Here's an email from a podcast listener named Luke who writes and asks this.

Pastor John, how do we reconcile Ezekiel 1832 for I have no pleasure in the death of

anyone declares the Lord God with Deuteronomy 2863?

And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take

delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you, how do you handle this apparent contradiction

and scripture between Ezekiel 1832 and Deuteronomy 2863, what would you say, Pastor John?

When I meet passages like this in the Bible, especially passages relating to the emotions

of God, I am very slow to think that God cannot have these seemingly contradictory emotions.

One expressed in Ezekiel 1832, I do not have pleasure in the death of anyone and the

other expressed in Deuteronomy 2863, the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon

you and destroying you. Instead, my assumption is that there is a true way that God takes pleasure

in the just destruction of the wicked and there is a true sense in which he does not delight

in the death of anyone. In other words, both are true and our job is to discern as much

as we can in what different ways or senses they may be true. It may be, Tony, that since this

is such a huge issue, I should point to a couple of places where I've written about it,

desiring God, pages 38 to 40, and the pleasures of God, pages 55 to 59, I tackle precisely those two

texts that were mentioned. It's as if they were reading what I wrote and wanted some clarity on it.

So that's where I've written about it if you want to pull down the book off the shelf. But let

me try to give a brief answer here, not depend on people going there. God's emotional life

must be infinitely complex. Who can comprehend that the Lord hears in one moment of time,

the prayers, for example, of 10 million Christians around the world and sympathizes with each one

personally and individually as a caring father, as Hebrews 4.15 says he does, even though

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