Throughout the Bible we see how God uses people to perform his punishments on the sinful. Since God is unchanging, doesn’t it seem reasonable to consider that his methods would also be unchanging?
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God definitely did some supernatural things to Egypt to teach the Pharaoh that God is THE God, but he also used Moses to organize and lead the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the desert.
God used the prophets to bring the people back into proper worship and righteous living, although most of the time that didn’t work. One exception could be in 1 Kings 18, when fire fell from heaven on Elijah’s sacrifice on Mount Carmel in Shomron. That got people’s attention, but it didn’t last for long.
God used the Philistines, the Amorites, and other semitic kingdoms to punish the Israelites when they turned from God and sinned, and he used judges to encourage and lead the people to rebel against these kingdoms when they repented.
God used King Sennacherib of Assyria to punish the Northern Kingdom of Israel for all its sins.
God used Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon to punish the kingdom of Judah for all its sins.
So, considering that God has used his creation to enforce his will and punish those others of his creation, when the End Days come, why not use mankind to punish mankind?
The Book of Revelation is rife with metaphor, and I know many people will believe that what we read in there is to be taken literally, but I don’t believe that. I truly believe that the destruction mentioned will be what happens- during a nuclear war, couldn’t we expect that 1/3 of the earth would be burnt, 1/3 of all living in the rivers and streams dying, the sun turning black (from the millions of tons of earth being thrown into the sky) and the stars falling from the sky (radioactive fallout)?
I wrote a poem when I was in high school and (fortunately for you I don’t remember it well enough to recite it now) the point of it was that God makes the world turn every day, he destroyed it once and promised not to do that again, but God still makes the world turn every day, and now he will let man destroy it in his own way.
Of course, there is nothing stopping God from having all those angels pour out his fury on the world in a majestic and supernatural way, as he did with Sodom and Gomorrah. And I may be way off thinking the End Days (in Hebrew, we call that the Acharit haYamim) won’t be supernaturally performed in order to demonstrate, undeniably, that there is a God and that this is all His doing. Really, that would be something to make people stand up and take notice.
Revelation tells us that despite all these horrors, people will still curse God’s name and fail to repent, which also makes me think that God will use people. Why? Because it is all about faith: if every one of these terrific destructive forces can be explained, then only the faithful will realize it is God doing it. Those without faith will fail to repent and continue to reject God’s existence and influence, which is tantamount to cursing his name.
God is very binomial: either you is or you ain’t, and if you do not accept God’s way of living, then you reject him, which is pretty much the same as cursing him.
I suppose we will have to wait until the Day of Judgement to see if it is God doing things supernaturally, or using people to do his handiwork. I don’t know about you, but as for me, I am more than happy for this question to remain unanswered during my lifetime.
That’s it for today, so thank you, again, for being here, l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
