Passage Read: Deuteronomy 4-7
Meditation Verse: 7:10
Thought
God will repay everyone who hates Him to their faces. But when He talks here about the blessing and the destruction, we immediately think of this life, as in blessing or repayment in this life. Those who do right, we hope to enjoy favor and blessing while we still living here. Those who hate the Lord, we would like them to be rebuked publicly, now, in this life for all to see and take warning. That's the purpose behind the immediate and sometimes drastic judgment that the community is to inflict on the sinner, that all would see and fear and not do any such terrible things again. But it is all too common for the righteous to suffer in this life and the wicked to prosper. God will repay every person for whatever good or evil they do, and He will do it face to face. The Lord is not afraid of any one of us. He will rebuke and He will reward face to face. But that in itself speaks of His judgment, after our death. In truth, for the wicked to prosper in this life, it's a trap that keeps them from humbling themselves and repenting! For the righteous to suffer, that's for our humility, that we continually evaluate our ways, correct ourselves, and also to look to the Lord for relief and endurance. Suffering forces us to choose trust and obedience or rejection and self-reliance. He does promise earthly blessing in these chapters, in great detail! So there must also be earthly rebuke. To be sure, the Lord prefers men repent so as to be saved, so His judgment is not always as swift as we might like, but so too should we desire the repentance of those who do wrong. Yet He gives us instruction for relatively swift judgment, and so we should not delay too long in our execution of judgment, especially when it doesn't mean death, because that serves as much or more as a warning than continual delay of judgment.
Application
The Lord knows who hates Him and who He has rejected. It is safe to trust Him with that final judgment. But He has given us instruction on how to discipline one another, and we should be diligent to exercise that judgment, not in hated but in mercy, in hope that the one disciplined will come to repentance. I don't need to make excuses for them or for myself. I need to be diligent to make the changes I know I need to make, and I need to be diligent to bring rebuke and discipline into the lives of those I have authority over. For the good of the body and for the good of the individuals within it, discipline needs to be swift and sufficient to encourage a change in behavior, in hope that I and others so disciplined actually seek a change of heart, a humbling before God and a submitting to His rule and leadership.