God The Punisher Series

So hello, good to see you, and welcome to this place that we call DCC. We want to give a special shout and welcome to anyone who is back from Easter last week and any brand new friends here checking us out for the very first time today too. If you are new you need to know that all of your story is safe and welcome here regardless of how it reads, you belong with us regardless of what you believe,and that you are in a room today full of people who have all made mistakes, people who struggle with hurt, pain, guilt, and shame, people who have parts of their lives and stories that they wish they could erase, delete, change and do-over, people who really are just like you. We hope that you have already experienced that and that you want to come back and do this again with us real soon.

So, we are starting a brand new series today called Distortion, a series designed to help all of us clear up all the confusion that we tend to have about God. In my almost 54 years in church now, what I have discovered is this. There may be just as much confusion or distortion about who God really is inside as there is outside the church. I hear comments all the time that leave me scratching my head, comments from people who have been Jesus followers for years, from pastors, where I just walk away and go, nope God’s not like that. About 7 or 8 year ago a pretty major voice in the Christian world publicly offered his opinion that God steered a tornado directly toward a Lutheran Church because of their various beliefs. I just shook my head, nope God’s not like that. Okay, so if that’s not true, what is God really like? We are doing this series to try to help all of us with that question. So, we are going to talk about how God is not political, he’s not Republican or Democrat, He is not stoic or uncaring, He’s not boring or lame, He’s not checked out or disengaged, and He’s not homophobic. That’s where we are headed over the next six weeks starting today with this image we have of God as the punisher.

ILLUST> If you are not familiar with “the punisher” let me help you with that. When we mention the punisher today a specific image comes to mind for many of us, here it is, an image that has become a real popular over the past several years, it’s on hats, and shirts, it is hard to drive around for any length of time and not see it show up as a decal on a car. It was in the book and the movie American Sniper, the story of Navy Seal Sniper Chris Kyle. His unit called themselves the punishers, labeled all their gear with the image and took the image with them to the battlefield in Iraq. It’s an image that originally appeared on the chest of the original punisher in 1974 in a Spider-Man comic book. The original punisher was a character whose mission was fighting evil by all means necessary. He was extremely angry, raging, totally ticked off and ready to use pain, violence, destruction and murder to stomp out evil and make things right.

See, I am not so sure that in one way or another that’s too far off how a lot of us see God. I get it. It’s really not too hard for any of us to get there or land there, especially when we spend any time at all in the first two thirds of this book. The truth is that if we start at the beginning of this book it doesn’t take any of us very long to begin to see God as somewhat of a punisher who is angry about evil and sin. Standing on that alone it’s not too difficult to jump to this conclusion. I’m a sinner, God is angry with me, and determined to punish me. I lived in that space for the vast majority of my life. My guess is that I am not alone. So let’s just jump into this, talk about it and see.

If you brought a Bible we are going to be three different places today Isaiah, Hosea, and landing the plane toward the end of the Bible in 1 John. We are going to start in Isaiah today. If you would like a Bible to follow along in but don’t have one, they are on the back tables. Or you can just hit our app, the YouVersion app, or you can just read along with me off of the screens. It might be easiest to follow on the screens or on our app today because we are going to jump around quite a bit. Okay, so here we go, Isaiah chapter 55 starting with verse 8…