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.
God is Not What You Expect
Jesus with Child [Canvas on oil painting136.00
God is one, and yet we discover that his oneness is the oneness of eternal perfect love between three distinct Persons. God is all holy, but his holiness is his utterly unique love that leads him to become sin on our behalf (2 Cor. 5:21). God is righteous, but his righteousness is the justice of his love that leads him to become a cursed criminal for us on Calvary (1 Cor. 1:18). God is unfathomably glorious, but his glory is the radiance of a perfect love that leads him to become one who was despised, humiliated and forsaken out of love for us. And God is immutable, but his immutability is the unchangeableness of his eternal love that led him to change radically and take on our humanity, sin and condemnation.
This is what God is like! He really is this beautiful and loving! All of us have to one degree or another been conditioned to view God in a deceptive way, which is why many of us struggle to believe this. We’re tempted to see Jesus as perhaps part of what God is like, but not the very essence of God. Afflicted by the Accuser who fills our minds with condemnation and fear, we may wonder when “the other side” of God will show up and crush us.
How desperately we need to become confident that there is no other side to God. If we see Christ, we see the Father. The fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him. He’s the one perfect expression of the Father’s essence. God is light, John says, and there is no darkness in him (1 John 1:5). There’s no shadow side of God, no trace of malice, no hint of meanness. He’s altogether loving, compassionate and just. Calvary reveals the whole truth about God, and nothing but the truth.
Admittedly, there have been times when God in his love had to stoop to the level of instilling fear in people because their sin had tainted them to such a great degree that there was no other choice. But his ultimate goal has always been to have a people who receive and reflect back to him his perfect love. And perfect love drives out fear (1 Jn. 4:18). He wants a people who feel compelled to serve him not out of fear, but out of love.
God is different than you could ever expect because none of us could ever dream of God being as good as he is. This is the reason Paul prayed that we would be able “to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:18-29)
Category: General
Tags: Attributes of God, Character of God, God is Love, Jesus
Related Reading
The Key to Understanding the Bible
In yesterday’s post we discussed how Jesus is the starting point for interpreting Scripture. If this is the case and Jesus is the subject matter of all Scripture, then the ultimate challenge is to disclose how each aspect of Scripture bears witness to his subject. To state it otherwise, if the intended function of all Scripture is to mediate…
The Destiny of God’s People
Jesus represents the realization of God’s glorious dream for humanity. In Christ, we see what we who are in Christ are destined to be. As a stick placed in a river is destined to be carried to whatever body of water the river runs to, so all who have allowed themselves to be drawn by…
The Rule of Love
The traditional confession that Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres (“Sacred Scripture is its own interpreter”) presupposes that there is one divine mind behind Scripture, for example. Moreover, Church scholars have traditionally assumed that Scripture’s unity can be discerned in a variety of concepts, motifs, themes and theologies that weave Scripture together. And to speak specifically of the…
Jesus, the Word of God
“[T]he standing message of the Fathers to the Church Universal,” writes Georges Florovsky, was that “Christ Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures both the climax and the knot of the Bible.”[1] It was also unquestionably one of the most foundational theological assumptions of Luther and Calvin as well as other Reformers. Hence,…
Is Jesus Unique?
The Search for a Non-Unique Jesus Built into the naturalistic assumption that drives the liberal New Testament search for the “man behind the myth” is the notion that, whoever Jesus was, he cannot have been utterly unique. The laws that operate in the world today, including the laws of human behavior, have always operated. And…
What do you think of the “Penal Substitution” view of the atonement?
If asked what Jesus came to do and how he did it, most contemporary western Christians would automatically say something like, “Jesus took the punishment from God that I deserved.” This is what’s usually called “Penal Substitution” view of the atonement, for it emphasizes that Jesus was punished by God in our place. His sacrifice…