Tag: love

Categories
God

God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment

“God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment”
  by brian rushing

Two of my recent posts have dealt with some of these words that we don’t like to think about in connection to God – specifically we don’t like the words wrath & judgment. Before I leave these two words, I want to share a few final thoughts that Dr. Packer provides that help us to realize something important about God’s key characteristic of love. Because of that love, there must also be wrath and judgment. A key characteristic of love is to always seek the very best for the object of love. Therefore, someone who loves another will have wrath toward anything or anyone who attempts to harm the one he loves. Someone who loves another will see malicious acts aimed at the one he loves as something to be judged as evil. Therefore, when we realize that God loves us with utmost intensity, we should also realize that it will require God to have wrath and judgment toward any people, things, behaviors, or attitudes that would cause us harm or problems.

It was not man…who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn his Father’s wrath against us into love. The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of his unkind Father by offering himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message — it is sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God himself who took the initiative in quenching his own wrath against those whom, despite their [terrible behavior], he loved and had chosen to save.

God, in His Trinitarian nature, loves us supremely. There is not one person of the Trinity that loves us more than another. God – in all aspects of who He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – loves us more than we can ever understand. In regard to that love, He must judge…
a wooden judge's gavel symbolizing judgment and possibly wrath

The judge is a person identified with what is good and right. The modern idea that a judge should be cold and dispassionate has no place in the Bible. The biblical judge is expected to love justice and fair play and to loathe all ill-treatment of one person by another. An unjust judge, one who has no interest in seeing right triumph over wrong, is by biblical standards, a monstrosity. The Bible leaves us in no doubt that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity, and that the ideal of a judge wholly-identified with what is good and right is perfectly fulfilled in Him.

This loving God has determined to love what is good and right to provide us with good and perfect gifts – the chief gift being Himself. Therefore, He must judge those things that harm us or our relationship with Him as bad, wrong, immoral, evil. Our culture (and world) does not want anyone telling us how to behave or think, but God’s absolute love requires that there be an absolute truth – which requires wrath and judgment.

“To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God’s kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment.”

Let’s keep thinking deeply about who God is and what He requires!


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


Categories
Jesus

The Ever-Increasing Intensity of Jesus

“The Ever-Increasing Intensity of Jesus”
  by brian rushing

Many people seem to have the idea that the God of the New Testament is loving while the God of the Old Testament is angry and full of wrath. The thought process seems to be that when Jesus comes on the scene, He decreases the intensity of that fiery, wrathful Old Testament God. But that is most definitely not the case. In fact, regarding those 10 Old Testament laws that God had given to Moses called the Ten Commandments, we see that Jesus did not remove them nor did He even reduce them. No, surprisingly He made them even harder to live up to!

It was one thing to not kill someone (the O.T. Law), but now Jesus had said that anger in your heart can be the exact same sin as murdering someone. It was one thing to not have an adulterous affair (the O.T. Law), but now Jesus had said that lusting for someone else was the same sin. The intensity of the Law was increased dramatically by Jesus.

And when it comes to Old Testament God and New Testament Jesus, Jesus’ idea of judgment is actually intensified as well.

Dr. Packer puts it this way:

People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background. But if we examine the New Testament…we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God’s action as judge, far from being reduced, is actually intensified.

The entire New Testament is overshadowed by the certainty of a coming day of universal judgment…and proclaims Jesus, the divine Savior, as the divinely-appointed judge…. If we know ourselves at all, we know we are not fit to face him. What then are we to do? The New Testament answer is: Call on the coming Judge to be your present Savior. As Judge, he is the law, but as Savior he is the gospel.

Run from him now, and you will meet him as Judge then—and without hope. Seek him now, and you will find him, and you will then discover that you are looking forward to that future meeting with joy, knowing that there is now “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).

Jesus was not a reduction of God in any way – not in providing an understanding of the Law, not in being the world’s Judge, and not in love. Instead, Jesus is a clear look at who God always has been and always will be. He clarified for us how intense the standard of God is, how intense the wrath of God’s righteous judgment is, and how intense is the love and grace that God has provided to make us into holy people fit to be with Him.

I pray that Jesus continues to be ever-increasing in intensity in your own life!


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


Categories
Relationships

Living Everyday In the Intensive Care Waiting Room

Many of us have had to spend time in an Intensive Care Waiting Room.

Knowing a loved one is behind those closed doors fighting for life.

Waiting with expectation for each of those 15-minute visits when the hospital staff opens the doors to let us see our loved one for a brief moment.

icu waiting room sign with hours of visiting posted

A pastor wrote about the ICU waiting room:

I have spent long hours in the hospital intensive care unit… watching with anguished people… listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How can I live without my companion of thirty years?”

The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions that divide people in society melt away. A person is a father first, and any other distinctions are less important. The man without a job loves his wife as much as the successful business owner loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.

In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about.

Could we learn to love like that if we realized that every day of life is a day in the waiting room?

Life is like the Intensive Care Waiting Room, and yet we often fail to remember this. Life is full of struggle and pain and difficulty. But instead of an illness or injury that has us struggling for physical life, our real struggle is one of the spirit. Temptations and sin pour into our lives leading to worry and anxiety that chokes out our ability to breathe. And yet, we fail to realize that every one of us walking this planet are struggling in much the same way.

Therefore everyone needs to pull for everyone else.

Loving others is what life is all about. Let’s stop being divisive over secondary matters. Let those less important things melt away. Let someone know that you love them and are pulling for them today.

Categories
Relationships

Things We Get Wrong, Part 3… Inviting People To Church

When I started out in youth ministry, I had the idea that I should invite any and every teenager who I could find to come check out our youth worship services. So I did. And some of them even came. And some of them had not grown up in church. And some of them were a bit rough around the edges.

Therefore, I was quickly taken aside and told by a couple of the members of the church, “Be careful what teenagers you invite into this church, because some don’t know how to behave in church, and they don’t need to be here until they learn how to behave.”

WHAT??

sign stating "wrong way, go back" to signify things we get wrong

Were they serious?
Unfortunately, yes.
And as a young minister who was about 25 years younger than them, I didn’t know what to say. (Though I’d have some choice words for such a comment said to me today!)

“They don’t know how to behave.”
“They shouldn’t be allowed here until they can behave.”
So who is supposed to teach them how to behave in church if not the church?

Of course, I disagree with the whole “in church” mentality anyway. People are the church, not the building at a certain address that you find yourself “in” on a given Sunday. But apart from that technicality, when we have these types of attitudes, we have gone back to the system of the Pharisees that says: “You clean up your act, and then you can come to know God.”

Instead we should be living in the system of Christ that says, “You come as you are – with your sin – and let Jesus embrace you and remove your sin – then He will help to clean you up.”

Which attitude draws people?
Which attitude is compassionate?
Which attitude shows love?

Jesus drew people to Himself, was compassionate, was loving… even to the outcast and the sinner. How is it that Christians are so often seen as people who push people away and are not known for compassion or love? How do we get this so wrong?

We are told to imitate Jesus. So what does that mean? It means we should be people of grace, forgiveness, and joy so that we help to show what Jesus is like – the One who loves deeply and constantly pursues us to transform us into His likeness.

I’m glad I didn’t fall into the trap that these two people set for me, and instead kept on inviting new teens – even the ones who didn’t yet know how to behave! I guess I’m still learning how to “behave” as well! And that is fine by me.

Now go out and invite someone to be part of your faith community.

Don’t invite them “into” a church building. Invite them into church – into the relationship of family that it is.

And don’t worry about whether they know how to behave. When Jesus gets hold of them, He’ll take care of cleaning them up the way He wants them to be. You and me… we’d just mess it up!

Categories
Relationships

Safe, Not Soft.

a soft cottony dandelion seed headPreviously I wrote about how Jesus wasn’t safe. (But that He is good!)

And while it may be true that Jesus is not safe, the church does need to be a “safe” place for people to come with their brokenness.

Too often, though, we think that being a safe place means we have to be “soft.”

No so. Jesus certainly wasn’t.

Jesus loved people furiously, without ever being soft on their sin. We have to love people furiously as well, at the same time holding a serious view of behavior that is not God-honoring.

“Abhor what is evil.” A gospel-centered community acknowledges the presence of sin and welcomes the confession of sin. But a truly gospel-centered community never reduces the severity of sin. …When God saves us, our attitude toward sin changes. Sin doesn’t become easier to commit; it becomes more despicable to us than ever. …Abhorring what is evil in the context of community requires true love–love that dares to inflict “the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6).

The weakest, saddest, most hypocritical form of pseudo-love is the kind that sees someone in danger and simply hopes everything works out in the end. Is it judgmental, ruthless, or wicked to correct your children when they’re doing things that are dangerous for them? Normal parents would never watch their kids play in the street and just hope they don’t get hurt: “I know it’s dangerous, but look how happy they are. They seem to be having so much fun.” Our ferocious commitment to their safety and success, along with a heart full of genuine love, drives us to endure the often unhappy experience of disciplining our children.

In the same way, gospel-formed believers take responsibility for confronting those who claim to be Christ-followers and yet continue to sin. Church leaders must strive to create environments that are “safe but not soft”… environments that embrace people in their brokenness while guiding them to wholeness in Christ. [from ‘Creature of the Word’]

Let us reject pseudo-love in all our relationships.
Let us not be cruel by withholding the truth just to protect feelings.
Let us be safe, but not soft.