Rolling Thunder

As I write, thunder is rumbling somewhere over Lake Michigan. I don't like the inconvenience of a sudden rain or the damage lightning can cause, but I love a thunderstorm. When our kids were little we told the usual fairy tales about angels bowling in heaven or dropping pumpkins off their wagons to calm the kids' natural fear of loud noises. Once they grew older, we began to explain thunder as a hint, a metaphor of the awesome power of God.

This opens up all kinds of teaching opportunities. Thunder is loud and scary; God is big and not someone to be trifled with. Lightning can destroy things; God owns the earth and if he wants to break something, it's his right. Thunderstorms seem to pop up out of nowhere (forget our new radar weather forecasts;) God is everywhere and you never know when he will act. If this sounds like a terrible way to introduce kids to God, bear in mind that the Bible constantly instructs us to fear him. I love the line C.S. Lewis puts in the Chronicles of Narnia regarding Aslan, the figure of Christ in the series: "Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."

I think too much of our teaching about God in the church today tries to make him safe. I have previously commented on Rob Bell's outrageous statement that the biblical "story" about hell is not attractive and we need to concoct a better "story." It is common to hear believers trying to downplay the harsh nature of the God of the Old Testament: the Levitical penalty for adultery was stoning both parties; the Canaanites were to be subjected to mass genocide; a crowd who rebelled against Moses was swallowed by an earth quake -- twenty-three thousand of them.

Do I think that we should preach Jonathon Edwards' sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" every Sunday? No, but I think the required balance is missing. I assigned the Edwards' sermon in a Literature class and got the expected reaction from a couple self-avowed atheists: who would want to believe in a God like that? Mea culpa. I should have had them read another of his works on the grace of God or the fellowship of the saints or anything for balance. The wrath and the love of God must be taken as a whole. Either alone distorts who he is.

People love to talk about the wonder of creation in a starry night sky or how the beauty of a sunset speaks of God's tenderness towards us. These are good analogies, but so is thunder. I believe that much of what is wrong in society today can be traced to a loss of fear of God. We used to speak of parents putting "the fear of God in 'em" to motivate good behavior. Now I hear the (sickening) parental cry, "Stop doing that, Johnny, Okay?" as little Johnny continues to wreak havoc and the parents shrug.

What Johnny needs to hear is a clap of thunder -- and maybe he should experience a little bolt of lightning in the form of a swat on his behind. I think we could all do with a flash of "inspiration" like that occasionally. Without a sense of how big God is and what his rights are over his creation, we all tend to get a little too big for our britches. I say, "Roll thunder, roll."