mdemchsak

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? (Ex 15:11)

 Father, You are incomprehensible. No other god, no other person can compare. You surpass the nations, and You exceed the boundaries of our knowledge. Truly, You are worthy.

Over the past months, this blog has discussed many attributes of God — love, justice, wrath, mercy, omniscience, omnipotence, Trinity, and more.   After reading these descriptions, two things ought to strike us. First, God has revealed a great deal about Himself. Second, God has not revealed everything. He is far bigger and greater than what He has revealed. The past blogs briefly touch only a smattering of things God has revealed, but the hidden attributes of God may far exceed the revealed ones, and the infinite nature of the revealed ones makes them fathomless. There is much more to God than even the angels can tell.

Now, after reading about these attributes of God, you may be tempted to separate them in your mind and possibly even make them fight each other. You know, how can a loving God send someone to hell? How can God forgive and show justice? How can God be all-knowing and almighty and allow evil? These sorts of questions tend to compartmentalize God’s character, as if God’s justice and mercy were somehow separate entities. This kind of thinking is a mistake. God is not the sum of His attributes. Let me try to illustrate.

In basketball sometimes a team of five good players can beat a team of five “superstars.” The good players play well together as a team while the “superstars” all wish to remain superstars. When put together, the good players add up to more than the superstars. Coaches call this chemistry. The attributes of God have a kind of chemistry, but it is of a different sort. It is certainly true that God is greater than the sum of His attributes. But to be correct, we would have to say that there can be no such thing as the sum of His attributes, for the attributes are not, properly speaking, parts of God which can be put together. They are more like a whole that radiates from God. Of course, we cannot be perfectly precise by using natural examples, but if you think of the relationship between God and His attributes more like that of the sun and its attributes, you will be closer to the truth. The attributes of God are the spiritual characteristics that flow from God. He is not what they add up to be. Rather, they are what He is. They are simply God radiating. They are God being Himself just as light, heat and energy are nothing more than the sun being itself. And when the sun is being itself, the light, heat and energy come as a package. Scientists may talk about light, heat, and energy separately to help us understand something about them and about the sun, but in real life, they are a whole. Something like that is true of God. His attributes exist as a unity. His omnipotence is holy, His justice omnipresent, His love infinite and His infinity loving. His forgiveness never contradicts His justice; His wrath never works against His love. When God acts, He never sets aside one aspect of His character in favor of another. Each of His actions is purely God being God in a specific circumstance. All His deeds are holy, gracious, just and loving all in one. Sometimes circumstances may highlight one aspect just as summer in Alaska highlights the light above the heat of the sun, but the other attributes are still present.

Secondly, God’s attributes are not high-octane versions of ours. God is not a human taken to infinity. He is certainly quantitatively superior to us, but He is also qualitatively superior to us. God is a different sort of Being from us. Even in heaven, when we are at our best, there shall be only one God. We shall then be perfect humans, but the canyon between a perfect human and God is a colossal leap indeed. This qualitative difference does not deny that we are created in His image. We can still be like Him in limited ways. Though His love is of a different sort from ours, our love can give a faint picture of His. It is like His in some ways, yet never completely. He is still qualitatively superior and will forever be different from us. That is what holy means.

Think of it this way. The anatomy of a fruit fly and that of a human may be alike in certain respects, yet who would deny that there is a vast qualitative difference between the two. We are not bigger and better fruit flies. And yet we might actually learn something about humans by studying fruit flies. So it is with God. We might learn something about God by looking at human love or human morality, but God is not just a bigger version of us.

We are, thus, faced with a God who astounds us, a God more overwhelming than a million suns, yet with depths deeper than those in our own impenetrable hearts. We cannot probe Him. He is God. One test for knowing whether our thoughts of God may be off target is to look at whether God ever stumps us. If we allow for no mysteries because we cannot understand them, if we demand that everything about God fit into our brains, if we never allow God to surprise us, we have the wrong ideas about God. Of course, being surprised and stumped is no guarantee of truth, but if we have God in a box, we have something more like Zeus than God.

God is love. (I Jn 4:8)

 ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. (Mk 10:7-8)

 Paul, an apostle — not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead … (Gal 1:1)

God, I praise you not just because you are beyond my understanding but because your mystery helps me understand other mysteries.

We’ve been talking about the Trinity — the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. All three are unique persons, and all three are one God. I have tried to give some help understanding the Trinity, but today I want to talk about how the Trinity helps us understand other aspects of Christian theology.  The Trinity may be a mystery, but it is a mystery that has explanatory power.

Let’s begin with love.  Scripture says that God is love (I Jn 4:7-8), but love requires more than one person. I can love my wife and kids. I can love my friends. I can even love my enemies. But I cannot love a void. One person living alone cannot be love. In order to love, he needs someone to love. But God is love from eternity. He did not just begin loving when He created the human race. God does not need the creation in order to love. Rather, His love for you and me is rooted in His very nature. The Father loves the Son from eternity, and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit the same. Love is the nature of a Trinitarian God in a way that it cannot be with Allah.

Similarly, the Trinity explains why God is relational, for He is so by nature. Relationship is grounded in His Trinitarian character. God has never been lonely. He never sat in the sky moping for the right person to come along. He did not create people because He needed relationship. He had perfect relationship from eternity. He did not need us, but He did want us. In addition, our human desire for relationship finds its source in the nature of God. The Trinity provides the foundation for the human hunger for meaningful relationships. We enjoy relationship because God does, and He made us in His image.

The Trinity models the Biblical concept of equality with submission. Jesus considered Himself equal with God (Jn 10:30; 14:9). Yet Jesus delighted to do the will of His Father (Jn 4:34; 6:38; Heb 10:5-9). Normally, we think that equality and submission cannot coexist, but Biblically, they are sometimes friends. On Earth, Jesus willingly submitted to His Father, yet His submission was not a statement of inequality but an expression of His love, and a picture of His role. His submission does not deny His equality with the Father. This fact sheds much light on what God says about marriage, for Scripture clearly says that men and women are equal in God’s sight (Gen 1:27; Gal 3:28), yet Scripture also calls wives to submit to the leadership of their husbands (Eph 5:22-4; Col 3:18; I Pet 4:1-6). If you are not a Christian, then the comparison of the Trinity to a marriage may make no sense to you. You may say that they both are bunk. But if you are a Christian, then you accept the equality of the Father and the Son, and you also accept the submission of the Son to the Father. And you know that the submission and the equality stand together. Submission does not nullify equality.  You accept this. Well. If you can accept this with the Trinity, why can’t you accept the same thing within marriage? Submission within marriage is not what most Western people think it is.

The Trinity models Biblical marriage. When a man and woman marry, are they two or are they one? Of course, when you count heads, you see two, but to God they are one flesh (Gen 2:24). How can this be? Is “one flesh” just a metaphor for sex? Sex is part of it, but it is so much more. Paul says that when a man loves his wife, he loves his own body (Eph 5:28-31), and this body-love is more than just sex. It is that a husband and wife are one in a sense in which Scripture can say that she is part of his own body. When a man loves his wife, he actually loves himself. The Trinity helps illustrate this, for just as God is three distinct persons in one God, so is a marriage two distinct persons in one flesh.

Finally, the Trinity helps explain how God can die for our sins and yet remain alive. When Jesus died on the Cross, God died. Consequently, His death becomes a punishment that pays infinitely. Yet the Father did not die, so in that sense, God did not die. The Father raised Jesus from the dead (Gal 1:1; Eph 1:17, 20). The Trinity helps explain the Resurrection of Jesus.

We could perhaps go on, but what I want you to see is that Biblical theology is interconnected. Your view of God affects your view of many other things like marriage, relationships, and the Resurrection.

Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer; the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.’ (Is 44:6)

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (Jn 1:1; 14)

 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (I Cor 3:16)

 Father, Lord Jesus, and Spirit: I don’t understand, but I praise who you are.

Imagine a world where temperatures don’t exist, where yesterday and today are at the same time, where light needs no source, and where creatures never die. You would not be imagining this universe. But no problem. Stephen Hawking and many other physicists today posit the idea of multiple universes. They speculate that at least one and perhaps many other universes reside outside our own, and one of the central aspects of their theories is that these universes do not operate under the same laws of physics as our universe. In other words, a thousand years may be like a day, light may have no physical source, and, for all we know, creatures may live forever. I find such physics ironic because, in one sense, it says what Christians have been saying for thousands of years. There is another world out there, a different type of world from what we see and touch, but just as real nonetheless. Now I am not here to talk about alternate universes, but I bring them up because I think they may help us with a bit of theology about God.

Sometimes, when we talk about God, we want Him to fit inside the universe we live in. This desire is understandable, for this universe is the experience we know, so we may, thus, struggle with ideas like God being three persons but one God. In fact, Christians often avoid discussing the Trinity altogether because they can’t exactly explain it. They’re sort of embarrassed. “Um … Well … you see … three people make up one God … and …” The fact of the matter is that the Trinity, on the surface at least, doesn’t seem to fit the known laws of physics on Earth. But this is precisely where Stephen Hawking might be of some help. You see, God isn’t from this universe, and if Hawking is correct, then God is not bound by the same laws of physics that bind you and me. Indeed, in a spiritual world, perhaps personalities can fit together differently than they do here. In that world, perhaps one being can be three persons. In that world, perhaps the concept of a Trinity is not so hard to understand. In fact, it might be the norm. If we were to go to that world, we might find that we would retain our unique individuality and yet also be swallowed up in the glory of God.  At the same time.

We must understand that God is bigger than we are and that He is not from here. In our current experience we live in four observable dimensions. The first three are length, width, and height — what we call space. The fourth is time. Virtually everything we see can be measured in those four dimensions, and as long as something fits neatly within those dimensions, we are OK with it. We can see it. But what if we encountered a being of twenty dimensions, a hundred dimensions, or infinite dimensions. We would then be out of our league. We would be like a three-year-old girl trying to understand calculus. The Trinity is this sort of thing. It involves dimensions beyond our normal experience. It is spiritual calculus, but we are spiritual infants. The reason we have difficulty grasping the Trinity is that we are dealing with God. The Trinity is God. And when you fit God inside your brain, you no longer have God.

When God revealed Himself as a Trinity, He did not mean us to analyze and discuss it. He meant us to marvel in it and enjoy Him. So enjoy the Father. Enjoy the Son. And Enjoy the Spirit … three in one.

There is…one Spirit…one Lord…one God and Father of all. (Eph 4:4-6)

 … baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit … (Mt 28:19)

 I am God, and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me. (Is 46:9)

 I and the Father are one. (Jn 10:30)

 Now the Lord is the Spirit (II Cor 3:17)

 …which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (II Cor 3:18)

Lord Jesus and Precious Holy Spirit, we rightly give you praise and worship. We offer you the same allegiance due the Father, knowing that our worship of you and prayers to you are simultaneously given to the Father, for in your triune nature there is no competition. Praise be to your holy name.

I recall talking to some Chinese Christians about Christmas. They told me that people in China today celebrate Christmas. They shop, give presents, enjoy lights, and know all about Santa Claus.

“What about Jesus?” I remember asking.

“No. Most people don’t know that part of Christmas.”

Suffice it to say that few people in China know about Christmas, for if you talk about Christmas but never talk about Jesus, you have missed Christmas. In Christian theology, something like this is true of God, for we can talk about many attributes of God, but if we never get to the Trinity, we miss God. Today we will talk about the Trinity.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity takes us on a highway that ascends into the clouds. It gives us revealed facts that, when put together, do not seem to fit our limited understanding. To someone with faith, this is not insurmountable, for the doctrine is not irrational. But to someone without faith, the cloud is evidence that the road is false. To this person no amount of clarity would bring faith. If the cloud could be removed, the faithless would remain faithless and the faithful faithful. No one’s eternal destiny would improve if only God were a bit clearer. Thus, we must take God as He has revealed Himself; and if the highway goes into the clouds, we must fight all efforts to detour it into the valley.

The doctrine of the Trinity consists of several truths of Scripture put together much as our view of the solar system comprises many observed facts put together. The first truth about God is that He is One.  “I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me,” Isaiah said.  The Bible is clear. There are not two or three or a hundred or thirty million gods. There is only one, and He has no equal. Religions that speak of multiple gods are, thus, by definition, idolatrous. Some may think it harsh for me to say that, but the idea is not mine. It is God’s. The Scriptures constantly decry the worship of other gods. In fact, God continually describes it as spiritual adultery. Just as a married woman has only one husband, so did God make us for only one God — Himself.  To chase after another is unthinkable. There is only one God.

But the oneness of God means something else as well. It means that God is one. He is a unity. He is undivided. We can never have a part of God as we can have a part of our sandwich, for God cannot be partitioned. The entirety of God is always present everywhere. This oneness of God does not seem to cause people difficulties. But the next teachings do.

The Scriptures plainly deal with the identity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit and treat both as equal to the Father.   Jesus commands us to baptize in the name of all three. Scripture refers to all three as Lord. It is perfectly appropriate for us to pray to and worship all three as God.[1] They are all divine, but the Scriptures never intend the divinity of Christ and the Spirit to mean that there are three gods. All three — Father, Son and Spirit — are simultaneously and completely God. They are not parts of God. They are not phases of God. They are not aspects of God. They are fully and completely … God. The one and only God, by definition, consists of three distinct persons. If I could describe it as a math equation (crazy right?), it might be something like this:  1God = 3persons.  Yet those persons are so united that we cannot divide God into three parts. These persons are distinct but one. Nothing on earth is fully analogous to their relationship. For on earth, when things are put together they either form a part of the whole (like a yolk, a white, and a shell) or they lose their identity when integrated into the whole (like adding cream and sugar to coffee). We know nothing that remains uniquely distinct AND completely whole when combined.

At this point we are in the clouds and are invited not to analyze but to worship. God’s complexity towers over us. We are like computers unable to process data for which we have no known program. Our software cannot handle a task this sophisticated. Here lies the difference between the Christian and nonChristian views of the Trinity. The unbeliever sees the doctrine as contradiction; the believer sees it as mystery, which we do not now have the capacity to fully understand. The one requires the data to fit the software; the other allows the data to outstrip the software. The Christian expects God to be perplexing, and, in that sense, the Trinity does not surprise us. But, of course, in another sense it shocks us. The Trinity is not at all the sort of God anyone would ever invent. Invented gods are far more simplistic. The Trinity is God pulling back the curtain just a wee bit and giving us a slight view of something we cannot fully grasp now. But the important thing is not to explain the Trinity but to bow before the Unexplainable. Be still and contemplate the Triune One. Worship Him as Father, worship Him as Son, worship Him as Spirit.

[1] I will give more details in future blogs when I discuss Jesus and the Spirit more fully.

You received the Spirit of sonship, and by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” (Rm 8:15)

You are my Father, my Daddy, my Papa. You love me and care for me.  You make yourself known and call me to commune with you. Grant to me a continual and abiding intimacy with you. Deepen our relationship and let it be said in heaven and on earth that here is one who knows God.

Can you know a computer? How about a factory? Or a theory? Or a process? Of course, the answer is yes. We can know all sorts of things, but knowledge does come in different varieties. It is one thing to know a tree and quite another to know a woman. Personhood adds a dimension to knowledge. When I speak of knowing my daughter Charissa, I am saying something quite different than when I speak of knowing engineering. My knowledge of Charissa has a personal element to it that engineering will never have. That’s because Charissa is a person, and we can know people in a deeper, richer way than we can know curried rice or the World Cup. Personality enriches knowledge. Having said that, I do not mean that we know all people the same. I do not know my cousins the same way I know Charissa, and I do not know the chancellor of Germany the same way I know my cousins. I do not have the same level of intimacy with all people. But because people are people, if the president of Indonesia were in my family, I could know him as well as I know my daughter. In fact, I have no doubt that some people know him that way now.

When we discuss the attributes of God, it is sometimes easy to get philosophical, but God is not a philosophy. He is a person. God is not the Watchmaker or the Grand Idea or the Great-Spirit-in-the-Sky. He is not a detached force, He is not nature, and He is not the unfeeling ground of all being. He is a distinct person who thinks, feels and wills. His nature is personal just as your dad’s nature is personal. He, thus, desires personal relationship, and He has taken great steps to make Himself known. He loves us and desires our love in return. If it were possible to add wonder to infinity, this truth would do so. The unchanging, infinite, sovereign creator of the universe wants you to know and love Him. He came to the garden and walked with the first pair; He likened Himself to a husband (Hos), a father (Mt 6:9), a friend (Jn 15:15). If we truly understand what prayer is all about, we know that it requires a personal God. God wants us to communicate with Him, not because He needs to know something but because He wants relationship. The Incarnation was a relational move. God became man because God wanted to reconcile the world to Himself (II Cor 5:18-19). God became man because God wanted a face to face. God became man because God wanted to restore communion. God is our Abba, our Father, our Daddy. He wants us to be family, not just observers or workers.

I recall a speaker telling about a time when he had traveled to Israel. He was at the airport and was passing by the place where plane passengers filtered out into the public. Two young children, maybe four and six, recognized their dad returning home. They ran up to him shouting “Abba! Abba!” and jumped into his arms. With God, we are those small children, and He delights to see us run to Him and jump into His arms. Indeed, we, too, find no greater joy than to revel in our God.

We long for a close relationship with our Father. We were made for such a relationship because we were made in the image of that Father. We are relational creatures by creation. It is relationship that gives depth and meaning to life, and it is relationship with God that gives ultimacy to life. People who live for their gardens, their research, the next drink or the next deal are to be pitied. They have sacrificed relationship for something that will never deliver. But people who live for their spouse or children are equally to be pitied, for they have sacrificed the ultimate relationship for something lesser. Human relationships are wonderful. Good ones give us a taste of heaven, but they can give only a taste; they were never meant to be the full meal. It is in God that the soul will truly get to feast, and it is His great pleasure to set the table.

from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. (Ps 90:2)

his understanding has no limit. (Ps 147:5)

I am God Almighty. (Gen 17:1)

God of all, we acknowledge the immensity of our limitations in comprehending the infinity of who you are. Help us to quietly adore and to allow you to be who you are.

In high school I worked a couple summers in the mountains of Colorado. I will never forget those summers and the powerful beauty of the Rockies. One night, the guys in my cabin decided it would be fun to sleep on the roof.  We took our blankets up there and froze, and because it was so cold, I didn’t get any sleep. I, thus, spent the entire night gazing at the heavens. The stars on a clear night at 10,000 feet are a spectacle to behold. Galaxies spread out before your eyes, and the quiet beauty penetrates your soul. Deeply. You feel small in the presence of such an expanse. The heavens really do declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1).

That night on the roof, I got a glimpse of a small portion of the universe.  The universe is immense, but the universe is finite. It may be expanding, but it has an end. In fact, if it has no end, it cannot expand. To God, the universe is like an atom, a little neutron, so small you can hardly see it under a microscope. You must understand. God is infinite.

When people encounter infinity, the proper reaction is something like, “Oh my!” We cannot grasp it. It is beyond us. The human mind may be marvelous and mysterious, but it is limited, and one of the great mistakes people make about God is that they think He is limited too. Too often we put our parameters around God. We somehow think He is like us. This thinking disrobes God of His divinity. A god smaller than our minds is not God. The real God has no boundaries.

This does not mean that God’s love can behave unlovingly or His justice be unjust or His holiness sin. Rather, it means that when God acts in a fashion consistent with His nature, His love and justice and all the rest have no bounds. This aspect of God boggles us, for everything around us has boundaries — including the universe. Truly, we do not understand infinity. We may say we do, and we may have a limited idea of what it is, but our idea is at best a nod of the head or more likely a boast like that of an eight-year-old claiming to understand the mysteries of quantum mechanics. The infinity of God is a statement of His incomprehensibility If God is infinite He cannot be fully understood. But the church has often replaced God with a god it can understand. Tozer puts it well:

“The God of Abraham has withdrawn His conscious presence from us, and another God whom our fathers knew not is making himself at home amongst us. This God we have made and because we have made him we can understand him; because we have created him he can never surprise us, never overwhelm us, nor astonish us, nor transcend us.” (p.43).

Infinity should give birth to humility. No matter how great our intelligence, riches, strength or influence, how deep our love, or how pure our life, when we put these things next to God we are empty. The infinity of God precludes our ever coming before Him as if we are the big man on campus. And yet we can humbly take heart, for the love He has for us never ends, the wisdom ordering the events around us is limitless, the power fighting for our good cannot be overcome, and His faithfulness to His people will never be betrayed. We cannot outsin His mercy or outrun His grace. We cannot thwart His justice or defile His purity. We cannot stump or stop infinity. No power or force or plot or deceit can conquer infinite sovereignty. Every attribute of God is colored by His infinitude. His knowledge is infinite.  His riches are infinite.  His power is infinite.  His love, His purity, His faithfulness, His mercy, His justice.  All of these are infinite.

We can never grow tired of God. The beauties and marvels of the Majestic One are forever inexhaustible. After we have worshipped in heaven for a million milleniums, we will still find new aspects of the infinite God to revel in. Eternity in glory will not exhaust the infinitude of God. Behold your God. But truly you cannot behold Him.

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty … (Ex 6-7a)

 O Lord, I have heard the report of you, and your work, O Lord do I fear … in wrath remember mercy. (Hab 3:2)

 Lord, your judgment, your wrath, your mercy and your grace go together. Praise you, for though I do not fully understand, I know enough to worship and to be grateful.

I was teaching American Literature, and my class had just read Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon he preached in 1741. In the sermon, Edwards relates rather vivid pictures of the judgment and wrath of God, and those pictures are what most people remember — a spider hanging by a thread over a fire, a bow and arrow pointed to our heart, a great flood being stopped by the hand of God. I asked my students what they saw in the sermon. Anger, judgment, hell … these were the first answers. I then asked them if they saw any mercy. They had to think, and then one person said, “Yes.”

“Where did you see the mercy?” I asked.

“The spider was not in the fire. The arrow had not been fired. The hand of God was the only thing between the flood and us.” That was the gist of his answer.

“Yes,” I said and then pointed out a statement Edwards makes toward the end of his sermon. He says, “And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners …” He goes on and speaks of the love Christ has for us and how He has washed us from our sins in his own blood.

I then asked my students how Edwards can put the judgment of God and the mercy of God together. “Which is it?” I asked. “Does God judge or show mercy? How can He do both?” The class was silent. I then said, “Could you say that judgment is a prerequisite for mercy?” I saw the wheels turning inside their heads. They had never thought thoughts like this before. Finally two people spoke up simultaneously. One said “yes,” the other “no.” So I told them this parable.

A man robbed a bank. The police arrested him and charged him with robbing the bank, so the man had to go on trial. The jury found him guilty, and he then stood before the judge. A second man in another city did not rob a bank, but he was on the scene of a bank robbery at the time the robber fled, and the police mistakenly arrested him. They charged him with robbing the bank, and he went on trial where the jury found him innocent. He then stood before the judge. In the case of the second man, the judge said, “You are free to go.” In the case of the first man, the normal sentence was up to twenty years, but the judge said, “Well, these circumstances and those … four years.”

So I asked my students, “Which man received mercy?”

“The one who robbed the bank,” they said.

“Why?” I asked. “He got four years, but the other man got nothing.”

“But he was supposed to get more,” they said.

In other words, the presence of judgment gives meaning to mercy. You cannot forgive someone who has done nothing wrong. You can’t lighten a sentence that is already at zero. The mercy of God implies a real and just judgment. Mercy and judgment are woven together. To separate them makes no sense. Edwards understood this, for while judgment and wrath are central to his sermon, so are mercy and grace.

And this is how the Bible talks about God. Jesus spoke about hell more than any other person, yet it is Jesus who willingly gives His life to bring us forgiveness. Judgment and mercy kiss.

We must understand that when we remove the judgment of God, we remove His mercy.  God does not owe us mercy. If he owes us anything, it is judgment, for that is what we have earned. When mercy is an obligation, it ceases to be mercy. God shows us mercy because He wants to. It is a free and gracious expression of His love. We do not have it coming to us, and it is most certainly not a duty.

We must, thus, be careful in our attitude. God’s people cannot imperiously demand mercy, as if God were a store clerk dispensing it and somehow owed them good customer service. Rather we must acknowledge our bankruptcy before God. We must understand that, if the truth be told, hell is what we deserve. The difference in these two approaches to mercy is no light thing. One group knows it has no claim on God’s mercy; the other sees mercy as a right. One group approaches God with a broken heart; the other with a presumptuous heart. One group lets God judge them; the other judges God and thinks He is not such a grand chap unless He conforms to their view of Him. Both groups talk of God’s mercy, but their hearts are as different as heaven and hell. I oversimplify to illustrate, but unless our hearts are like the broken group, we do not know God’s mercy.

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt. (Ps 123:3)

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.  (Ps 51:1)

Lord, hear our prayers.  We come to You broken and hurting.  Heal our wounds.  Apart from Christ, we have sin on our heads.  Forgive our sin.  Thank you for the Cross that heals and brings forgiveness.  And thank you for a mercy that is infinite.

Have you ever seen suffering? Maybe a woman dying from cancer or a man sitting in jail for doing the right thing, or a woman whose husband has left her, or a nation going through famine or war. All these experiences are Earth. Ever since Genesis 3, suffering has been the normal experience of the human race, and sometimes this suffering makes people question God’s goodness. Sometimes people throw the sufferings of Earth into the face of a Christian and say, “Where is your God of love, now?”

Of course, one way to address this accusation is to point out that the human race isn’t exactly the pinnacle of virtue. But today, I don’t have time to flesh out that idea. I want to focus on a different response to suffering.

I want to talk about the mercies of God. The Bible could not be clearer. Our God is a merciful God, and His mercy is tied up with His love. Mercy is an expression of love. Peter said “love covers a multitude of sins.” (I Pet 4:8) In the Scriptures mercy entails a tender-hearted compassion and expresses God’s care for His hurting creatures. When the psalmists frequently cry out for God’s mercy, they are not asking primarily for forgiveness of sins but for relief from oppression. Evil men pursue David to take his life, and he cries out for God to have mercy. An invading nation slaughters God’s people, and they cry out to God for mercy. In drought, in famine, in war, in disease, in danger, in childlessness, and much more, God’s people ask their God to show them mercy. They want a God who has compassion, and this compassion is a common thrust of the Biblical words for mercy. God feels for those who hurt; He has an infinite compassion on them. But this is only one aspect of the mercy of God.

The same words for mercy also often refer to forgiveness. God’s shows His mercy by forgiving our sins. God’s mercy, thus, has this double meaning: 1) God has compassion on His creatures, and 2) God will forgive their darkest sins. This is news beyond our grandest desires. The one who truly grasps it must admit that he cannot grasp it. Sing Christian! God sees your sufferings and will address them! And God forgives!

The reason mercy entails both these meanings is that suffering and sin go together. God’s mercy deals with the entire package, not just one element of the problem. Mercy is holistic. When the people lowered the paralyzed man through the roof, they wanted Jesus to show mercy and heal the man. Jesus responded with mercy and said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” (Mk 2:5) Sometimes we just want relief from our pain when what we really need is a clean soul. We want the depression to go away, but we forget to ask for the sin to go away. We want the tumor to be healed but don’t think about having our sins wiped away. We want relief from the symptom without dealing with the cause. But God’s mercy deals with the cause. Praise God. He heals tumors … and depression. He deals with our pain, and we can trust Him when we hurt. But He wants to do more. His mercy is bigger than we think. He nails our sin to the Cross. He says to us, “Come to me, my child. Be mine.” He gives us Himself and grants us an eternal inheritance that far outweighs our “light and momentary afflictions.” (II Cor 4:17)

That’s right. Make no mistake. Glory is mercy. We often look only to Earth for our mercy, and God does often grant us physical relief or material blessing here and now. When He does so, it is grace. But it is also true that sometimes we suffer many years till we die. Sometimes people suffer at the hands of injustice. When that happens, we must see that our lives are but a nanosecond in the grasp of eternity, and it is the glory of that eternity that makes up for our nanosecond of suffering. God will show His people mercy one way or the other and sometimes both ways.

But the mercies of God are not just in eternity or in the Cross. We must understand that the oxygen we breathe is mercy. The water we drink is mercy. The food we eat is mercy. The home we live in, the sun we enjoy, the rain that brings the crops, the clothes we wear, the friends we have, the car we drive, the music we like, the very life we live — all of this and more is mercy. We take these things for granted and somehow think that sinful creatures deserve pleasures. We don’t deserve any of these things. But we do enjoy them, and we do so because our God shows mercy.

A full treatment of our sufferings and of God’s mercy deserves more space than this blog can give, and I may have raised as many questions for you as I have answered. That’s OK. But we have got to see the mercy in God. It is part of His character, and it is everywhere we look. Now and for eternity.

God is love. (I Jn 4:8)

His love endures forever…His love endures forever…His love endures forever.   (Ps 136)

Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy.   (Mic 7:18)

God on high, can the angels in heaven comprehend your love? Is there any end to it? How can I, full of sin and rebellion against you, quick to ignore your voice and heed my own inclinations ¾ how can I possibly know your love? Yet you love me! Oh glorious fact! And you forgive my ugly sin! Thank you. Oh thank you.

Now we get to talk about the part of God that everyone likes to talk about — the love of God. If you have heard anything about the Christian God, then you know that He is full of love and compassion. And praise Him, for it is true! Last week I said that God’s judgment against sin is on virtually every page of the Bible. This week I say that His boundless love is also on virtually every page of the Bible. Even when God judges, He loves. All the way back in Genesis, God sent a curse for sin but covered Adam and Eve with His sacrifice (Gen 3:8-21). In Noah’s day, God judged the world, but if you were to ask Noah if God loved, he would reply with a thundering “yes,” for he was the recipient of that love. God showed His love to Israel while she was in Egypt. Amazingly, He kept delivering His people during the times of the judges, when they spit in His face again and again. He showed His love to Moses, to Samuel, to Ruth, to Hannah, to David, to Solomon, to Isaiah, to Jeremiah, to Daniel, to Mary, to Peter, to Paul. And He continues to show His love to you and me today. He does this because it’s who He is. God so loved the world that He gave His only son (Jn 3:16). God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rm 5:8). You cannot escape the love of God. Even when you sin, He loves you. The love of God is what makes life worth living. Remove it from earth and earth would be hell. To know that God is for us and is working for our good is enough to cheer the most despondent heart. You may feel that no one cares, but you are wrong. God loves.

In fact, God is love (I Jn 4:8). Tozer helps us understand this statement by explaining that it does not mean that God is some impersonal force. We do not worship love, and God never intends us to. Rather, the Scripture is speaking as we sometimes do when we say, “Dora is grace in action,” or “Robin is the picture of faith.” God is love perfectly, but love is not our God.

The love of God means that God is passionately looking out for our best interests. It means God has affection for us. We are not just pawns on a chessboard or file number 13479. God has feelings for us. He wants our good; He wants us to know Him; He wants to share with us from His bounty. To God we are children, not clients. God is not a cold force but a warm affectionate person.

He is love, but He is not love in the abstract. He loves you. He loves me. And the amazing thing about such love is that you and I have rebelled against Him. We are not people who are naturally friendly to God. The Bible describes us in our unconverted state as enemies (Rm 5:10). But God still loves us. The depravity of the human race magnifies the love of God. The better we think ourselves, the less we understand God’s love. Ironically, many who talk about God’s love have precious little grasp of it. Some think too highly of themselves; some think of God’s love as a type of human right, and it is precisely when we think we deserve God’s love that we miss it. His love then ceases to amaze. But when we see that we deserve wrath, the Cross astounds us. Praise God! He is willing to forgive. Even me.

God’s love sacrifices. “Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus said, “that he lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13) “Love is not self-seeking.” (I Cor 13:5) Love desires the good of someone else so greatly that it will sacrifice its own desires and comforts to bring about that good. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” (Jn 3:16) The ultimate expression of the love of God is found in Jesus Christ. His sacrificial death and resurrection is the pinnacle of the revelation of God’s love. Those events show God paying a great price for our best interests. People who deny the Atonement and Resurrection strip the power out of God’s love. They change the passionate sacrifice of God’s love into a lukewarm feeling. Divine love becomes human love. They remove God’s laying down His life yet think they somehow have a greater love. We cheapen the love of God when we deny the Cross, but we fully declare it every time we take communion and proclaim His death till He comes.

One of the wondrous things about life is that we, too, can love. Because we are created in God’s image, we have the capacity to love, but since we are finite and fallen creatures, our love is limited and imperfect, even tainted. Nonetheless, God, as the fountainhead of love, is the foundation of all legitimate human loves. An ungodly woman may have a love for her husband and children. Even that kind of love “is of God.” Some of the other desires and motives mixed in with her love may have a different source, but the love itself could not exist without God. Take Him away and all legitimate human loves disappear as well. We cannot love without God.

And so … God has a passionate desire for our well-being. This desire is warm, tender-hearted, and drives Him to make the ultimate sacrifice for us. It allows us to trust Him in all things and to serve Him from the heart as a son or a daughter. It provides great comfort, great joy, even in the midst of suffering, for we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. (Ps 89:14)

The Lord within her is righteous; he does no wrong. Morning by morning he dispenses his justice. (Zeph 3:5)

See, the day of the Lord is coming — a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger. (Is 13:9)

The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. (Rev 14:19)

O God Most High, righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne. How could I ever stand in Your presence on the basis of my own righteousness? I have none. On my own, I stand condemned, and I know it is right. Your wrath and justice are good and right, and I praise You that even in Your mercy, You remain just. Always.

The dictionary defines justice as “the principle of moral rightness; equity.” It is a moral word and a rather broad moral word. Sometimes we think of justice as merely the proper punishment of evil and reward of good. That concept is indeed justice, but it is only one example. The mechanic who will stick to his quote even though he will now lose money is being just; the woman who will not move in on another woman’s man is being just; the student who will not copy an exam is being just. Justice is doing, thinking and loving what is right. The Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek words bear this same sense. Justice is righteousness. When the Bible says that God is just, it is saying that He is morally right in everything He does. God is good, and God cares intensely about right behavior and attitudes. Right and wrong matter to God. If they do not, then God is not good.

Most people today have little difficulty with what I have said so far. They know (or at least think it ought to be) that God is just and good and, thus, cares about right and wrong. But if God is just, the more common and narrow application of justice is also true of Him. He must have equity. He must be no “respecter of persons.” He must show partiality to no one. He must treat sin as sin deserves to be treated, regardless of where He finds it. Now if we begin to see reality, this application of justice should make us squirm, for we both know things we have done that we would rather God not know about.

This application of justice entails judgment. Moral rightness requires that one make distinctions between right and wrong, and a just judge must punish evil. We would have to shut our eyes through all of Scripture to try to ignore the truth of God’s judgment on sin. It is on almost every page we turn. God does not gloss over sin. He condemns it and punishes it severely. The fact that He does so flows from His justice. If God merely looked past our sins, He would be corrupt. Unfortunately, too many people think that God is corrupt. Such thinking is itself sin and needs to be called so. The idea that God will simply gloss over our sins is morally reprehensible. God’s judgment against our sin is necessary if God is to be God.

This judgment is just, and it is inextricably tied to the character of God.  When God administers justice against sin, that justice is an expression of His wrath. God does not merely punish sin; He is angry at it. God’s character is never neutral toward sin.  He hates it, and He hates it precisely because He is just.  The justice of God and the wrath of God are woven together.

Now the wrath of God is an anger, but it is not the petty anger which you and I often have. The wrath of God is a righteous, passionate hatred of evil, and it flows from His justice. God so vehemently hates evil because He so passionately loves what is right. The more we love, the more we hate the desecration of what we love. Anger at evil is something we understand. People are angry when children walk into schools and shoot children, or when a terrorist blows up a plane and kills hundreds of innocent lives, or when a large corporation uses its power to exploit helpless people, or when a politician intentionally lies to cover up wrongdoing. Anger in these situations is not a bad thing; it shows that there is a place in our hearts for what is right. If a person were calloused when confronted with such problems, we would quickly wonder about his heart. Doesn’t he care? The wrath of God is like this sort of anger. It is the heart of God responding to the desecration of something precious. It is the natural expression of His character toward sin. It is the essential manifestation of infinite moral goodness. It is how pure goodness behaves when confronted with sin. God would not be God if He had no wrath toward sin.

The judgment and wrath of God are not particularly popular ideas today. We would rather talk about God’s love and forgiveness. We are more comfortable with those concepts. Yet the God of the Bible is as much a God of judgment and wrath as He is of love and forgiveness, and we ignore His judgment to our peril. If we are not careful, we will turn God into nothing more than Santa Claus. But remember.  God does not exist to indulge our desires.

Some do not like the idea of God’s wrath because they do not consider their sin to be particularly bad. They can understand wrath against child molesters and rapists, but most people do not do such things. They are just average folks who love their children and work hard to pay the bills. Isn’t God a little bigger than to get in a tiffy all about their piddling faults? Doesn’t He have bigger sins to worry about than their lusting at magazine pictures or impatience with Mrs. Johnson? Surely God is not so petty as all that. Wrath against such trifles is beneath the dignity of God. Or so they imply.

I certainly agree that God ought not get upset over nothing, but the fact of the matter is that the view God has of our sins and the view we have do not agree. When you look at Scripture you find Jesus equating lust with adultery and unjust anger with murder (Mt 5:21-8), not because their external consequences are the same but because the heart that produces the one is the same heart that produces the other. God’s anger at sin is directed at the nature of the heart. This is why Paul can say that greed is idolatry (Eph 5:5; Col 3:5).  When we finagle the discussion in the car to get the family to go to the restaurant we want, we are revealing a selfish heart that God fully sees. God sees past the specific expression straight into the ugly source itself. We may not see our finagling as such a big deal (if we are even aware of it). We are adept at taking corrupt hearts and motives, dressing them up in wedding clothes and then seeing how pretty the tuxedo is. But God sees through all the dressing we put on. He sees straight to the heart. And He sees the heart from the perspective of absolute holiness. He has wrath because if the righteous standards of God were applied to our hearts, we would look to Him as child molesters look to us.

The Christian faith says that people flatter themselves, and one of the requirements God puts on a person who would become a disciple of Jesus is that he stop such flattery and admit that he has a damnable heart. Those who see their sinful hearts have no difficulty with the concept of a just wrath against them. They know they deserve it. Those who complain about the wrath of God are blind to their own heart. They have no clue about how serious sin is.  We would do well to spend time contemplating the justice and wrath of God, for if our God will not pour out His justice and wrath on our sin, then we have a god who is less than God.  And we have no need for Christ.