God still has wrath. He is furious over people harming one another. And He will do whatever it takes to correct people—not always in this life, but sooner or later, He will correct ALL PEOPLE. You don’t correct people by killing them as He supposedly did according to Moses and some of the prophets.
God may not have corrected people by killing them BUT He did correct the problem in doing so — which inevitably in doing so He spared the greater whole. Such ones as lost their lives accordingly simply came to know the goodness of God they wouldn’t or couldn’t come to know in this life… but once having stepped through death’s dark veil it was a bright new day into the greater workings of God we as mortals don’t grasp.
So many times in Israel’s story there was corruption within the camp that for the sake of the greater whole God needed to remove… sometimes there were warnings given and sometimes not. He did this that Israel as a whole might succeed in being His light to the world… the very thing Jesus and his firstfruit saints finally accomplished. Such unpalatable means that did occur were always ultimately towards a better ends.
I honestly don’t see the narrative proves that killing people corrected Israel’s corruption. Even in drowning almost everyone, the upshot is that Noah gets drunk and the earth proceeds to only show “doing evil continually.” The extermination of enemies was likewise to solve temptations to idol worship, etc, but Israel regularly proceeded to imitate the world and pursue idolatry anyway. And killing the unclean within Israel likewise does not seem to me to actually have made Israel “succeed in being the light of the world” at all.
Indeed, it appears that my perception that the narrative actually highlights how little Israel succeeded at this leads me to draw the opposite conclusion about how correctively effective we are to see that violence actually is.
LOL If you find that the flood, or lethal violence, means that “evil, corruption or idolatry” truly
no longer happens now, I reckon my own glasses are not as rose colored as I thought
Perhaps he means that God is not killing people any more.
However, there are many who say that He still kills people. They ascribe floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. to his present activity in punishing people by death.
What is translated as “wrath” in conventional translations cannot—as commonly believed—be an essential change of disposition on God’s part toward man. God has only one disposition, one inclination, one divine posture in His relationship with man, that of unconditional love coming to us in unearned grace. He is determined to fully give Himself to us unreservedly. When one sees this, we become His bond slave, bound by such love.
The primary Greek work translated as “wrath” is “orge,” from which we get our English word, “orgy,” and it’s various forms. The word itself and it’s root conveys aroused passion, excitement, a reaching after and overlaps in meaning with “thumos,” translated also as “wrath.”
Jonathan Mitchell translates “orge” it as "inherent fervor, and Ed Browne, translates it as “intrinsic fervor.”
For me, it suggests, in the case of God, pure, ravishing love.
Since God IS love, then wrath, necessarily, is a form of love, for nothing could proceed out from the nature of God that is inconsistent with the love that He IS.
I’ll ask you a straight up question. Does God control the world? Are all the tornadoes and hurricanes and floods and droughts part of Gods doing? Yes or no?
No. God does not control the world! If He did, He would be responsible for all the tortures and rapes of girls and little children.
And No. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and droughts are not part of God’s doing. When Adam and Eve fell from fellowship with God, all their descendants, as well as nature itself, fell with them, and the consequences of both remain with us to this day.
So my point is that these things do happen today and will most likely happen in the future, but there is no scriptural boundaries or basis for such happenings. When God did what he did in scripture, there was a prophet or indicator that certain things would happen at certain times. It was to be honest all about God’s relationship with Israel, and Christians have tried to drag the narrative to us some thousands of years later.
The very point that you ask the question about the flood, or lethal violence, means that “evil, corruption or idolatry” truly no longer *happens now shows we are on different understandings. My suspicion is that you are still look for the evangelical utopia on earth. And hey, it is cool. I just don’t see it as you do.
Do you think these words of Jesus’ prayer apply only to “first fruit saints”?
"I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (John 17:20-23)
If those words apply only to the “first fruit saints” then Jesus’ prayer was never answered. For the saints in that day did not become perfectly one, nor, for that matter, in any other day including ours. The day of perfect unity of the saints is yet to come.
First of all, the first century martyrs were perfect. We are but grateful observers of a great time, and we need to be both grateful and understanding of their great sacrifice, just as we are grateful of the sacrifice of Christ. They were worriers and willing to give their life for their belief in Christ.
But the perfection of Christ is beyond ages, and his position in putting people in a proper relationship with God is paramount, and is cloaked in love.
Because you continue to see the worst in people, does not mean that God is not in fact working and that great things are indeed happening.