Collateral damage

 This week's verses are Ezekiel 14:12-16:

The Lord’s message came to me: “Son of man, suppose a country sins against me by being unfaithful, and I stretch out my hand against it, cut off its bread supply, cause famine to come on it, and kill both people and animals. Even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would save only their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Sovereign Lord.

“Suppose I were to send wild animals through the land and kill its children, leaving it desolate, without travelers due to the wild animals. Even if these three men were in it, as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, they could not save their own sons or daughters; they would save only their own lives, and the land would become desolate.

 These verses come as part of a conversation God is having with the prophet Ezekiel about the pillars of his community who had become consumed with idolatry. The whole land of Israel was going to be punished, and the only way out was to diligently follow God's path.

There are a couple pieces of important information in these verses, outside of the specific disasters God was planning for Israel. First, there is a challenge to the idea of an eternally patient God who sits at a distance occupied with something else and letting us just do whatever we want. And second, there is rebuttal to the "libertarian ideal" where each of us only ever has to bear the consequences of our own sin and nothing we do affects our neighbors or vice versa.

In our comfortable modern world, which lies somewhere on the map between materialism and hedonism, we tend to want to see God as a kind of "huggy Jesus." "Huggy Jesus" is like a big stuffed animal who just wants to throw his arms around us and tell us we're OK and empower us in whatever it is we choose to do. But this is a false god made to enshrine our happiness and comfort and agency above all other things.

And yet here, in these verses, our very real God is killing both people and animals, even children! Even if you could argue that children understand the difference between right and wrong, do animals? Our modern morality gives more weight to their well being sometimes than it does for adult humans, but here they are hapless victims to the consequences of those adult humans' life choices.

The same God that died on a cross to save us from the consequences of our bad behavior is also capable of this carnage. It's hard to look at the two side by side. You can't develop a healthy fear of God when all you see is "huggy Jesus," but when you see the full picture, it's a lot easier. We need to have a more balanced view of who God is. He may be our friend, but he's still a lion!

We need to understand that his beautiful grace is not the result of some weakness of character or an overly soft temperament. The grace we are offered is an exceptional, time-limited decision on his part that has serious consequences for us if we fail to take advantage of it while we're here.

And speaking of consequences, if God's judgment even affects the land we live in, can we really cling to the false god of "rugged individualism?" It's one thing if your bad ideology and life decisions only means you suffer as an individual, but it's quite another if puppies and children are torn apart by the consequences. Like it or not, you're connected to the world around you in ways you cannot possibly comprehend.

Think about it: scientifically speaking, how could our attitude towards God and our moral choices cause environmental disasters and cause wild animals to attack helpless children? We forget that we live in a world that is also spiritual, and that the spiritual world and physical world are intertwined in ways that we can't measure only physically.

So how do we escape the consequences of our mutual sin? God gives three examples: Noah, Daniel, and Job. These are three men who were surrounded by evil and stuck to the right path. In a sense, that's the only kind of individualism that counts, the individual determination to follow God despite what everyone else is doing, and despite what it may cost.

We need to tread more carefully and have a bit of humility about how much of the consequences of our sin we can really pay ourselves. The damage can spread a lot wider than we might realize. And even though our debt is paid by Jesus on the cross, we should still recognize what our future would be if he had not made that sacrifice.