NOTES for Joe 3:16
So what is really God's judgment? Is it a punishment coming from heavens, against which God has to protect His people, or it is all the same a judgment in our usual understanding, when the affair of each is examined by an infinitely wise and infinitely merciful Judge, for Whom nothing can be hidden? It would probably have been easier to say that these two points of view on Judgment replace each other historically, that the image of God chastising the sinners without distinction is changed to the image of a wise and merciful Judge. Is all this true? We are not going to say that the God, clattering with thunders and flashes of lightning on the sinful humanity, is not also really foreign to the religions that grew on the Christian ground.
It is about another thing: the image of the Judgment is sometimes doubles even in the Bible, and hardly it will be necessary to put this double vision only on history. And maybe, all the problem is, what is considered as judgment? For us today the judgment supposes an evaluation of man or his acts, given by the judge, who because of diverse reasons is entitled to it. And we look at God's judgment very often almost in the same way, adjusted by the omniscience and the mercy of the One who judges. And for the prophets, for example, the judgment already became the meeting with God face to face, and man was already condemned here because of his own sin, and not of God.
In fact, what can feel a man who met God, but rejected His love, mercy, guidance? What remains to him to do? Obviously, only one thing: the power of God. Because love, mercy, and guidance are voluntarily accepted, in them God's will manifests itself according to the human nature, by condescending to its weaknesses and its limits. If there is no voluntary acceptance, there is only the power: because God will not disappear from the world only because His presence in this world does not please someone, and that is why this someone will see not the face of God, turned to man, but the power of God, which is not intended for man. With all the ensuing consequences here.