Yesterday's Easter Service at ORB was about Hope. You can listen to it here: SERMON
If you weren't there, I would really recommend giving it a listen. It's a good one.
Basically the point of the sermon was this:
What we hope for, with the limitations of of our narrow human understanding, are so much smaller than what God actually wants to give us. Our pastor, Christian, then gave some examples. The one that stood out to me was this:
When we become a Christian, or start earnestly reading the Bible, hoping for complete understanding of the word and a new steadfast faith, we don't receive it. And sometimes, we receive the opposite - a feeling of anger towards God, or seething in a phase of disbelief. But the result of this is soul searching and research so that when you finally do come to an understanding, it is much stronger than if you just simply believed it outright.
He worded it much more eloquently than that, but it reminded me of the issue I had with the Midianites. If you didn't get a chance to read the response from the Metro blog, basically it boils down to this:
People often forget that God is both perfectly loving and perfectly just. We want to say God is all loving and forget about the just part because it's not as pretty or as easy to worship. God's perfect justice was unleashed on the Midianites - and all of us, as fallen humans, deserve the exact same thing that the Midianites got, as horrific as it was. But, because of God's love he sent Jesus to take that punishment for us. And even in that he was merciful. Jesus died much more quickly than others who died on the cross, ending his suffering early. The Roman officials were actually surprised to hear that he had died so quickly.
So now we don't have to face God's justice - because the entirety of his wrath against humanity, from the beginning of time to the end of time, was unleashed on Jesus.
This understanding and faith that I've gained from going through such a difficult period is so much stronger than I could have ever hoped for.
This suggests a "domain specific" sense of justice to me. Genocides against certain groups of people are justified in a religious context but not in others. The holocaust would not be justified for example. As someone who is not religious, it's definitely harder for me to accept the narrative on this point.
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