Never adept at off-the-cuff debate, I was a bit relieved when the topic turned to the taboulleh my family had brought. I’ve mulled that statement over since then, however. It points to a disconcerting train of thought among even devout Catholics. One of my priest friends—tongue in cheek—put it best: in Old Testament times, God was very angry and prone to punish. With the New Testament, He apparently went through anger management therapy, and is doing much better.
As flippant as that statement sounds, a huge number of Christians seem to believe it. I could almost pay off my student loans in a single lump sum payment, if given a dollar for every variant of, “Oh, I don’t believe in an angry God. My God is a merciful God, who loves everyone.” True, God is love. He is merciful. We see His mercy in Ezekiel 33:11: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live. Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways: and why will you die, O house of Israel?”1 (This from the God with an anger management problem.) His mercy is lauded in the Psalms. Our Lord’s intervention with the woman caught in adultery, or His kindness to the Samaritan woman at the well are other examples. Let’s also not forget the writings of St. Faustina! Experiential knowledge likewise proves God’s mercy. We have all sinned; we will all need the Sacrament of Confession many times while we live.
So yes, God is merciful. He has loved every human being since the Creation, enough to become one of us and die an excruciating death to pay the price of sin. Here we come to a fact about God that many today do not like to see: God is just. Justice and mercy are intertwined in a very intricate way. His justice gave us the Law in ancient days. In mercy, He also spelled out the consequences of disobedience (namely, damnation.) His justice and mercy are closely meshed in giving us Purgatory, in order to complete the reparation we do not or cannot complete in this life. Neither law nor consequences have gone away. Culturally, we just ignore them. The four crimes that cry to heaven for vengeance are all committed, more or less in full public view, and few are the voices raised against them (murder being the only exception.) They infest our entertainment, economy, education and politics. But sin has a price. Justice demands that payment be made.
God has fixed in His mind the length of time He will allow every person and culture on earth to turn from sin and follow Him.2 In 1973, at a convent in Akita, Japan, God mercifully allowed Our Lady to tell us that our time is drawing near. (I won’t rehash the entire story here, but refer those who are not familiar with Our Lady of Akita to the link above.) She spelled out in detail the punishment we will incur, if mankind fails to repent:
“[I]f men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead.”Remember, this was in 1973. I personally think it no coincidence. Akita occurred in the same year that abortion became formally legal in the United States. Since then, we have not collectively bettered ourselves. In some ways, we’ve become even worse. This raises unsettling questions.
Is it just, loving, and merciful to continue to permit evil to be done with apparent impunity? How loving is it that those who are less developed in holiness see the vilest sins brazenly committed in broad daylight, with no action taken by the Lawgiver? Are we to assume that He who rained fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah when their wickedness was ripe will not deal likewise with a world that openly celebrates its contempt for all Ten Commandments? Is He who smote Egypt for Israel’s sake no longer omnipotent? Has mercy made God an effeminate weakling? Is the Ancient of Days so old that He no longer dispenses the wages of sin?
Our Lady’s message at Akita is a very sobering and resounding “No.” But because of the foul excesses of that bloodiest of centuries, the 20th, we have allowed ourselves to believe that God is no longer just. We’ve allowed ourselves to believe in mercy without prudence and that punishment is for the past and the Parousia. I suspect that’s why, in 1973, God allowed Our Lady to speak through her humble wooden likeness. She spoke to warn us that she will not be able to restrain the Father’s arm of justice for very much longer. She spoke to say that if we continue to offend God, there will be only one loving, merciful and just option for Him—to cleanse the earth with fire.
Would this break the oath He swore to the Patriarch Noah? If you’ve carefully read that part of Genesis, you know that God’s oath was to never again destroy all life with a flood. As the mark of original sin is removed once in a lifetime using holy water, so sin will be removed from the earth by water only once. God placed no such limits on fire, famine or pestilence.
At Quito, the Blessed Mother foretold our times. At La Salette and Fatima, she issued dire warnings and commanded penance. (Indeed, admonitions to pray and do penance have been central to the message of every Marian apparition for the past several centuries.) At Akita, she gave us her sternest warning. She spelled out the details of our collective sentence, and how it can be avoided. Akita is our final plea bargain offer. God has allowed Our Lady to give many warnings in the past 500 years. Can we really say that He is not being merciful when He finally visits just punishment upon us?
1 Douay-Rheims Translation. (2009, St. Benedict's Press)↩
2 My readers should ask where I am getting this. My source is the chief exorcist for the Diocese of Tulsa, Fr. Chad Ripperger, via his website, Sensus Traditionis. He has made available many conferences, sermons and homilies which he gave when he was a parish priest with the FSSP. I think so highly of this site that I have provided a link in “My Watering Hole”. I cannot recommend it enough! ↩
