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Paul says it this way in Colossians: “Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”
We live between D-Day and VE-Day. Between Jesus’ first coming to land the decisive blow and his second to end evil for good. And in the meantime, our job is to stand in that victory. To hold our ground. To cooperate with heaven’s invasion of earth. Yes, we “fight,” but our fight isn’t with swords or spears or AK-47s; it’s with prayer and sacrificial love. So don’t join a militia and go to war; get on your knees and give your life away.
And there are similarities among the world religions, between, say, the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha. For sure. But there are also chasmic, mile-wide, irreconcilable differences. The problem with universalism is that none of the conquered people think they are worshiping the same God as everybody else. That’s the view of the conqueror.
But what’s strange is the Scripture writers have little or nothing to say about the problem of evil, at least not in the philosophical sense.48 They don’t debate its nature or theorize about its origins or have a crisis of faith over a tsunami. Why not? Because evil was assumed. Take, for example, Jesus’ central prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”49 Notice that Jesus assumed that God’s will was not done on earth. Hence, his prayer.
To clarify, it’s not that God’s will is weak—on an even playing field with all the other wills. As if we, God, and Satan are all equal players in a game for the world. It’s that in the universe God has chosen to actualize, love is the highest value, and love demands a choice, and a choice demands freedom. So God has chosen to limit his overwhelming capacity to override any “will” stacked against him, in order to create space for real, genuine freedom for his creatures, human and nonhuman. And evil is the by-product of that freedom that God built into the fabric of the universe.
One theologian says it like this: “When one possesses a vital awareness that in between God and humanity there exists a vast society of spiritual beings who are quite like humans in possessing intelligence and free will, there is simply no difficulty in reconciling the reality of evil with the goodness of the supreme God . . . it virtually sidesteps the problem of evil.”
If you’ve been around the church for a while, the odds are you’ve sat through a sermon or two about idolatry, and the pastor said something to the effect of “an idol is anything that takes the place of God in your heart.” One preacher I love said this: “If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol . . . The human heart is indeed a factory that mass-produces idols.”
The idea here is that an idol is a good thing that becomes ultimate—it becomes the thing. The idolatry conversation becomes a priorities conversation. The task is to keep watch over “the idols of the heart.”
Paul writes this to the followers of Jesus in first-century Corinth: “Do I mean then that food sacrificed to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.”
N. T. Wright says it this way: “When we humans commit idolatry—worshiping that which is not God as if it were—we thereby give to other creatures and beings in the cosmos a power, a prestige, an authority over us which we, under God, were supposed to have over them. When you worship an idol, whatever it is, you abdicate something of your own proper human authority over the world and give it instead to that thing, whatever it is.”
As the infamous Keyser Söze put it, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.”
David Foster Wallace eloquently said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
So to say it again: there is one true Creator God who made the world and everything good, beautiful, and true in it. He and he alone is deserving of worship. He is the only source of life and peace and meaning and significance that will last past death and into forever. Love him with all your heart and soul and strength, with every scrap of your being. Not Chemosh or Aphrodite or Shiva or Elvis or the new Audi or V-cut abs or a 4.0 or whatever “it” is for you. Worship GOD
“compassionate” is a feeling word. Yahweh is like a father, or even a mother, and we’re like his children. And “gracious” is an action word. It means, like a parent, God comes to the rescue when his kids need help. These two words link up and fuse together to show us what Yahweh is like: he’s compassionate and gracious.
a third way to come before God: not based on what you’ve done or what’s been done to you, but based on who God is—based on his mercy. In this posture, prayer sounds something like this: “God, you are compassionate—you care about me. And you’re gracious—you help. And God, you don’t owe me a thing, and there’s a ton of other people who have it way worse than I do, but based on your mercy, I ask for you to ____.”
Exodus 34 back to God! “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, LORD [Yahweh], take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Exodus 34 in the New Testament book of Hebrews: “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
Proverbs 14, we read: Whoever is erek apayim has great understanding, but one who is quick-tempered displays folly.
Proverbs 16: Whoever is erek apayim is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.
Targum. It was a translation into Aramaic—probably the language Jesus grew up speaking. This translation was more of a paraphrase—they were free and limber with the original Hebrew. But I love how they translated Exodus 34: God is “patient, the One who makes anger distant and brings compassion near.”4
Yahweh’s anger is far away, but his compassion is close by.
I love that, because when Lincoln finally lets out his anger, it’s on purpose, deliberate, and under control. And it’s fitting. It’s the right emotional response. I think that moment does a great job of capturing “slow to anger.”
Here’s my favorite definition of God’s wrath: “his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations.”9
Yes!
God does get angry, but it’s unusual. His baseline is “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger.”
Polish poet Czesław Miłosz argued that “the true opium for the people is belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”
Abraham Lincoln said publicly that he thought the Civil War was God’s judgment on America for slavery. In his second inaugural address, after asking how to reconcile the horror of war with the “divine attributes” of God—his answer was that the war would continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
In fact, the Scripture writers’ main problem with Yahweh’s anger is that he doesn’t get angry more often! They are far more frustrated with God’s mercy than his wrath. They look out at the overwhelming amount of injustice in the world and vent their angst to God.22 One of the most frequent prayers in the Bible is, “How long?”23 The prophets, kings, politicians, farmers, and shepherds who write Scripture have no doubt that one day, Yahweh will bring evil to its logical conclusion. They just can’t figure out, Why does he delay? Why does justice usually come in the next life, and not this one?
For a lot of people, love has come to mean tolerance. Think of the common slang in our culture: “Hey, what’s good for you is good for you.” “Who am I to judge?” “Live and let live.” I can’t help but think, Really? Would you say that about an ISIS bomber? A deranged killer sneaking into an elementary school with a machine gun? A pedophile? I’m guessing no. So, clearly tolerance has a limit, even in our late-modern world. There’s a line; we just disagree on where to draw it.
Classic tolerance is the idea that we can agree to disagree rather than kill each other or go to war over some petty thing. This was a revolutionary leap forward in social evolution. I’m all for it. But modern tolerance is the much newer idea that right and wrong are elastic. In this view, to call out somebody’s action as sin is to “judge” them. To disagree with somebody is to hate them.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”24 At some point, tolerance starts to slide dangerously close to apathy.
We need to live in the tension between love and anger. Most of us think of love and anger as incompatible. How can you love somebody and be angry at them? That just shows how much we still have to learn about love.
Have you really read them, slowly and deeply? Creating space for Jesus to fill with his reality? To allow him to define your vision of God?
God is not a permissive parent; neither is he an angry jerk of a dad. He’s a good Father—compassionate, gracious, and slow to anger.
As I was reading the chapter on family of origin, I created a little space to ask God, “What are the generational sins I carry forward? Is there anything I’m blind to? Weak points in my character I don’t even see?”
Between who we are and who God is. Between the way we live and the way of Jesus. Following Jesus is about closing that gap, one step at a time.
James. He opens his letter by saying, “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”34
Every Friday morning, my wife and I climb on our bikes and ride out to eat breakfast. Then we stop for coffee. I have Fridays off, and the kids are in school, so it’s become our weekly date. The default time every week to catch up, sync our hearts, laugh, fight, make up, and talk about the things that matter.
This Rhythm
My completely unscientific theory behind the “seven-year itch” is that right around year seven, you realize you have to either accept your spouse for who God made them to be, or get a divorce.
To start, hesed. This is a sweeping, panoramic word that we really have no equivalent for in English. That’s why translations are all over the map. It can be translated as “steadfast love” or “unfailing love” or “covenant loyalty.”
Hebrew scholar Daniel Block: “The Hebrew hesed cannot be translated with one English word. This is a covenant term, wrapping up in itself all the positive attributes of God.”
God’s love is his faithfulness. God’s faithfulness is his love.
“You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them.”
“Now therefore, our God, the great God, mighty and awesome, who keeps his covenant of love, do not let all this hardship seem trifling in your eyes . . . In all that has happened to us, you have remained righteous; you have acted faithfully, while we acted wickedly.”
He’s Yahweh, and he’s Israel, in the same place.
All because thousands of years ago, Yahweh made a promise. When Israel failed, Yahweh was faithful. Even before that, when Adam failed, he was faithful. And when you and I failed, God was still faithful. To bless and heal and free and save.
Jesus takes all our failure—millennia of broken promises—and he drags it to the cross, absorbing it in his death and then breaking its hold over humanity through his resurrection.
To the Scripture writers, hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the character of God. It’s bedrock trust that no matter how many wrong turns we make or setbacks we face, we can sleep soundly tonight because we know that, one day, Yahweh will eradicate evil forever. He will remake the world into a garden city, a second Eden. He will bless “all peoples on earth” through his Son, Jesus. And it’s all because Yahweh is “abounding in love and faithfulness.”
Amen!!!
It’s not that God doesn’t want you to live a rich and satisfying life—I believe he does. He’s your Father. What father doesn’t want success and prosperity for his kids? But like any good father, he takes the long view. He’s willing to discipline his kids to see them grow and mature into their full potential. God is more concerned with your long-term character than your short-term happiness. And he’s more than willing to sacrifice the one to get to the other.
Whew!
Our hope is that no matter what happens to us, Jesus is back from the dead, and anything is possible.
God’s promise is that he will bless you, so you can turn around and do the same for others. He’ll put you to rights, so you can you put the world to rights. And one day, in time, he’ll return to finish what he started and set all the crooked things straight. And God’s promises aren’t just generic to all his followers; they are specific to you.
