Sunday Sermons
The Untamed God
The Untamed God
One of the most startling statements in the Bible is when Joshua said to the Israelites, “You will not be able to serve the Lord, for He is a holy God. He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your transgression or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you harm and consume you” (Joshua 24:19-20). Such a response is unexpected, especially after Joshua had encouraged the Israelites to serve the Lord (24:14-15). The purpose of the statement is to have them face reality, to count the cost (Luke 14:25-35). Faithfulness will involve much more than lip service (Matthew 7:21). “Neither Israel nor the church could hear a more beneficial word than ‘you will not be able to serve the Lord’. The church should note this: Too frequently, the Jesus we present is some variety of prepackaged joy, peace, and provision that works twice as fast as aspirin. One of the healthiest things a Christian can do is to doubt and question his easy expressions of commitment”(Dale Ralph Davis pp. 201-202). We should not sell Christ, rather we need to warn people of the commitment that He demands (John 13:37; 21:15-19).
A Holy God
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8). “The Hebrew idiom repeating something even once gave it special emphasis; a threefold formula ‘expresses an extraordinary superlative of unheard-of intensity’. As Charnock pointed out long ago, we find no other attribute trebled in this manner. We never read, ‘Eternal, eternal, eternal’; or ‘Love, love, love’; or even ‘Almighty, almighty, almighty’. In this revelation given to us, holiness alone is emphasized in this way” (God The Redeemer, Jack Cottrell, pp. 245-246). The holiness of God is admittedly unique, for everyone that we encounter in this life has been tainted by sin, and has compromised at some point (Romans 3:23), but not this God, “Who is like Thee among the gods, O Lord? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness?” (Exodus 15:11). “It means that His essence is pure moral goodness and is the very opposite of all evil. It is a glorious, radiant and searching purity, a positive goodness incomparable, which is to all sin and wrong what the sun is to the night” (Cottrell p. 247). See 1 John 1:5; Titus 1:2. In addition, God has a very strong and positive attitude toward His holiness. He has a definite love and zeal for moral uprightness. “This leads Him both to demand holiness in His moral creatures, “You shall be holy for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), and to delight in it (Psalm 33:5)” (Cottrell p. 251). Holiness also includes a negative side, which is God’s perfect freedom from all sin, His absolute opposition to it, and His total hatred of it. “God’s holiness is not just the absence of sin from His nature, but His strong attitude against it, an attitude of abhorrence and hatred, “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated wickedness” (Psalm 45:7). The Canaanites were destroyed because, “every abominable act which the Lord hates they have done for their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31). See also Proverbs 6:16-18; 12:22; 15:26; Malachi 2:16; Revelation 2:6. “That the God of the Bible is such a God is why He stands in such sharp contrast with pagan deities, most of which may be included in Kleinknecht’s description of the Greek gods, namely, that in them, ‘we find no trace of moral seriousness or of what is for use the characteristic trait of holiness’. This is also why, as Charnock notes, that the sinner hates nothing as much as he hates the holiness of God. It judges him and threatens him, and often drives him to atheism because he would rather believe in no God at all than in a holy God” (Cottrell pp. 254-255).
God’s law and His holiness
“Usually when we think about law we are thinking of its content or its commands. Here we see God’s holiness, His perfect moral character, put into verbal form. Thus we may say that moral law is the mirror or the transcript of divine holiness” (Cottrell p. 263). What this means is that the commands, moral code or instructions in the Bible cannot be separated from the very nature of God Himself. The commands found in Scripture are nothing more than God’s holiness in a verbalized imperative form. This is one reason why Jesus said, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). The moral expectations found in Scripture are nothing less that God’s own moral nature.
God’s Law and Sin
John wrote, “Every one who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). “The word here (lawlessness) is anomia, which means not merely transgression of the law but more basically opposition to the law. It is rebellion against law, a rebellion against authority, a zeal for autonomy and for a false freedom from law of all kinds” (Cottrell p. 269). “Since the very essence of sin is lawlessness, the sinful heart delights to know the law just so it can flout it” (p. 269). “But even many Christians, as the result of a misunderstanding of the relation between law and grace, are quite indifferent toward law (i.e., God’s commands as they apply today) and do not consider it to be binding upon them. They disdain the so-called ‘letter of the law’ and embrace a false freedom in which the only ‘imperative’ is a nebulous subjectivity euphemistically known as ‘love’. What must be understood is this: since God’s law is the outward expression of His own holy nature, any rebellion against law is also a rebellion against God personally” (Cottrell pp. 269-270). David understood this truth when he said, “Against Thee, Thee only, I have sinned” (Psalm 51:4). Paul understood this when he noted, “because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God” (Romans 8:7). “This is why James says, ‘For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all’ (James 2:10). There is a sense in which all laws are one, in that they are all identified with the will or nature of the Lawgiver. No matter which arrows of sin we launch, and whether it be one or many, they all ultimately come to rest in the heart of God” (Cottrell p. 271).
The True Nature of Sin
“Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the minutest peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying ‘no’ to the righteousness of God. We are saying, ‘God, Your law is not good. My judgment is better than Yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do” (The Holiness of God, R.C. Sproul, pp. 151-152). On a positive note, Christians understand that God always connects obedience to His law with a personal relationship with Him (John 14:15; Deuteronomy 10:12-13 “to walk in His ways and love Him”). “The more we love God, the more we will love His law; and the more we love it, the more we will prize obedience to it and hate disobedience—both in ourselves and others (Psalm 119:97ff)” (Cottrell p. 274).
Understanding God’s Wrath
“The wrath of God is not a pleasant subject to contemplate, and most of us would rather just pass it by” (p. 275). Many people today, even professed Christians have attempted to domesticate God by claiming that God is nothing but love. Yet wrath is and essential trait in God, in fact, without wrath, God could not be love, because true love is always “holy”, “does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). “Not only this, but we cannot even properly understand the doctrines of redemption without a right understanding of divine wrath” (p. 275). “We can put it in the form of a question: If God is truly holy, how could He possibly not be angry toward sin? Would we not be surprised if God did not become angry when His law is broken? Would we not consider such indifference toward sin to be a moral blemish?” (Cottrell p. 279). Sadly, many religious people are embarrassed by verses in the Bible that describe the wrath of God, yet such an embarrassment is telling; it means that one does not truly love good, one lacks moral courage, one secretly delights in evil and wants room to bend and compromise. One of the main Hebrew terms in the Old Testament that is used about ninety times to describe the wrath of God is a term that means hot displeasure, indignation, rage and fury. One writer said such a term refers to the “inward fire of the emotion of anger” in God. The most common Old Testament word for divine wrath (170 times) is a word that basically refers to the nose or nostrils. It comes from a verb, which means to snort, to be angry. Yet the wrath of God is never capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, or morally ignoble, that human anger so often is. See Hebrews 12:29.
God and the Sinner
A common expression is, “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner”. Biblically, this is not correct. It is true that God still desires the sinner to repent even when the sinner is sinning (2 Peter 3:9), and it is true that God sent His Son to die for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), but it is not true that God’s anger is merely directed against our sins and not against us when we are sinning. “Thou dost hate all who do iniquity” (Psalm 5:5-6); “The one who loves violence His soul hates” (Psalm 11:5); “Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). Could anything be more terrifying than to hear God say, “I hate you?” “God’s wrath is something we choose for ourselves in the sense that we know sinners will be cursed but we choose to sin anyway. It is punishment poured out upon the sinner because, and simply because, he deserves it. The person who freely chooses to break the commandments of the Lord of the universe, thereby dishonoring Him, deserves and merits the wrath that engulfs him. This is why sin is called a debt (Matthew 6:12). What the sinner experiences as the result of God’s wrath is not merely suffering, but deserved suffering (Romans 2:5; Revelation 19:1-2; Acts 17:31 “He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness”).
“I will repay”
“Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord’”
“While this concept must not be distorted into something like the petty, spiteful and often unjust revenge we see among human beings, neither must its content be softened into something like the impersonal natural consequences of one’s sins. Vengeance is an intensely personal act, coming from the heart and will of one who has experienced wrongdoing against himself. Thus God’s vengeance is something he deliberately and personally inflicts” (Cottrell p. 290).
Wrath and Forgiveness
Others have tried to tame the God in the Bible by removing the so-called embarrassing and primitive doctrine of an eternal hell. But to claim that hell does not exist is to teach pure fantasy (Hebrews 10:26-31; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9). “Those who continue to plead that God is a loving and forgiving God as a basis for denying retributive wrath need to consider the fact that unless God’s wrath and hell itself are something we really deserve, then forgiveness has little meaning. Unless we hold that men really deserve to have God visit upon them the painful consequences of their wrongdoing, we empty God’s forgiveness of its meaning. For if there is no consequence, God ought to overlook sin. We can think of forgiveness as something real only when we hold that sin has betrayed us into a situation where we deserve to have God inflict upon us the most serious consequences. When the logic of the situation demands that He should take action against the sinner, and He yet takes action for him, then and then alone can we speak of grace” (Cottrell p. 294).
Mark Dunagan/Beaverton Church of Christ/503-644-9017
www.beavertonchurchofchrist.net/mdunagan@easystreet.com
