I remember once having nearly been run off the road by a van belonging to a religious organisation, which suddenly cut in front of me. The first thing I noticed, as I nearly smashed into it, were the dramatic words emblazoned across its rear: ‘Prepare to meet thy God.’ Well, that was quite a few years ago, and I doubt you’d see such a vehicle today with those words emblazoned across it, because the concept of Divine Judgement doesn’t go down well in our sophisticated world. And yet the strange thing is that in my conversations with people who reject traditional Christian teaching the recurring theme is: ‘why doesn’t God do something about the evil in the world?’
On the one hand we don’t want to accept the idea of judgement, but on the other we blame God for not doing it.