“But who will by no means clear the guilty”
This week, the dead and ghoulish will rise from the ground through plastic effigies. Fake blood and dirt decorate their forms as their sharp features pierce your soft temperament. Happy Halloween! Creepy evil things are all around you.
But they’re only plastic. They aren’t real.
Halloween dramatizes evil and demonic forces that Americans silo off most of the rest of the year. Spiritual things and true evil aren’t real; they’re simply commercial products. Or are they?
Have we been tricked?
But Who Will by No Means Clear the Guilty
The final section of God’s identity in Exodus 34 recalls the terrifying part of God that polarizes Christians. God is love, but God is just. God is merciful and forgiving, but He is also the God who ordered thousands of Israelites to be killed just a chapter before. All they did was make a golden calf! The punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime.
At its most basic, this clause demonstrates that God sees evil in all its forms, with all its objects, and in its entirety. We Americans hide evil behind decorations, holidays, and customs, but He sees all the ways that we stand guilty as we victimize our neighbors near and far to run our lives. Were all the people who made our plastic skeletons paid fair wages? Did the dyes used to color our inflatables kept from polluting water sources? Are the people who grow the ingredients for our candies able to afford a meal that day?
Horror as Education
Halloween’s drama of evil is much like the horrific judgments in Scripture: horror teaches the reality of evil. Demons possessing one’s neighbor down the road may be rare in real life, but there are demon-adjacent behaviors in towns. Horns and tridents in real life look more like guns, addiction cycles, unfair wages, and physical abuse. Claws and hellish flames point us toward the subtle evils around us that ought to scare us into justice. If we ought to call a priest to exorcise the demon in little Sally, why do we do nothing when we see signs of evil right across the street?
Unlike us, God sees the guilty and visits fitting judgment on them. His justice is complete. If evil persists in a man’s children, his grandchildren, even to his great-grandchildren, His justice will visit them. They are not guilty by association; they stand guilty as long as they repeat the mistakes of their forebearers! The terror of punishment ought to have taught them otherwise.
Good Terror
Though judgment seems fearful and opposed to mercy, it encapsulates the fiery passion of love. What lover would not move heaven and earth to defend their beloved? What spouse would not exert every ounce of energy to guard their spouse from real and present harm? What parent would spare any anger against a real and present danger to their child? Ferocious love looks like judgment and shows compassion to the victim of a crime.
The lawyer who works to gain wages lost through injustice seems unloving to the employer but like a lover to the employee. The officer who busts a prostitution ring seems unloving to the dealer and clients but like a lover to the workers. A God who punishes all kinds of evil seems unloving to criminals but like a lover to victims.
Turning to Christ, the hell fires that should have burned up the crimes of Christians scorched the Son of God. The judgment tasted by Sodom and Gomorrah fell on the Word made flesh on the cross. When we look at the cross that gives freedom to sinners, we ought to look at the wounds in His hands and feet and see the terror of our sin. The cross should horrify us to guard our lives from further injustice, for God’s judgment exemplifies His great love toward His creation and especially toward His people.
As you look at the scary and creepy around you this week, see that those things pale in comparison to the horrors of sin around you and within you. What ghoulish things do you hide in your closet still? How might you see those things as judged on the cross of Christ, without place in your life?