Punishment – Examined from the Spiritual and Ecclesiastical Aspects
[1]Punishment – Examined from the Spiritual and Ecclesiastical Aspects
Those who have heard much about meekness may think that punishment contradicts meekness, or that it conflicts with the principles of tolerance, or that it opposes mercy and compassion.
We would like to explain in this article and the ones that follow the evaluation of punishment from the spiritual perspective, how it may sometimes be necessary and obligatory, and how God Himself practiced punishment, even with His saints, and how the apostles and the saints also practiced it.
God the Merciful used to punish.
No matter how tender, compassionate, or merciful a person may be, his tenderness, compassion, or mercy will never equal that of God… Yet God, who is full of mercy, sometimes punished…
From the beginning of creation, God practiced punishment: He punished Adam, Eve, and Cain, and He established the punishment of Canaan.
The punishment reached such severity that God drowned the world with the Flood, burned the city of Sodom and Gomorrah, turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, caused the earth to open its mouth to swallow Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and sent an angel who struck all the firstborn of Egypt in a single night.
Indeed, the first angel we hear about in the entire Holy Bible was an angel of punishment—one of the cherubim who stood with the flame of a turning sword guarding the way to the Tree of Life (Gen 3:24).
We hear much about angels of mercy, but how numerous are the angels of punishment mentioned in the Scripture. It is enough to say that the two angels who rescued Lot and his family from Sodom were the same ones who struck the people of Sodom with blindness.
Another angel struck 180,000 of the army of Sennacherib so that they died. The greatest references to angels of punishment are those angels with the trumpets spoken of in the Book of Revelation, who brought terrible woes and dreadful destructions upon the earth when they sounded their trumpets. When the first four had finished sounding, John the Seer says:
“Then I looked, and I heard an angel flying in the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, ‘Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound!’” (Rev 8:13).
Let no one think that God’s punishments were limited to the Old Testament, while the New Testament is the covenant of grace, meaning without punishment!
Certainly not, for God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; with Him there is no change nor shadow of turning.
Christ the meek and humble is the same One who said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites” (Matt 23). He is the One who spoke about “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” When Peter hesitated and excused himself from having his feet washed, He said to him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me” (John 13:8), meaning that He would deprive the Apostle Peter of the Kingdom because of a fault that seems so simple!
In the same manner, the Lord Christ said: “Whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be in danger of the fire of Gehenna” (Matt 5:22). He also commanded that the branch which does not bear fruit be cut off and cast into the fire (John 15). Christ, the compassionate and kind, who in the goodness of His heart left one tree for a year in hope that it might bear fruit, is the same One who—in the New Testament—cursed the unfruitful fig tree. He said to the sinful priests, “The kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing its fruits” (Matt 21:43).
In the New Testament, the covenant of grace, the Lord judged Ananias and Sapphira with death through the mouth of His servant the Apostle Peter, and He did not leave them another opportunity for repentance.
In the New Testament, the Lord also gave the command of punishment when He said to His holy disciples: “Assuredly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 18:18). He also said to them: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:23). Concerning this the Didascalia says to the bishop:
“As you were given authority to loose, so you were also given authority to bind.” At times it is not only the bishop’s right to bind, but it becomes his duty to do so. Eli the priest was punished by God because he did not punish his sons as he ought to have done.
The Apostle Paul commands the bishop saying: “Rebuke, exhort, admonish” (2 Tim 4:2). He even says about those who have sinned publicly: “Rebuke them before all, that the rest also may fear” (1 Tim 5:20).
Moses the prophet, who “was very meek, more than all men who were on the face of the earth” (Num 12:3), when the people sinned and worshiped the golden calf, became very angry. He threw the tablets of the Law and broke them, destroyed the idol, scattered its dust, rebuked the high priest severely, and ordered killing so that three thousand were killed that day (Exod 32).
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