Does God Enjoy Punishing People?

Deuteronomy 28 lists curses so severe that many readers reach a quick conclusion: a God who threatens this must want to do it. This guide tests that conclusion, and it does not hold. A severe warning shows that the stakes are real and that God will enforce his covenant. It does not show that God wants the disaster. Scripture also answers the question of God’s desire in God’s own voice, and the answer is no. You can work through this guide alone in about an hour, or with a group in one longer session. Keep a Bible open to Deuteronomy 28-30, Ezekiel 18 and Lamentations 3, and have a sheet of paper ready for the exercise near the end.

Write the argument down first

Hard questions get muddy when no one states them plainly. So begin by putting the skeptic’s case in its strongest form, as a short chain of claims.

1. In Deuteronomy 28, God threatens Israel with disease, famine, defeat in war and exile if they break the covenant.
2. Anyone who threatens suffering that severe must want to inflict it.
3. So God wants to inflict suffering, which does not fit the God revealed in Jesus.

The first claim is simply true. Anyone can check it by reading the chapter. The whole argument rests on the second claim, and that claim is about something you cannot see directly. It infers what God wants, an inner desire, from the words he uses.

Before testing it, pin down what want could mean here. At least three things are possible. Someone might want an outcome for its own sake, the way a person wants a good meal. Someone might be willing to bring an outcome about without desiring it, the way a surgeon is willing to amputate. Or someone might approve of justice being done while hating the harm that made justice necessary. The skeptic’s conclusion needs the first meaning. Keep these three apart as you read.

Observation. Read Deuteronomy 28:1-14, then 28:15-68. Note roughly how long each section is. Then write one sentence on what each section is asking Israel to do. Finally read Deuteronomy 30:19 and ask what the whole speech wants its hearers to choose.

Test the second premise against ordinary cases

A general rule like premise two can be tested by looking for a case where severe warning and real desire come apart. If one clear case exists, the rule fails as a rule.

Dr. Esau McCaulley, who wrote a significant portion of his dissertation on Deuteronomy 28 to 30, offers such a case. He explains that in covenant speech of this kind, “the way this rhetoric worked was you made it seem so bad if you disobeyed that nobody would disobey.” He compares it to parents warning a child that they will lose everything they love and sit in the corner forever. “The parent isn’t actually gonna put you in the corner forever,” he says.

Follow the logic. In a deterrent, the vividness of the warning serves the speaker’s goal, and the goal is that the warning never has to be used. The harder a speaker works to describe a disaster, the stronger the evidence that the speaker wants it avoided. So premise two is false as a general rule. Severity can come from a desire to prevent.

The counterexample has a limit, and a careful reader should name it. A parent’s threat is exaggeration. Israel’s exile actually happened. So the parent case proves that severity and desire can separate. It does not prove the curses were empty. A closer comparison might be a doctor who describes in grim detail what will happen if a patient stops treatment, and whose description later comes true. The doctor did not want that outcome. The doctor wanted the patient to listen.

The verse that seems to grant the premise

The skeptic has a stronger move available. Deuteronomy 28:63 does not only threaten. It speaks of feeling. The KJV reads: “And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.” Some modern translations make the wording stronger still, rendering it as God finding great pleasure in destroying them. Here, the skeptic says, the text itself supplies the desire.

This objection deserves a real answer. Christian interpreters usually offer some combination of three readings.

• The verse belongs to the warning. Its job inside the speech is to remove any hope that God would enforce the covenant halfheartedly. The parallel with blessing says God will be as fully committed to the consequences as he was to the gifts.
• The object of the rejoicing matters. Taking satisfaction in justice being done differs from enjoying the suffering it involves.
• Scripture speaks of God’s emotions in human terms. On this reading, any single description of God’s feeling should be weighed alongside what Scripture says elsewhere when it addresses his desire directly.

Dr. Jo Vitale, an Old Testament scholar, works through the second reading from her own struggle with the word pleasure. As a teenager she asked, “if he has to dispense justice, why shouldn’t he hate doing it?” Her thinking changed when she watched a close friend suffer a grave wrong and saw the person responsible never held to account. Her love for her friend made her long for justice. She points out that people already feel this when a court finally gets a case right: “We don’t celebrate the crime, we don’t celebrate the wrongdoing.”

Vitale does not deny the feeling the verse describes. She affirms “there is a sense of righteous anger and a rightness when God dispenses his justice and brings it about.” But she locates that rightness in justice, and she separates it from appetite: “It’s not that God wants people to go wrong, it’s not that he wants to pour out judgment”. In the terms of this guide, she is claiming the third meaning of want and denying the first. The skeptic’s conclusion needs the first.

Let God answer the question about his desire

An inference about someone’s desire carries less weight than that person’s direct statement about it. Scripture contains such a statement, and it is addressed to people who were living inside the curses Deuteronomy described. Ezekiel prophesied among the exiles. Ezekiel 18:23 reads: “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” The chapter closes the same way in Ezekiel 18:32: “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.”

Vitale, citing this chapter, says simply, “That’s his heart.” McCaulley reaches the same point from the shape of Israel’s history. Generation after generation, God sends prophets pleading with the people to turn before the consequences arrive. McCaulley sums up the message running through those books in one line: “And God is saying, my heart is not judgment.”

Lamentations adds a third witness. It is poetry, a lament over the ruin of Jerusalem, and should be read as poetry. Even so, its claim is direct. Lamentations 3:33 reads: “For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.” The verse before it says that though God causes grief, he will have compassion. The poet does not deny that God brought the judgment. He denies that God did it gladly.

Put these texts beside Deuteronomy 28:63 and a clear pattern appears. When Scripture warns, it speaks of God’s full commitment to the covenant. When Scripture asks what God desires, it answers that he desires repentance and life.

Is this the God revealed in Jesus?

The reader’s question has a second half. Even if the argument fails, does the God of Deuteronomy look like Jesus? McCaulley proposes a test for any troubling passage. If an interpretation contradicts the character of God revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the interpretation has gone wrong somewhere. As he puts it, “if you wanna understand what God is like, you need to read the gospels.”

Applied here, the test supports the reading above. John 3:17 says: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” McCaulley calls Jesus “the ultimate display of the fact that God’s end is not judgment.” That fits Ezekiel’s God, who has no pleasure in death and calls people to turn.

The test cuts both ways, though. McCaulley also says that at the end there will be an accounting of human wickedness and that wrongs will be righted. Jesus does not reveal a God with no judgment. He reveals a God whose judgment is real and whose desire is rescue. The continuity runs through both.

What this does not settle

This guide answers one inference. It leaves other questions open. Faithful interpreters still differ on how best to explain the language of rejoicing in Deuteronomy 28:63 next to Ezekiel’s language of no pleasure, and the three readings above can be weighted differently. The conquest accounts raise their own hard questions, and so does the shape of final judgment. Christians hold a range of views on those, and this study does not rule on them.

What the evidence does support is narrower and firmer. The step from “God warns of terrible judgment” to “God delights in terrible judgment” does not follow, and Scripture directly denies its conclusion.

A practice: rebuild the argument

This exercise takes about twenty minutes. It works alone, and it works especially well in pairs.

1. Copy the three-step argument from the start of this guide onto your paper.
2. Beside each step, write true, false or uncertain, and list the verse that most affects your judgment.
3. Try to repair premise two. Write the strongest version you can that survives the parent and doctor cases. For example: anyone who rejoices while carrying out a punishment must want the suffering itself.
4. Test your repaired premise against Deuteronomy 28:63, Ezekiel 18:23 and Lamentations 3:33. Does it still hold?
5. Finish with one sentence: I would conclude that God enjoys punishing people if Scripture showed… Then check whether Deuteronomy 27-30 and the prophets actually look like what you wrote.

In a group, have one person in each pair argue the skeptic’s side as fairly and strongly as possible while the other responds. Then switch. The goal is to restate the other view well enough that its holder would accept your summary.

If you are leading, be aware that some people come to this question carrying memories of harsh threats from a parent or a church. Let anyone share that history or keep it private. Nobody should be asked to defend their experience. The exercise examines an argument, not a person.

Questions for discussion

1. Before this study, which step of the argument seemed strongest to you? Has that changed, and what changed it?
2. Does a warning lose any moral seriousness if the speaker hopes it will never be carried out? Why or why not?
3. Vitale distinguishes celebrating justice from celebrating wrongdoing. Can you think of a time you felt relief when justice was done without wanting anyone to suffer? Where might that experience fail to describe God?
4. Ezekiel 18:23 comes as a question. Why might God ask rather than simply state, and what answer does the second half of the verse expect?
5. If Lamentations 3:33 is true, what does it suggest about how God relates to the judgments he does carry out?
6. McCaulley reads troubling passages through the character of Jesus. What does that method protect against? Could it ever be used to erase what a hard passage actually says?

The next time a passage seems to expose an appetite in God, write the argument out and find the premise doing the work. Then ask whether the text itself grants that premise, or whether you supplied it.