It doesn’t appear that way to me. Of course, one can interpret it that way if one is used to blaming God for death and disaster. I’ve heard people in our day blaming God for sending earthquakes and tsunamis to punish people for their wrong doing. If that were so, why would God punish those particular people and not others who were just as bad or worse? Job’s three friends thought God was punishing him for wrongdoing. But they were mistaken.
Some say that God was punishing the Jews by bringing the holocaust upon them. What a cruel blow that is, to most Jewish people!
I think Ananias and Sapphira may have died from fear at the words of Peter. They realized that Peter must have known by revelation that they had kept back part of the proceeds of their land sale.
In the parable, the king killed the murderers of the servants the king sent. This doesn’t imply that God is going to kill. Not every detail of a parable corresponds to the reality it typifies.
It was the Romans who destroyed Jerusalem and caused starvation to those who had not fled. Through Jesus, the destruction of Jerusalem was predicted. Why do you think that God did it?
Certainly I see violence in it. The whole thing is a vision which the writer John saw. What the vision means is a matter of much debate.
The flood story is found in many cultures, and is essentially the same. A man was told by God to make a large boat and save himself and his family together as well as animals. I think it was a worldwide flood and not merely a local one. Clearly Moses who wrote Genesis believed that God had caused the flood. But did He cause it? Or did He merely predict it and instruct Noah to save his family and the animals?
That’s what this discussion is all about—the age-old problem of evil. The fact that God usually does not intervene does not imply that God has restained Himself for a deeper reason. That attempt to explain God’s non-intervention is precisely what turns so many against God. “Why did you do this to me, God? Why was my little girl raped and murdered? If you did this for a deeper purpose, why don’t you tell me what that purpose is? And couldn’t you have brought about it without allowing this to happen to my little girl?”
Those who see matters as I do, would never ask God such questions, for they would know that God had nothing to do with it.
Do you have a better answer that DOES wash? Every other answer of which I am aware makes God out to be a villain, though those who hold those other answers won’t admit it.
No one’s free will is ever violated; it can’t be. Everyone has the ability to choose all the time. There are conditions in which people cannot carry out their choices. Perhaps that’s what you mean. But God is not responsible for those conditions; usually evil people are responsible, although sometimes “normal” people also do evil deeds on a whim.
Who are you addressing here, God, or the violators of the victims?
God allows the freewill of everyone. The violators violate their victims’ freedom of action, but as long as the victims live and are conscious, they have the ability to choose.