus. Which is exactly like saying it’s okay to be a jerk for Jesus. Okay to get in drunken fistfights for Jesus. Okay to participate in an orgy so that you might win some of them for Jesus. In general it’s bad behavior disguised as righteousness—but I digress. I used to argue with ’em; I don’t now.

But I was curious to know what alternatives they had in mind. Okay, if God isn’t allowed to get handsy when he fights evil, what is he allowed to do? How’s he gonna stop a terrorist with a bomb vest without killing the terrorist?

“Well…” is a really common answer I’ve been given, “he’d give that guy a change of heart.”

Oh, so God would take away the evildoer’s free will and reprogram him to be good. Or at least sorry for being evil.

If God’s almighty—and most of us who believe in God are pretty sure he is—he should be able to flip anyone’s “evil” switch from on to off. If these people were God, it’s precisely what they would do. So they don’t see why God can’t simply do this. Should be the easiest thing for an almighty being, right?

Well… the easiest thing only if God doesn’t care about human free will. Only if when God wants people who love him, he’s totally cool with programming people to love him. If I’m desperate and pathetic enough, I can program my phone to randomly tell me “I love you” throughout the day… but of course I’d know it was only doing that because I made it. Is God desperate and pathetic like that? Not at all: He wants us to love him, but he wants us to actually love him, and that means we have to voluntarily love him. Involuntary love ain’t love, and God’s not gonna monkey with our free will when it comes to love.

But he will show us he’s worth loving. He does try to change our minds. He wants us to repent and follow him. He’s not gonna coerce it. Legalists will, but of course legalists don’t understand how God works: He does grace. They don’t.

Jesus graciously appeared to Paul of Tarsus to convince him to quit persecuting Christians and follow him. Didn’t force Paul to quit; Paul could’ve defied the vision he saw, and kept stubbornly persecuting Christians regardless. He chose not to. Ac 26.19 Various Christians insist Jesus did so force Paul to quit, by blinding him. Ac 9.8 I’ve known plenty of blind people who never let their impaired vision stop them, and I seriously doubt Paul would have.

Now when Jesus flipped Paul, note he didn’t invade his mind and instantly transform him from depraved sinner to dedicated follower. I’ve heard people claim he did, but Paul’s change was far from instant. Paul spent three days praying and fasting, Ac 9.9 trying to process his Christ-experience. Then, after getting cured of blindness and getting baptized, Ac 9.18 another few days talking it out with fellow Christians Ac 9.19 before “at once” proclaiming Jesus in the synagogues. Ac 9.20 Even then, he needed three years before joining the Christians in Jerusalem. Ga 1.15-18 True, God-experiences can sometimes flip people very quickly. But usually that’s because they were already most of the way towards Jesus, and the God-experience simply pushed them over the finish line. Paul wasn’t even close to the finish line, but Paul was at least open to God’s correction.

Unrepentant sinners, not so much. Determined unrepentant sinners—especially ones who’ve convinced themselves God’s on their side, and if God himself says otherwise, they’d immediately say that can’t be God—not at all.

So yeah, skeptics would immediately reprogram every evildoer if they were God—even if it meant none of these evildoers could ever honestly, independently love God, due to their brainwashing. Even if it meant they broke the independent spark within every single one of those “reformed” evildoers. They’d figure if they were almighty, they could cleverly come up with some way in which these people weren’t actually robots now. They’d program them to not be robots. Yes I know that’s a paradox, but they figure the Almighty should be easily able to pull off such paradoxes.

I don’t know that he wants to. I believe he’d rather have free-will humans, and he’d rather have us repent. But if we won’t repent, sometimes there will be consequences. Ones he hates.

Ezekiel 33.11 KJV

Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?

Live, dangit! God’s offering you life and forgiveness. Take the deal!

But skeptics would much rather provide a third option, besides repentance or death: Brainwashing. And since God isn’t gonna turn evildoers into soulless automatons, somehow he’s the bad guy.

“Those people weren’t that bad. Killing them was way worse.”

The other objection I hear from pagans and nontheists about God’s acts of judgment, is that God shouldn’t be judging people for their evil deeds because their deeds aren’t all that evil.

Fr’instance when the LORD had Israel destroy the Amorites when they took over Canaan/Palestine. The usual assumption people make, is that the only thing the Amorites did wrong was worship the wrong gods: They worshiped the Baals instead of the LORD. Usually pagans aren’t all that knowledgeable about the bible, and presume the Amorites didn’t know any better: They had no idea there’s only the One God, and had never even heard of him. Which is rubbish. The king of Gerar knew God personally. The king of Salem was his priest. Anthropologists discover time and again how nearly every culture recognizes there’s One God above all the other gods, and some of them are actually more monotheist than not. True for the Amorites as well, who knew there was a God they were supposed to follow… but Baalism was way more fun, and let ’em get away with way more sinning and oppression and exploitation.

Even in so-called “Christian nations,” there’s a lot of reprehensible sin going on. Arguably worse stuff than these pagan nations do. Arguably, God should be busily smiting us too. (Arguably, he is.)

But what these skeptics object to, is the idea God sometimes chooses to kill evildoers. Not just expose them and let our governments prosecute them, although he does do that. But sometimes they just die.

Acts 5.3-6 KJV

3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? 4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. 5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. 6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

They don’t usually drop dead like Ananias did… but yeah, sometimes they die, and suddenly every evil deed they were getting away with, comes out. And the people of their churches are horrified by the extent of their crimes. All the money they stole; all the children they molested; why didn’t God expose them sooner?

Yeah, they’ll gripe about God killing the dude, then they’ll turn round and gripe that God didn’t kill him sooner. Really, God can’t win with these people. Which is usually the real issue: God didn’t judge the way they would’ve judged. They’re entirely sure they’d have done it correctly.

Lastly, we have those skeptics who insist God shouldn’t kill at all—because he forbids us from killing, Ex 20.13, Dt 5.17, Mt 5.21 and if it’s wrong for humans, and because our governments have regularly proven they can’t be trusted to enact the death penalty fairly, why should God get to do it? Because he can be trusted to enact it fairly? Because he, unlike us, can and will undo any deaths he causes? Meh; those reasons aren’t good enough; God shouldn’t kill. Ever. A God who kills isn’t a good God.

Me, I figure God, as our maker, has every right to unmake what he’s made, for whatever reason he sees fit. If he wants to mercy-kill a sick person, as he does, 1Ki 14.12-13 he’s the only one who can be trusted with life and death that way. When we don’t trust him like that—when we insist he has to follow the very same divine checks and balances we do, otherwise he’s not moral; in fact we refuse to believe he’s inherently moral—we expose the fact we don’t know him. We know ourselves, more or less, and presume he’s just like us, and has to abide by the standards which keep us in check. We don’t understand he’s not corrupt like us, and can be trusted to be true to himself.

And as the only uncorrupted being in the universe, he’s the only one who can judge us rightly and fairly. It only looks wrong and unfair from our biased point of view, but we are not the standard which God has to follow. It’s the other way round. And either we trust him to judge us right… or we don’t. Pagans may as well just confess they don’t.

Heck, many Christians may as well just confess we don’t. I sometimes struggle with passages from Judges and Revelation, where it looks like there’s just an orgy of indiscriminate destruction going on, and the prophets and apostles kinda make it sound like God’s happy about it—even though I know he’s not, like he told Ezekiel. The biblical authors’ personal senses of vengeance and wrath were kinda leaking into the text, because they were pleased that God smote their enemies. God’s attitude is way different. He doesn’t want anyone to perish, but repent. 2Pe 3.9 When he judges people, it’s after he’s given them loads of chances—sometimes over centuries, like he did with the Egyptians and Amorites; and of course with us Americans before the Civil War. But, like Abraham Lincoln said,

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Second Inaugural