Assuming that God is love, it may be asked, How does that harmonise with the text? How is it to be reconciled with words where God represents Himself as pouring down His fury like a thunder-shower, and scattering His people in a storm of indignation, as light and worthless chaff blown away upon the wind. How, it may be asked, does this consist with God's love and mercy? Now, there is no greater mistake than to imagine that God, as a God of justice and a God of mercy, stands in antagonism to Himself. It is not mercy, but injustice, which is irreconcilable with justice. It is cruelty, not justice, that stands opposed to mercy. Like two streams, which unite their waters to form a common river, justice and mercy are combined in the work of redemption. On Calvary, mercy and truth meet together, righteousness and peace embrace each other. Observe
I. That God is slow to punish. He does punish; He shall punish; with reverence be it spoken, He must punish. Yet no hand of clock goes so slow as God's hand of vengeance. Where, when God's anger has burned hottest, was it ever known that judgment trod on the heels of sin? A period always intervenes, room is given for remonstrance on God's part and repentance upon ours. The stroke of judgment is indeed like the stroke of lightning, irresistible, fatal; it kills kills in the twinkling of an eye. But the clouds from which it flashes are slow to gather, and thicken by degrees; and he must be deeply engaged with the pleasures, or engrossed in the business, of the world, whom the flash and peal surprise. Heeded or unheeded, many are the warnings you get from God.
II. Observe how God punished His ancient people. Look at Judah sitting amid the ruins of Jerusalem, her temple without a worshipper and her streets choked with the dead; look at that bound, weeping, bleeding remnant of a nation, toiling on its way to Babylon, and may I not warn you with the Apostle: "If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He spare not thee"?
T. Guthrie, The Gospel in Ezekiel,p. 60.
Although the permission of sin is a mystery, the fact of its punishment is no mystery at all; for while every answer to the question, How did God permit sin? leaves us unsatisfied, to my mind nothing is plainer than this, that, whatever was His reason for permitting it to exist, God could not permit it to exist unpunished. In proof of this, I observe
I. The truth of God requires the punishment of sin. "Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little," God has recorded His irrevocable resolution, not in one but in a hundred passages, and reiterated in a thousand ways the awful sentence: "The soul that sinneth it shall die."
II. The love of God requires that sin should be punished. Divine love is no blind divinity: that love being as wise as tender, sinners may rest assured, that out of mere pity to them, God will neither sacrifice the interests, nor peril the happiness, of His people. Love herself, bleeding, dying, redeeming love with her own hand will bar the door of heaven, and from its happy, holy precincts exclude all that could hurt or defile.
III. Unless sin is to be awfully punished, the language of Scripture appears extravagant.
T. Guthrie, The Gospel in Ezekiel,p. 79.