to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour
    and the day of vengeance of our God,

The gospel, it has been said, is ‘bad news before it is good news.’

In his commentary on Isaiah, Barry Webb points out that the full treatment of ”the day of vengeance” is held over until chapter 63:1-6. Chapter 61 concentrates on the time of ”favour”, and most of all on the Person who brings it in. It is also worthy of note that when Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue at Nazareth, He concluded His words with ”to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” This was not because He didn’t believe in judgment. He spoke about it frequently in other parts of the gospels. But I believe it was because He knew that ”the day” of judgment lay in the future.

However, a balanced communication of the gospel will include both the good news of grace, and the bad news of judgment. If we try to remove the subject of God’s wrath from Scripture, we will disembowel it. I read one author who suggested that maybe our loss of confidence in the good news is linked to a lack of conviction about the bad news. But the Bible shows that there is a heaven to gain and a Hell to shun. Human distaste for the idea does not render it false.

I was in a church recently where the preacher emphasised that nothing can separate a believer from God’s love. ‘But’, he added, ‘to be separated from God is another matter altogether, and it is a terrible thing.’