God is a mystery,but if you are a married man, you know that so is your wife! However you won’t usually avoid knowing her or trying to understand her because you sometimes don’t. God is mysterious,but mysteriously good and mysteriously loving and mysteriously awesome and He isn’t so scary He is to be avoided. In Hebrews 10:31, when talking about “insulting the Spirit of Grace(or God), it says “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God”. Of course that is true but to help us try and understand our God ,we will need to grasp the healthy balance of two seemingly opposing personas we see in God that walk together. We see this balance all the time as we read through the scriptures . But it is not a good/bad dualism or even the ying yang in Tao. It is the likable/lovable vs the frightening/perplexing.
Today there is a new wave of understanding about God’s nature of grace. But as people dive into these wonderful truths they can tend to get carried away,then come to crazy conclusions and say things like, “God is so gracious,I’m sure satan can be saved, too!” Or, “I am pretty sure we don’t even need to read the Old Testament as it’s irrelevant.I’m all about Jesus.The God of the Old Testament was guilty of killing people and I can’t reconcile or believe in a God who would do that! Those stories must be just allegories”. While I can see how people might go there, they seem to miss the point that God is beyond our comprehension! His ways inscrutable…and He is beyond understanding. The bible tells us God can actually give us a peace that defies understanding! So why is it such a stretch to think we are invited and asked to BELIEVE ,but not necessarily UNDERSTAND? Winston Churchill after WWII, when trying to describe the way Russia operated, called them, ”a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Now that was trying to understand and describe how the police state of the Soviet Union worked. But God is infinitely more mysterious than that! Yet the problem is not with GOD. Because there is one thing we can be clear about, and that is that GOD is good,loving,merciful and HE is LOVE. So whether we understand HIM or not, God is the unchanging ONE, not us. WE are the ones with the challenge of believing in a being we scarcely understand. The fear of God could be said to be the acceptance of these extremes of compassion,love,mercy & grace on one hand and righteousness, justice, truth and wrath on the other! These contradictions are seen all through BOTH the Old and New testaments and can confuse someone trying to have faith in a God he barely comprehends. For example the characters of suffering JOB and joyful JESUS don’t seem to intersect, but God thinks they do. Another example of this kind of apparent tension is in Luke 12 where Jesus, not Job, said this:“I say to you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear the One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear Him! Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.” Luke 12:4-7 |
AuthorPastor Marc Lawson Archives
July 2018
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AboutThere are 168 hours in every week. The 166 Factor is the answer to the question: "Who are you the OTHER 166 hours a week when you are NOT in church?" Join the community here as we will be discussing this and other topics related to Reformation in the Church, The End of Church (As We Know It) & The 166 Lifestyle.
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