God's Divine Retribution.
Divine retribution is supernatural punishment, or an act of wrath, towards a person, a group of people, or everyone by a deity in response to some action. Many cultures have a story about how a deity exacted punishment upon previous inhabitants of their land, causing their doom.
Description[]
Divine retribution is found in many cultures with the most prominent being a great flood destroying all of humanity, as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hindu Vedas, or Genesis, leaving one principal 'chosen' survivor. In the first example, it is Utnapishtim, and in the last example Noah.
The Bible refers to divine retribution as, in most cases, being delayed or "treasured up" to a future time. Sight of God's supernatural works and retribution would militate against faith in God's Word. The Christian apologist William Lane Craig says, that in Paul’s view, God’s properties, his eternal power and deity, are clearly revealed in creation, so that people who fail to believe in an eternal, powerful creator of the world are without excuse. Indeed, Paul says that they actually do know that God exists, but they suppress this truth because of their unrighteousness.
Overview[]
Other examples in Hebrew religious literature include the dispersion of the builders of the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Ten Plagues visited upon the ancient Egyptians for persecuting the children of Israel. Similarly, in Greek mythology, the goddess Hera often became enraged when her husband, Zeus, would impregnate mortal women, and would exact divine retribution on the children born of such affairs. In some versions of the myth, Medusa was turned into her monstrous form as divine retribution for her vanity by; in others it was a punishment for being raped by Poseidon. in the temple of Athena.
Zeus has been known to punish ungodly mortals, usually by condemning them to the realm of Tartarus. These include: Lycaon (for cannibalism, human-sacrifice and killing guests in his home), Sisyphus (for avoiding death and mocking the gods), Tantalus (for feeding the gods his own son), and Ixion (who tried to have a relationship with the goddess Hera while visiting Mount Olympus, and later boasted about bedding her as well as describing secrets of the gods).