We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The God Who Stoops
The way that one imagines God can be thought of along the lines of a Rorschach test. That is, I submit that the way a person imagines and experiences God says at least as much about that person as it does God. The more estranged people are from God, the more their knowledge of him is obstructed and distorted. And when people yield to the Spirit, they are empowered to discern the true glory of God “in the face of Jesus Christ.”
That being said, the standard that must function as the ultimate criteria by which we assess the extent to which any conception and experience of God is accurate or inaccurate is the revelation of God in the crucified Christ.
Hence, on the one hand, to the extent that any conception and experience of God conforms to the character of God revealed on the cross, we may conclude that the Spirit has managed to break through the limited and fallen hearts and minds of people. On the other hand, to the extent that any conception or experience fails to conform to this character, we must conclude that the limited and fallen hearts and minds of people have resisted the Spirit.
Given Scripture’s repeated teaching that the people God claimed for himself in the OT were a “stiff-necked” people who continually resisted the Spirit, we ought not be surprised to discover that their conceptions and experiences of God were sometimes distorted. To the contrary, I believe we ought to rather be impressed by how frequently the Spirit succeeded in breaking through to disclose beautiful portraits of God that reflect his true character.
Knowing what we now know about God through his self-revelation on Calvary, we ought to be able to discern the true character of God in the depths of even the most seriously distorted portraits of God in the OT. For when we view them through the lens of the cross, we can see that there is something going on beneath the surface. We can discern in their depth the same humble God of self-sacrificial love stooping to bear the sin of his people that we discern on the cross.
In the OT, we can see God working within his people’s faulty Rorschach-like conceptions and experiences of him. God was bearing the sinful perspectives of his covenant people, including the horrifically violent concepts they had of him. He was accommodating the hard-heartedness of his people, stooping to their level to move his people in the right direction. The fact that God was willing to stoop in this fashion and bear the sin of his people reveals God’s true character, anticipating the revelation of God ultimately revealed on the cross.
Photo credit: jimforest via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Bible Interpretation, Cruciform Theology
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Related Reading
Early Anabaptists and the Centrality of Christ
In a previous post, I wrote about the Christocentric interpretation of the Scriptures espoused by the magisterial Reformers, specifically Luther and Calvin. Their hermeneutic was focused on the work and the offices of Christ, but in my opinion the Anabaptists surpasses their approach because it focused on the person of Christ with an unparalleled emphasis…
How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part II
In Part I of my review of Scott Oliphint’s God With Us we saw that Oliphint is attempting to reframe divine accommodation in a Christ-centerd way. Yet, while he affirms that “Christ is the quintessential revelation of God,” he went on to espouse a classical view of God that was anchored in God’s “aseity,” not…
Reviewing the Reviews: Tom Belt (Part 2)
In my previous post I reviewed Tom’s critical review of volume 1 of CWG, and in this post I’d like to do the same for his critical review of volume 2. As he did in his review of volume I, Tom begins with some praises and points of agreement. He thinks my quest to discern “what…
Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update
Did you know that authors generally don’t have much say-so about the cover art for their books? It’s considered part of the marketing, so the author may or may not like how it ends up looking. I’ve had a few book covers that made me scratch my head. (I won’t tell you which ones, but it would…
God Became What He is Not To Reveal What He Is
We are saved because Jesus became the curse of the law for us (Gal. 3:13). So too, the way Christ freed us from the condemnation of sin and enabled us to “become the righteousness of God” was by becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). What is more, since the curse of the law includes enslavement to…
Who Killed Ananias and Sapphira? A Response to Paul Copan (#6)
In his critique of Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG), Paul Copan makes a concerted effort to argue that the God revealed in Jesus Christ and witnessed to throughout the NT is not altogether non-violent. One of the passages Copan cites against me is the famous account of Ananias and Sapphira falling down dead immediately…