Consuming Fire Daily Devotional
The weakness and unbelief of men has led them to think of God as bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice...
Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in man, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; they can perfectly co-exist. The one naturally follows the other. Sin and suffering are not opposites; the opposite of evil is good, not suffering; the opposite of sin is not suffering, but righteousness. The path across the gulf that divides right from wrong is not the fire, but repentance. ..
Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain; but “I would I had never been born!” must be the cry of Judas, not because of the hell-fire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed his friend, the world’s friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved...
God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy it. If he were not the Maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin; but seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and therefore sin has, by the creating act of God, come into the world, God is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin...
If it be said by any that God does a thing which seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it. If, for instance, it be said that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, a man who takes visits upon to mean punishes, and the children to mean the innocent children, ought to say, “Either I do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true, whoever says it..."
Even without the material rectification of a wrong when that is impossible, repentance removes the offence which no suffering could. I should even feel that the gift the thief had made me, giving into my heart a repentant brother, was infinitely beyond the restitution of what he had taken from me...
