Isaiah 3
See now, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support, v1
The first LORD is a translation of the Hebrew Adonai meaning Master and Owner. The second LORD is a translation of the Hebrew Yahweh, it is the personal name of God. Yahweh, the Adonai Almighty. God is saying you had better repent for I am not only the Master, the one who is in control of everything, but I am the personal One. He is far off and up close. He is above and below. A God of anger and a God of love. Is that possible?
Only those who have witnessed evil can truly understand how these two names can sit together.
Miroslav Volf, a Christian theologian from Croatia, used to reject the concept of God’s wrath. In his book, Free of Charge, Volf reveals his new understanding of the necessity of God’s wrath: “My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love”.
We need to carry in our faith the Almighty and the Personal God. The One who carries out judgment in His wrath and One who laid His life down for us.
Missions Paul 