"… ashamed will be all who are incensed against him"

22 Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. 23 I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. 24 Surely, shall one say, in the LORD have I righteousness and strength: even to him shall men come; and (*see below) all that are incensed against him shall be ashamed. Isaiah 45 (KJV)

“If there is a God, then I would like to have a few hearty words with Him…”. “If there is a God, then He must be a devil…”. These are just a couple of statements I read recently. In many, many variations, complaints like these are made worldwide. Humanity is angry at God. After all, a God who allows so much evil (natural disasters, disease, pain, death, injustice, etc.) while He is able to intervene, such a God, evidently, cannot be trusted. Curiously enough, this distrust of God nowhere comes more strongly to the fore than in religions. Religion is actually based on a dread of God. And thus, also, on suspicion of God. How can you not be afraid of Him, whom you do not trust? As a result, everything in religion is therefore intended to placate the deity, to reconcile him with man. The Evangel, however, is the message that God is pure goodness and that He loves the world. (John 3:16,17). He has demonstrated His love, man should realize (Rom.5:6-8). God allowed His Son to be nailed to the cross – without reckoning this against the world (2Cor.5:19). Please note: the Son did not have to be crucified to reconcile God, as the distorted version of Christian orthodoxy claims. No, God allowed His Son to be crucified to give the world the gift of Life. God is not an enemy of the world, on the contrary. He loves her unconditionally. And there will come a time when every creature will recognize this. God not only promises this, but He declares it under oath, as we read in Isaiah 45. Later on, the apostle Paul supplements this with: “every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil.2:11). Yes, the world is angry at God. How can He allow evil? How can God accept it for Himself to subject the world to vanity (death and destruction; Rom. 8:20)? We have not chosen this, have we? Is the mere presence of evil in the world not evidence that God is not good? Such are the charges expressed against Him, powerful and in many keys. Almost no one realizes that it is precisely due to God being GOOD (Luke 18:19) that He created evil. Why? In order to reveal the greatest good: His heart. Never would we have known how much God loves the world, except for the cross, and without the presence of evil. Never would we have gained any idea of grace, if sin had not made its appearance (Rom.5:19). Compassion we would not have known, because we never would have felt the need for it. However, someday it will be realized that God is good! Not in spite of evil, but precisely thanks to evil. All the accusations that have been made against Him, for thousands of years, shall be silenced. Those who have accused Him will be deeply ashamed. That is the essence of reconciliation: enemies will be embarrassed to the bone, that they ever have been able to think evil of such a God! —————————-

* The translation “but ashamed shall they be …” is incorrect. In Hebrew this is the ordinary conjunction ‘and’. The whole context shows that every tongue will swear before God and praise Him. Especially also they, who will be ashamed of the fact that they once were angry at God.

——————————— translation: Peter Feddema

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