“Because your fathers have forsaken me, declares the Lord,
and have gone after other gods and have served and worshipped them... and you have done worse than your fathers… Therefore I will hurl you out of this land
into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you shall
serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor,” (Jeremiah
16:11-13).
God’s punishment is giving the Israelites what they’ve
always wanted. That is weird to say, but
true. If you Israelites want to serve
other gods, than the consequences of that will be a full measure of service to
these gods (and all that entails). Giving
the Israelites what their hearts truly desire turns out to actually be their punishment.
There are other places in the scriptures where this
principle holds true. When the
Israelites refused to enter the Promised Land, God gave them all the wilderness
experience their hearts wanted (Num 13-14).
When Judah banked their hope on Assyria (instead of God) to rescue them from
the Syro-Israelite alliance, God gave them all the ‘Assyria’ they wanted (Is
8:5-8). When Paul describes God’s
response to the sin-saturated world around him, he explains that God “gave them
over” to their own depravity, and their own degrading passions, and their own depraved
mind (Rom 1:24,26,28).
What about the final punishment the bible mentions? While there is active punishment in hell, no
doubt, the bible also talks about hell as separation from God (2 Thess
1:9). This is interesting because the state
of mankind, according to the bible, is active rebellion against God. We don’t care much for God or his ways. We rule our own lives anyway. It would be better if God just butted out of
my life. But if we knew all that God creates,
sustains, and holds together, than being completely cut off from God is
probably the scariest thing imaginable. It
is a branch being severed from a tree.
So if hell is separation from God, and rebellion is our MO, than hell is giving mankind exactly
what we’ve always wanted –the full measure of it.