“Evil collapsing under its own weight.” I love that phrase. It’s so fitting. On a geopolitical scale we remember the fall of Communism, the end of the Third Reich, and the dissolution of Apartheid as regimes that collapsed under their own weight. Communism failed to deliver even a modicum of the equality it promised, providing instead an even greater disparity between the government and the people. Fascism proved so obscenely inhumane that even those in political support of streamlined governmental systems could no longer ignore the moral implications of finding ‘final solutions’ for socioeconomic problems. It was the church in South Africa that spoke up loudest, albeit latest, against eh evils of Apartheid finally removing the barriers of self-righteous justification for a beastly division of people based upon pigment and gentility.
But it’s not just geo-political evil that collapses under its own weight. Interpersonal evil ultimately carries within the sin itself the seeds of destruction. I counseled a friend who was involved in an extra-marital affair that this behavior could cost him his marriage, his family, his community standing, and possibly his friendship with me. He didn’t take my advice, and he lost more than I’d foreseen. The only thing he didn’t lose was my friendship, and that was pale comfort given the scale of his calamity.
Judgment is less about God’s punishment and more about the natural consequences of deviation from God’s design for human flourishing. You’ll get yours, and if you’re not careful, you just might choke on it.
Every judgment is designed with an escape route. Every sentence passed from the throne of God is avoidable. The question is: will we ever take God’s judgments seriously before we have to?