As I continue to share thoughts on the message in Revelation given by the three angels in chapter 14 I’ve been reflecting on some of the thoughts regarding God’s behaviour and the way we see the end of the wicked playing out. This isn’t a good/bad, better/worse suggestion but just a thought on why we might see things differently.

Do you think it’s possible that depending on how far one leans into the more intimate relationship pictures of God (brother, Abba, husband) the more likely they are to struggle with the destroying God picture? On the other hand, the more one leans into the more legal King/Judge pictures, the less struggle they have with the destroying God picture?

For example, if a king/judge pronounces sentences and demands execution that’s a fairly reasonable course of action to maintain order. However, if we take that same kind of behaviour into an intimate marriage relationship, a husband and wife or potential wife, we might think the sentence/execution action is kind of freaky. Like when the guy says, I want you to be my wife and the woman says no thanks and so he kills her cat, throws acid in her face, and then burns her house down.

God gives us several models of who he is. They’re all valuable and they speak to all of us more or less. Now this might be a value judgment: are the models all equal and they sit together on a shelf – at this point he’s king then back on the shelf and now he’s husband? Could it be there is a progression (revelation?) that God wishes to take us on (as in you are not longer slaves but sons and so on) from a formal, legal arrangement to the most intimate relationship of all?