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Questions Week 15, Day 2

by David Joynt on August 07, 2017


MATTHEW 23


We rightly worry in our flawed human justice system about penalties imposed but undeserved. Yet I wonder about why modern sensibilities seem so aghast at Jesus’ teaching about hell. Is it a secret worry that God will be unjust? Is it connected to our strange obsession with being “nonjudgemental” as if the suspension or moral reason was a moral virtue? We should never write people off, of course, or use criticism to elevate ourselves by denigrating others. Yesterday’s scripture emphasized this. But God is the source of all life and all moral reality. Only he has the capacity to understand the inner workings of every human soul.

Do we really want a universe where love ignores injustice and violence and exploitation? A God who accepted all this would be like a bad parent that blithely allowed one child to terrorize another, without consequence.


Read Jesus’ criticism of exploitive leaders in Matthew 23 and notice the references to punishment in verses 15 and 23.




FAMILY TIME— What are the purposes of family discipline? Reform? Safety? Protection? Obedience?

Tags: discipline, obedience

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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