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If we would truly know God, and be known of him, we should ask him to teach us here and now to reckon with the solemn reality of his wrath.
Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God,” writes Paul in Romans 11:22 (KJV).
People say they believe in God, but they have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in him may make.
To these questions there are several complementary sets of answers. One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word;
A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent—they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources; we have to try to show people the uniqueness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s last word to man.
A fourth answer, no less basic than the three already given, is that people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity; we must seek to wean them from this habit, since nothing but misbelief is possible as long as it persists.
To reject all ideas of divine wrath and judgment, and to assume that God’s character, misrepresented (forsooth!) in many parts of the Bible, is really one of indulgent benevolence without any severity, is the rule rather than the exception among ordinary folk today.
For the substance of Christianity is faith in the forgiveness of sins through the redeeming work of Christ on the cross.
But on the basis of the Santa Claus theology, sins create no problem, and atonement becomes needless; God’s active favor extends no less to those who disregard his commands than to those who keep them. The idea that God’s attitude to me is affected by whether or not I do what he says has no place in the thought of the man on the street, and any attempt to show the need for fear in God’s presence, for trembling at his word, gets written off as impossibly old-fashioned—“Victorian,” “Puritan” and “sub-Christian.”
This was inevitable, for it is not possible to see the good will of a heavenly Santa Claus in heartbreaking and destructive things like cruelty, or marital infidelity, or death on the road, or lung cancer.
When trouble comes, therefore, there is nothing to do but grin and bear it. In this way, by an ironic paradox, faith in a God who is all goodness and no severity tends to confirm men in a fatalistic and pessimistic attitude to life.
Count your blessings. Learn not to take natural benefits, endowments and pleasures for granted; learn to thank God for them all.
Learn to marvel at his patience, and seek grace to imitate it in your dealings with others; and try not to try his patience any more.
It is a discipline of love, and it must be received accordingly. “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline” (Heb 12:5). “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees”
We made this point two chapters back. When faced with God’s anthropomorphisms, however, it is easy to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. We have to remember that man is not the measure of his Maker, and that when the language of human personal life is used of God, none of the limitations of human creaturehood are thereby being implied—limited knowledge, or power, or foresight, or strength, or consistency, or anything of that kind.
There are two sorts of jealousy among humans, and only one of them is a vice. Vicious jealousy is an expression of the attitude, “I want what you’ve got, and I hate you because I haven’t got it.”
He meant that he demands from those whom he has loved and redeemed utter and absolute loyalty, and he will vindicate his claim by stern action against them if they betray his love by unfaithfulness.
The jealousy of God requires us to be zealous for God. As
He burns for one thing; and that one thing is to please God,
God’s wrath is “the holy revulsion of God’s being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness”; it issues in “a positive outgoing of the divine displeasure” (John Murray, Epistle to the Romans). And this is righteous anger—the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature.
1. Propitiation is the work of God himself.
In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates his wrath by his own action.
In other words, they are so many pictures and illustrations of the reality of propitiation, viewed from different standpoints. It is a shallow fallacy to imagine, as many scholars unfortunately do, that this variety of language must necessarily imply variation of thought.
Going on from this, your impression will be of One whose messianic mission centered on his being put to death—One who was consciously and single-mindedly preparing to die in this way long before the idea of a suffering Messiah took hold of anyone else.
And how should we explain the fact that, whereas martyrs like Stephen faced death with joy, and even Socrates, the pagan philosopher, drank his hemlock and died without a tremor, Jesus, the perfect servant of God, who had never before showed the least fear of man or pain or loss, manifested in Gethsemane what looked like blue funk, and on the cross declared himself God-forsaken? “Never man feared death like this man,” commented Luther. Why? What did it mean?
Those who in this life reject God will forever be rejected by God.
The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us.
The revelation to the believer that God is his Father is in a sense the climax of the Bible, just as it was a final step in the revelatory process which the Bible records.
New Testament believers deal with God as their Father. Father is the name by which they call him. Father has now become his covenant name—for the covenant which binds him to his people now stands revealed as a family covenant.
Who can grasp this? I have heard it seriously argued that the thought of divine fatherhood can mean nothing to those whose human father was inadequate, lacking wisdom, affection or both, nor to those many more whose misfortune it was to have a fatherless upbringing. I have heard Bishop Robinson’s revealing failure to say anything about divine fatherhood in Honest to God defended on these grounds as a brilliant move in commending the faith to a generation in which family life has largely broken down.
The truth is that all of us have a positive ideal of fatherhood by which we judge our own and others’ fathers, and it can safely be said that the person for whom the thought of God’s perfect fatherhood is meaningless or repellent does not exist.
Our first point about adoption is that it is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification.
One more thing must be added to show how great is the blessing of adoption—namely, this: it is a blessing that abides.
The dude abides
When one sees depression, randomness and immaturity in Christians one cannot but wonder whether they have learned the health-giving habit of dwelling on the abiding security of true children of God.
Arrogant asshole
First, prayer must not be thought of in impersonal or mechanical terms, as a technique for putting pressure on someone who otherwise might disregard you.
Second, prayer may be free and bold. We need not hesitate to imitate the sublime “cheek” of the child who is not afraid to ask his parents for anything, because he knows he can count completely on their love.
Shoukd still be respectful
The point is put positively in verses 31-33: “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need [these things]. But seek first his [your Father’s] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
The extreme of this is beimg lazy and ambivalent. More extrapolation would have been better.
Adoption, by its very nature, is an art of free kindness to the person adopted. If you become a father by adopting a son or daughter, you do so because you choose to, not because you are bound to.
The cause of such troubles as we have described is a false, magical type of supernaturalism, which leads people to hanker after a transforming touch as from an electric, impersonal power that will make them feel wholly free from the burdens and bondages of living with themselves and other people.
They believe that this is the essence of genuine spiritual experience. They think the work of the Spirit is to give them experiences that are like LSD trips.
Do I, as a Christian, understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny? I am a child of God. God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Savior is my brother; every Christian is my brother too.
Paul does not for a moment deny that Christians fail and fall, sometimes grievously, nor does he question that (as all true Christians know, and as his own words in Rom 7 reveal) the memory of sins committed after becoming a Christian is far more painful than are any thoughts of one’s moral lapses, however gross, before that time.
