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It is clear that the reality of divine judgment must have a direct effect on our view of life.
One cannot imagine that talk of divine judgment was ever very popular, yet the biblical writers engage in it constantly.
No doubt it is true that the subject of divine wrath has in the past been handled speculatively, irreverently, even malevolently. No doubt there have been some who have preached of wrath and damnation with tearless eyes and no pain in their hearts. No doubt the sight of small sects cheerfully consigning the whole world, apart from themselves, to hell has disgusted many. Yet if we would know God, it is vital that we face the truth concerning his wrath, however unfashionable it may be, and however strong our initial prejudices against it. Otherwise we shall not understand the gospel of salvation
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people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ.
people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity;
The word Paul uses in Romans 11:22 means literally “cutting off”; it denotes God’s decisive withdrawal of his goodness from those who have spurned it.
But if, now, he (in Whitefield’s phrase) puts thorns in your bed, it is only to awaken you from the sleep of spiritual death—and to make you rise up to seek his mercy. Or if you are a true believer, and he still puts thorns in your bed, it is only to keep you from falling into the somnolence of complacency and to ensure that you “continue in his goodness” by letting your sense of need bring you back constantly in self-abasement and faith to seek his face. This kindly discipline, in which God’s severity touches us for a moment in the context of his goodness, is meant to keep us from having to
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How can jealousy be a virtue in God when it is a vice in humans? God’s perfections are matter for praise—but how can we praise God for being jealous?
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. And we must remember that those elements in human qualities which show the corrupting effect of sin have no counterpart in God.
God’s jealousy is not a compound of frustration, envy and spite, as human jealousy so often is, but appears instead as a (literally) praiseworthy zeal to preserve something supremely precious.
married persons “who felt no jealousy at the intrusion of a lover or an adulterer into their home would surely be lacking in moral perception; for the exclusiveness of marriage is the essence of marriage”
As our right response to God’s love for us is love for him, so our right response to his jealousy over us is zeal for him. His concern for us is great; ours for him must be great too.
But the Lord Jesus once sent a message to a church very much like some of ours—the complacent church of Laodicea—in which he told the Laodicean congregation that their lack of zeal was a source of supreme offense to him. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.” Anything would be better than self-satisfied apathy!
How many of our churches today are sound, respectable—and lukewarm?
Revive us, Lord, before judgment falls!
within paganism propitiation, the appeasing of celestial bad tempers, takes its place as a regular part of life, one of the many irksome necessities that one cannot get on without.
The idea of propitiation—that is, of averting God’s anger by an offering—runs right through the Bible.
a gospel without propitiation at its heart is another gospel than that which Paul preached. The implications of this must not be evaded.
The difference is that expiation means only half of what propitiation means. Expiation is an action that has sin as its object; it denotes the covering, putting away or rubbing out of sin so that it no longer constitutes a barrier to friendly fellowship between man and God. Propitiation, however, in the Bible, denotes all that expiation means, and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby.
there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem—the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man’s relation with his Maker. And unless we make it plain that the solution of these former problems depends on the settling of this latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses of God—for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact.
By sin the New Testament means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from and consequent guilt before God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God.
Sonship to God is not, therefore, a universal status into which everyone enters by natural birth, but a supernatural gift which one receives through receiving Jesus. “No one comes to the Father”—in other words, is acknowledged by God as a son—“except through me” (Jn 14:6).
“Father” is the Christian name for God.
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. Christians are his children, his own sons and daughters, his heirs. And the stress of the New Testament is not on the difficulty and danger of drawing near to the holy God, but on the boldness and confidence with which believers may approach him: a boldness that springs directly from faith in Christ, and from the knowledge of his saving work. “In him and through faith in
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God has not left us to guess what his fatherhood amounts to by drawing analogies from human fatherhood. He revealed the full meaning of this relationship once and for all through our Lord Jesus Christ, his own incarnate Son.
Our first point about adoption is that it is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification.
this is not to say that justification is the highest blessing of the gospel. Adoption is higher, because of the richer relationship with God that it involves.
Adoption is a family idea, conceived in terms of love, and viewing God as father. In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship—he establishes us as his children and heirs. Closeness, affection and generosity are at the heart of the relationship. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.
There you have absolute stability and security; the parent is entirely wise and good, and the child’s position is permanently assured. The very concept of adoption is itself a proof and guarantee of the preservation of the saints, for only bad fathers throw their children out of the family, even under provocation; and God is not a bad father, but a good one. 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.
As Jesus always prayed to his God as Father (Abba in Aramaic, an intimate family word), so must his followers do.
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.
were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.
Just as adoption itself is the key thought for unlocking, and the focal thought for unifying, the New Testament view of the Christian life, so a recognition that the Spirit comes to us as the Spirit of adoption is the key thought for unlocking, and the focal thought for integrating, all that the New Testament tells us about his ministry to Christians.
We note that in this verse witness to our adoption is borne from two distinct sources: our spirit (that is, our conscious self), and God’s Spirit, who bears witness with our spirit, and so to our spirit. (This point is not affected if, with the RSV, we repunctuate and render, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit.” What it means then is that the filial cry, and the filial attitude it expresses, are evidence that the dual witness is a reality in the heart.)
Often the reason is that their notion of the nature and method of divine guidance is distorted. They look for a will-o’-the-wisp; they overlook the guidance that is ready at hand and lay themselves open to all sorts of delusions. Their basic mistake is to think of guidance as essentially inward prompting by the Holy Spirit, apart from the written Word.
In the New Testament, grace means God’s love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.
Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.
