It must be a fearful thing for impenitent sinners to fall into the hands of the Living God, when we remember the character of God as revealed in His judgments of old. Taking the Scriptures as our guide, we see in them a revelation of God differing very widely from that which is so current now-a-days. Let me remind you that ever since the day when Adam fell, the whole of the human race, with but two exceptions, have been subjected to the pains of sickness and death. If you would behold the severity of the God who judges all the earth, you have only to remember that this whole world has been for ages a vast burying-place.
Men whine out their abhorrence of God's justice, and scout the idea of future punishment with the question – "Would a father do thus and thus with his children?" The question needs no other reply than fact: all men die! When a father suffer his children to pine in sickness and die, when it was in his power to prevent it?
Since then, the great God evidently permits such pain, and even death to happen to his creatures, he is evidently not father merely, but something more.
To ungodly men Jehovah reveals himself in the light of a judge: and a judge, too, whose stern severity has brought to pass the death sentence for all men and women. This is our God of love. But not the newly-devised God who is love and love alone.