Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller. I remember years ago talking to someone who was

interested in Christianity but had one big holdup. How could God be loving and

good and yet judge people so harshly. In his view, the

judgmentalism of God was proof that God is actually a vindictive uptight

monster. And I know he's not alone. Many people struggle with the concept of God's judgment, with the concept of hell. I mean, to be honest, I've struggled with it myself.

But all that changed when I read the work of a Croatian scholar named Miraslav Volf.

He's a Croatian theologian who saw terrible violence in the Balkans in the 1990s

during the Yugoslav Wars.

He saw murder, sexual violence, and all of the worst kind. He saw

unimaginable things. And he saw that the perpetrators of the evil never faced

justice. They acted with impunity.

And so naturally, the victims wanted to take things into their own hands.

They wanted to exact upon their victimizers what their victimizers had exacted upon them.

They wanted justice. They needed justice.

Vulf reflected on this much later and came to a realization. The only thing that would

prevent people from continuing the cycle of violence was the promise that in the end

God would see that justice is served that in the end he would judge and thus

we don't have to take judgment into our own hands.

For the victimized people of Croatia, the fact that God judges wrongdoing isn't proof that he's vindictive or hateful.

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