John 5:14 surprised me today. "Your sins have been forgiven. Now go and sin no more, or something worse may happen to you" is the general idea of the verse, according to the few versions of the Bible I checked.
I guess it startled me, because the words sounded like abit of a threat. It reminds me of that picture of the bearded old man, standing on the clouds, wielding lightning bolts to toss down at people who displease him. The words seem imbued with the ideas of condemnation and judgment, which didn't seem right to me at first.
But a little further reflection reminded me that this was the pattern God showed the Israelites throughout much of their history, and that this is the basic pattern of the world - sin leads to destruction, be it in this life or the next. I guess that the same phrase could be spoken with much love and tenderness, and that it's only my preconceived cultural references which interprets it as threatening. That something worse may eventually happen to him is not the work of a vindictive deity, but a consequence of God standing by his own words and the system that he set up to redeem a pure people for himself.
I guess I got caught up in the worldly mindset of instinctively rejecting everything to do with the ideas of condemnation and judgment as ungodly. Just because we don't practice it doesn't mean we can't speak about it.
