Does Joel see God punishing Israel’s sin through the natural disasters such as the locust plague described in chapters 1 and 2? Perhaps (he has the right), but God likely has multiple purposes in a disaster. Whether we are sinful or righteous, our response to disaster ought to be the same: turn to Yahweh.
God’s love for us is unreasonable – it is not based on reasons but merely on God’s sovereign decision. The resurrection of Jesus is also unreasonable in that it lies beyond the realm of reason either to prove or disprove. This is why it is the perfect demonstration of God’s unreasonable love. It is also why our unreasonable faith in the resurrection is the perfect human response to God’s unreasonable love.
The biblical Book of Job addresses the problem of suffering in a way that is superior to the way moderns tend to talk about it in three ways: (1) it never questions God’s sovereignty; (2) it recognizes our human tendency to assume that God’s righteous judgments will be intelligible and relatively immediate; (3) it emphasizes the role of dialogue (including especially dialogue with God) as the path of resolution for the problem of suffering.
The biblical concept of “holiness” is not simply “doing good”, but it is the context that defines what is good and infuses our doing good with divine significance. The relationship between holiness and what the world sees as “good” is complex: sometimes they coincide, sometimes they are askew, and sometimes they come directly into conflict.
