God-In-The-Box

We have a problem. The Bible hasn’t changed in nearly two millennia, but how we view God changes regularly and certain aspects of His character rise and fall in trendy popularity. In short, regardless of how His Word describes Him, we still “create” God in our image.

During pretty much my whole lifetime, our culture focuses on the aspects of God that deal with love—‘Our Father in heaven,’ ‘God is love,’ and so on, with just enough of His justice so that we can get back to mercy, grace, love, peace, blessings, and so on with some sort of ‘context.’

There is also a kick of flavor added in by Lewis (in Narnia), Young (in The Shack) and others, including me who talk about God’s unpredictability, that He is wild and doesn’t conform to our image of him, but we still tend to think of things more on the softer side of wild, as a whole.

It was not like that 200+ years ago.

God's Anger

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him.” John 3:36 NIV

What a profound and unpopular verse. Even most non-believers can quote John 3:16, but even many churches stop there, shying away from the subsequent discussion of condemnation. I understand. We spend an astounding quantity of all of our types of resources to put the best face on ourselves, the best spin on our lives.

Yet, God would rather clean up our mess than paint over it. Our mess is there. It’s real. It is the foul odor of our secret places, the weight that pushes our head into our hands when we hope no one is looking. It is the stage IV cancer in our soul.

We want, and need, a doctor that is offended by cancer, that sees it as an enemy to be crushed, annihilated, not someone who takes it in stride between golf games. We need a doctor that is angry with us when we treat it with mild indifference or ignore it—a doctor that will push us to death’s door to force us to acknowledge our dire condition, then, when we turn in fright and horror, will hold us and say I have the cure, here and now. Take it. See life. Be living. Be disease-free.

But who will take a cure for a disease they don’t believe they have? We need to know we are terminal, to know we are condemned, to realize we need a cure, a pardon. Anything else is only half the Gospel, or less. The sad part is that half of a cure can often make the disease worse.

SDG