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096 | The Mean Old Testament God
538 Plays2 years ago
In the second episode of this mini-series on systematic theology, Phylicia digs into the "mean" Old Testament God and why we need a biblical view of *both* God's love and holiness to understand salvation through Christ. We talk about God's wrath, the redefining of love, and how God's holiness in the OT is what makes Him trustworthy today.
Based on Chapter Two of Every Woman a Theologian, available for preorder here: https://everywomanatheologian.comRecommended
Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast and Theological Question
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Welcome to Verity Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia Mason-Heimer, and I am here to teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it graciously to the world around you. I believe that women are ready to go deeper in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it. I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every woman is a theologian.
00:00:29
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Hello friends. Well, I'm excited for this week's episode because we're talking about an issue that comes up frequently when we are discipling other people about basic Christian doctrine and beliefs. It's also something I had to wrestle with personally in my own walk with Christ.
Personal Journey with Theological Questions
00:00:46
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When I was a beginning Christian, I was really struggling through why God allowed certain things to happen to me. Specifically, in my struggle with sexual sin from when I was 12 to my early 20s, I really wrestled with why God would allow certain things to occur in my life that caused me to stumble on
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erotic novels and led to my addiction. And so I question God's goodness and God's kindness and God's love while also wrestling through, is God truly sovereign? Like, why did he let this happen? If he is sovereign, isn't it his fault? So all of those are theological questions that I was asking at 14, 15, 16 years old. And they're questions that a lot of people are asking today in different
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areas and over different issues in their lives. If you are listening to this, you have probably asked those questions. And so I hope that as we look at God's character in this episode, you will learn something that is helpful to you in that journey.
Introducing 'Every Woman a Theologian' and God's Character
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So this episode is a part of a mini-series. Each episode is based on a chapter in my new book, Every Woman a Theologian. Know what you believe, live it confidently, communicate it graciously. It comes out February 28th, and this is focused on chapter two, which is the theology of God the Father. And so talking about this mean Old Testament God and the balance of love and justice, that whole issue
00:02:23
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is what chapter two is about and that's what we're going to talk about in this particular episode. So I want to start first by going back to my own wrestling with the goodness of God and the sovereignty of God. I really struggled to accept God's love and part of that was the
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assumption, presupposition I had about God's character and his kindness, and part of that was my own guilt and shame over my addiction. And if you want to know more about my testimony and sexual sin, I talked about it on the marriage series with my husband, and then I've also talked about it way, way back in the very first season on sexuality as well.
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So, I struggled to see God as kind. And part of that struggle then led me to wonder, does he really desire to be in relationship with me? And I think this is something a lot of Christians wrestle with. But the Bible itself upends these assumptions.
Western Biases and Old Testament Understanding
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The Bible destroys our assumptions about God's character if we let it. And that's why we have to check our theology against Scripture to be sure that what we believe is actually true. And this is why I always say, check what you believe against what the word says. Don't just take it for granted. The God of the Old Testament, the one that we often call mean, the one that we
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wonder about his wrath and his justice, that God is the same God who sent Jesus, John 3 16. We forget that, but the more we study it, the more apparent this becomes. And so as we learn the character of God, we find him so much more kind, so much greater and so much gentler than we ever imagined.
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So one of the first problems that we have when understanding the Old Testament God is that we don't let God define himself. We bring all of our assumptions to God and we have to let him destroy
Unity of God and Jesus in the Trinity
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those. We have to allow the Old Testament in its appropriate context to destroy that Western bias that we bring to the text.
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We live in a culture that is enamored with love. It's unacquainted with true justice. It's really a free-for-all. Every man is doing what's right in his own eyes. And because of that, we have a hard time reading a passage that was written to people in an honor-shame culture.
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where family honor and respect for elders and integrity were very important and still are in many Middle Eastern cultures. So our cultural differences can cause us to struggle to form this accurate picture of the God of Israel. We have to let God define himself and let the Bible reorient us to who God is.
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The God of the Old Testament is often accused of being vindicative, wrathful, violent, unloving. And then in contrast, many people will say, well, look at Jesus. He's loving and kind and nonviolent and accepting.
Scripture as a Guide to God's Character
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And so we end up presenting God and Jesus as two oppositional forces instead of two sides of the same coin or three sides, really, because with this view, we completely leave the Holy Spirit out.
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So when we create this dichotomy between God and Jesus and we act as if God and Jesus aren't one or God didn't send Jesus, we end up with a really screwed up theology that isn't what the Bible teaches at all. So when we look correctly at scripture, we see that Jesus is and was God. God sent and is one with Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the essence of Christ given for our growth.
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the Trinity, a fundamental of Christian teaching. When we splice apart these persons of God based on our own feelings about love and wrath, we end up with theology that isn't what the Bible teaches at all.
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We have to deal in the revealed word of God, not just our feelings about that word. And this means wrestling with the text and letting them teach us about who the Father is.
God's Love and the Trinity
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And when we do that, we come away so much more secure in His love for us. And that's what I found in my own journey.
00:06:52
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So there are several fundamentals of God's character that we could talk about here. God as Trinity, God as love, God's omniscience, his sovereignty, his righteousness. There's so much ground that could be covered in the chapter of the book. I chose to focus on six attributes and I'm only going to hone in on his love and holiness in this particular episode because I want to specifically address this idea of
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the God of the Old Testament as mean and this tension that we create between Jesus and Father God as if they are those oppositional forces when they are in fact not. They are one God with multiple persons, so three persons, Holy Spirit, Father and Son. So to do that, I want to first talk about God's love and then we'll move to talking about God's holiness.
00:07:48
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So one of the fundamentals that I obviously didn't get into here is that God's love is directly connected to his triune nature. Because God is Trinity, he is in community with himself and pouring and creating out of community. He is not a selfish being. He's not a being that's only concerned about what he wants and creating little slaves and minions, like in many monotheistic religions.
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What's unique about the Christian God is that he is entirely fulfilled in his communing self and therefore he did not need people
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He created people out of that communal love. And then he created people who also needed community, both with God and with other humans. So that's a really unique impact of the Trinity that we won't be able to go into a lot of detail on here. But if you're curious about that, I recommend the book Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves.
Defining God's Love vs. Cultural Definitions
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So that said, let's talk about God's love. So we know that in 1 John 4a it says God is love. Some progressive Christians have taken this to mean that love is God. But these are not the same thing. These are not equivalent statements. God is love. Love is completely a part of his nature. It is something that is innate to who he is. He defines what it is.
00:09:17
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But love is not God. Love as an attribute does not have the same authority and power as God, does not have the sovereignty of God. And unfortunately, what we often see in either functionally or expressly in progressive Christianity and the ways that it leeches into parenting advice, biblical exegesis, Bible studies, books, is that love as culturally defined is God.
00:09:47
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So, taking 1 John 4-8 and making a false equivalency, which is a logical fallacy. So, what does John say in context about love? Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
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Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4, 7-11.
00:10:32
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So there's a couple truths about love in this paragraph. We know God is love, right? But we also have some definitions of love here. God's love is sacrificial. He sent his only son into the world. He also sent his only son that we might live through.
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through him. So there's obviously a reason that we would not have been able to live. We were dying and God's love saved us through Christ. So his love is self-giving, sacrificial.
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We also see that God was the initiator in this love. He loved us and sent his son. And then his son is a propitiation for our sins. And this is where when
God's Love in Relationships vs. Cultural Ideals
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we flip the truth that God is love to say, love is God, you'll almost always see this essential part of God's love left out. God's love was active and its action was to make people holy.
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Jesus died to take our place as propitiation for our sins. And that is an integral part of what God's love is. It's a holy making love, a purifying love. And so if your love does not make you holy, it is not biblical love.
00:11:52
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That's a great measuring stick. And so God's love makes us holy, but it's also self-giving and sacrificial. And in this way, John says, God so loved us, so therefore we should also love each other.
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I think of a great expression in human relationships of this love is in marriage, where yes, we have a feeling of love for each other, but that feeling can come and go. And so what attributes of love are left if the feeling isn't there?
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the self-giving nature, the sacrificial nature, the purifying, sanctifying nature. So Josh, he is self-giving towards me. He's very sacrificial. He just came in and cleared the plate away from my lunch, put it in the dishwasher. He got me Starbucks coffee today. He is really acing this love game today. But he also is good at sanctifying love, and that's uncomfortable sometimes, right? His love
00:12:49
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will speak up to me and challenge my sin and refine me. And I need that in that covenant relationship to become a better wife and a better person. And so in our covenant relationship with God, His love also works in this way. It's the template for marital love and sanctifies us and is self-giving and sacrificial and leads us to emulate what Jesus did.
00:13:19
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So we know this about God's love. This is the definition of love and it diverges from our culture's ideals because today in our culture, love can mean endorsement, affirmation, unquestioning support, attention.
Cultural vs. Biblical Love and Justice
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If you don't give someone these things, you are deemed unloving. But this does not align with God's definition of love.
00:13:44
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The love of Christ is self-giving and sacrificial, and it's also wise. God's love is not in opposition to attributes like holiness and righteousness. It is complementary to them. So in other words, these are not two poles on a globe, but two sides of the same coin. Like I said earlier, you can't have love without justice and truth, and you can't have true justice without love.
00:14:11
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So as we, a modern culture, moved away from God, we've separated ourselves from both true justice and true love. Our justice is now polluted by selfish opinions, lack of consideration for others, and our love is polluted by this mistaken idea that affection equals endorsement of sin. So God, in the Old and New Testament, He destroys these assumptions.
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His love will not be manipulated or separated from truth, and yet it is His truthful love that chases us down and seeks us in our sin.
Overcoming Addiction through Understanding God's Love
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Jesus proved that God's heart, holy as it is, is not to separate from the sinner, but to invite the sinner to experience God's love.
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He revealed that God's seeking, loving heart to humanity is available in a relationship with Him where we experience the transformative love of God. And so this exposure to the Father's heart changes us because God's love is sanctifying.
00:15:22
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In my own testimony, when I was struggling with my sexual sin, my erotic addiction, I really struggled to trust this, to trust God's love. I would waffle between repentance and fear. So I would repent because I knew something was wrong, and then I would
00:15:40
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I wonder like, did I really repent because I'm still struggling with this? And in the repentance episode, I talk at length about that. But my motivation to repentance wasn't truly the kindness and love of God. My motivation was fear.
00:15:56
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I repented because I was afraid of God, afraid of sin, afraid of what might happen if I stayed in my sin. And so, yes, I think some of that was a healthy fear. I should fear the consequences of sin. I should fear what would happen if I lived in that place. I think when we get to that apathetic point, it's really dangerous. But in scripture, this fear should always be tempered by and removed by the open arms of God.
00:16:26
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I did not trust that God's arms were open to me. I believed that this judging God saw my sin and I was exposed. And it wasn't until I really pressed into studying God's love through some different books I read in my teens that I understood why I kept repeating the same patterns of sin, why I couldn't get freedom from the addiction in the first place. And it was because I did not trust God's love.
00:16:55
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My repentance was genuine, but because I never felt truly attached to God, secure in His love for me and His grace over my sin, I kept returning to this familiar addiction. I was so unfamiliar and unwilling to accept the affection of God that I ran to the very thing destroying my heart.
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And that's why the love of God is so important because it's the glue of scripture. It's binding together all these theological truths that we learn about God. And the Christian God is distinct because he is, in every part of his being, love.
Old Testament Stories and God's Love
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He is love, and every human love we experience and try to idolize or replace God's love with is just an echo of His original, hesed, faithful-seeking love. In the book I say that this love is brave enough to redeem the darkest sinner you know, even if that sinner is you.
00:17:53
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This is the hope that Christ offers us. And it's what John was talking about in 1 John 4 when he said, you have to come to know and believe the love that God has for you. Only when you do that will you see transformation. And so we can know God's love, but we have to believe it. And until we do, we can't actually live in it.
00:18:16
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And the eternal life that God offers, John 3 16, that God sent his only son to offer this eternal life to us, it's not just after death. It's for now. It's today to experience his power. And it's a real life free from addiction and dependency and anger and bitterness. It's a life knowing and believing that God's love is for you, not just for everyone else.
00:18:42
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So that's God's love. And to understand the God of the Old Testament, and to understand that he is not this mean boogeyman megalomaniac who's different from Jesus, as if God underwent this like metamorphosis in the silent period between the Old and New Testaments. No, that's not what happened. God's love is all through the Old Testament.
00:19:08
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God's grace to Adam and Eve that he didn't kill them on the spot, but instead slaughtered an animal to clothe them? That was grace. That was love. God's love in saying to Noah, I see you walk with me. I could wipe this whole world out, including you. You're just one family. But no, I'm going to show my faithfulness to you. I'm going to have you partner with me to build this ark, to preserve your family. That was love.
00:19:33
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When God came to Abraham and said, hey, I know you listen to me. I'm going to take you out of this land. I'm going to give you a promise and I'm going to walk with you even as you lie and you fail and you don't believe me. I'm going to build a family through you and your great, great, great, great, great grandson through your line will save the world. That was love.
00:20:01
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All through the Old Testament we see the love of God, the law that's given to Israel. That was love. The law was God's favor and grace on Israel so they could be a city on a hill to the nations around them saying, come here, come here, come know this God. Come see this God.
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live this way, this blessed way, so that you can have the presence of God with you. The Holy God loves us so much, He gave us the template for living with Him. The law was love.
God's Wrath as Protective Love
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God is love all through the Old Testament. And so when you see God's wrath, it's like I wrote in our Revelation Bible study in the Every Woman a Theologian Shop. When we see God's wrath in the Bible, this wrath is not this arbitrary human anger. God's wrath is the wrath of love, one theologian said, that seeks to protect those who are his.
00:20:59
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God's wrath is against everything that would attack and destroy His own. And that means all evil and everyone and everything that partners with evil. What does this tell us? You want to be on God's side. You want to be on the side of love. You don't want to be on the side of evil and opposing God. God opposes the proud. Why? Because pride is evil and it destroys those He loves.
00:21:25
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So when we read things like God opposes the proud, it's not like, oh, God doesn't love the proud. No, God loves for the proud to humble themselves and be a part of his family. But when they don't do that, he has to oppose them because they would destroy his own. He is the most loving father. When I think about my own children, if someone is after my children,
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They want to hurt or destroy my children. I will go to war against them because I love my children. But what if somebody just kind of passively supports the person trying to destroy my children? They don't say it's wrong.
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They don't, you know, argue against it. They kind of just stand with the person, but aren't actively seeking to destroy my children. What about them? Well, they're partnering with evil by their passivity. They're saying, I'm not going to say this is wrong. I'm not going to stand up for what's right. If God is a loving father protecting his children, then his wrath against evil is righteous. The thing that wants to kill those who are his own.
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And then anyone who stands with that evil or makes concessions to that evil or partners with that evil has told him what side they are on. And the whole time that this is happening, his arms are open and that very enemy could become one of his children too.
00:22:54
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That is the scandal of grace. That is salvation. So as long as someone refuses God's open arms, they remain in separation and they remain opposed to God and his wrath. God's wrath is the wrath of love. It is an entirely just wrath.
Explaining the Gospel and God's Holiness
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And until we recognize that, we will continue to make these false equivalencies and read things into the Old Testament that just aren't there. God is love, and even his wrath is loving. If someone asked you to explain the gospel, could you do it? If your coworker came to you with questions about why Jesus had to die, or your child asked you to define the Trinity, could you provide an answer?
00:23:44
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00:24:05
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00:24:31
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00:25:03
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So let's talk about God's holiness. The word for holy in Hebrew means separate or set apart. God is totally unlike us. He's perfect. He's sinless. He's completely good. His holiness, this is important, is the guarantee of his love.
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Because God is so perfectly holy, we can trust His love is unstained by self-interest.
Interconnection of Holiness and Love
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And this is why we can't pit God's love and holiness against each other. They have to be viewed as one complementary unit.
00:25:36
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We can't separate them. And we know that God's holiness is incredibly important to his character because the entire Bible talks about it. Exodus 15, 11, Isaiah 57, 15, 1 Thessalonians 4, 7, 1 Peter 1, 16. All through the Bible we see how God is holy. And we need him to be holy. We need him to be holy because
00:26:01
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all moral behavior is rooted in the character of a holy and righteous God. When we think about the moral law, so the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, Fruit of the Spirit, Galatians 5, we think of these things as just and loving, right? We don't want to make concessions to murder or envy or adultery or anything like that, stealing, lying. We know these things are wrong. Even our culture would say these things are wrong. We make government laws to penalize people for doing these things.
00:26:30
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And yet when we judge God as angry or wrathful for His holiness, we're actually undermining the foundation for all moral behavior. God should be wrathful against murder. It's the killing of an image bearer. He should be angry when people envy and are materialistic and manipulate to get more or when they wound other image bearers. God is wrathful against sin because God is love. And that love is perfectly holy.
00:27:01
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R. C. Sproul describes sin against the love of God this way. Sin is cosmic treason. It is treason against a perfectly pure sovereign. It is an act of supreme and gratitude toward the one to whom we owe everything to the one who has given us life itself.
00:27:19
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What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, God, Your law is not good. My judgment is better than Your's. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do.
00:27:40
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I love this quote because it points out that our human understanding of holiness is tainted by our tendency towards self-interest. So unless we are exposed to the truth of God's character in scripture, we will make allowances for our own little pet sins. We'll try to downplay God's holiness. And then we won't recognize that when we downplay God's holiness and his justice, we also downplay his love.
00:28:05
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And in the end, we lose because we have no leg to stand on when we try to say something is wrong. When we try to teach our kids, hey, be kind, but without any moral judge, any foundation for kindness, any objective standard of right and wrong. Last week's episode on bibliography, we talked about why we need an objective standard. And in this week, now we're seeing that implication.
Objective Moral Standards in God's Holiness
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I was recently looking at a, um, a post on Instagram.
00:28:33
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I think it was on Sharon Says So account, and they were talking about how many Congress members in the United States claim to be Christians. And it was a lot. It was kind of surprising, actually, claim to be Christians being the important note there. But in the comments underneath, people, Christians, including
00:28:57
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people who I know are authors, Christian authors, were writing in the comments that they didn't care whether someone was a Christian or not, or religious or not. But they just wanted people to be kind to one another. These are Christian authors, by the way, commenting this, you know, I don't care if someone shares my faith, I just want people to be kind to each other. And
00:29:20
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I'm not voting for someone to be a Christian leader in my Congress. I expect that as a secular institution. If a Christian person runs, then hooray. But that's not what I'm looking for personally. But what
00:29:36
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I noticed in these comments was that even these Christian authors were saying that they wanted kindness out of their Congress and out of the people who are voting for these congressmen and women without a foundation for kindness, without an objective standard.
00:29:59
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But without an objective standard, you don't even have a definition for what is kind. I could say it's kind for me to trip you because I think that tripping you helps me reach the finish line faster. And if I reach the finish line, I will do more positive things for the world than you will.
00:30:24
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It's a very Marvel endgame kind of thing here. This is a Thanos way of thinking, if you're into the Marvel universe, that if we remove the objective standard, we still are able to have kindness and peace and love and joy and all these things we see as the fruit of the spirit. But the whole point of the fruit of the spirit, the whole reason we have that fruit is because of the spirit.
00:30:48
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which means you have to have a moral judge of right and wrong. This is one big ball of wax and it all unravels as soon as you say, I don't need God's holiness. I don't need a holy God. I don't need a just and true God. So not liking God's wrath is like the little thread that when you pull it, it all comes unraveling.
00:31:09
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If you don't understand how essential God's wrath and justice and holiness are to the equation, you will start nitpicking and choosing a salad bar Christianity where you just have love and kindness and peace and joy, but in reality, you have just taken away the entire foundation for those things. This is dangerous.
00:31:31
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And it won't work because as soon as you find a new framework, a new worldview to tell you what kindness is, you can say that, you know what, kindness is divorcing my husband with no cause. I just watched this happen with a blogger I've followed for seven years. This person decided, was a Christian, deconstructed out of Christianity, became new age, increasingly more focused on manifesting wealth, manifesting
00:31:58
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what she deemed correct morality, her moral code changed, and then she announced that she was leaving her husband because it wasn't serving her anymore.
00:32:10
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And so this is an example of changing that moral foundation. We have to have a God who is holy and just as that foundation for all things that are righteous and good, for all things that are covenantal and holy.
00:32:29
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You have to have that holy God and you have to remember that His holiness is loving. His holiness is for our good. His holiness is the reason we can trust that His love will never change. You take away God's holiness, you can't trust His love.
00:32:49
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It is vital that Christians understand both holiness and love in their theology.
Balance of Love and Holiness in Theology
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Many believers tend to emphasize one over the other, and this leads to an imbalance in extreme theology. Because if God is only holy and not loving, there's no hope for us. There's no safety in His affection.
00:33:07
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And if God is all love and no holiness, my behavior doesn't matter and I'm left in my sins, hurting other image-bearers with my selfish deeds. God's love calls us to holiness so that we love others effectively and in doing so, bless the world.
00:33:22
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God's justice is the marriage of His love and holiness together. And His justice is what calls us to align our desires with Him because we know that He's our foundation. Without love, God's justice would be ruthless. Without holiness, God's justice would be untrue. We have to have both of these things.
00:33:44
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I love what Craig Blomberg said about the righteous. He said, out of the love of God and love of the neighbor, the righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to the advantage of the community. The wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. And this is what all those commentators on the Sharon Sesso post were saying. They were saying,
00:34:09
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I want people in Congress who don't disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. But they want that without transformed hearts. And I'm telling you right now, it can't happen.
00:34:24
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It can't happen. You might get it temporarily, a workspace visual lip service kind of righteousness. But until the heart has changed, you're going to see more and more corrupt politicians, more and more fallen pastors, because there was no fear of God before their eyes.
Conclusion and Book Pre-orders
00:34:43
Speaker
There was no reverence for His holiness. The quote unquote mean God of the Old Testament.
00:34:50
Speaker
is the God of your salvation and your hope. And without that righteous God, that holy God who sent Jesus to save you, you have no love, no kindness, no protection, no peace.
00:35:12
Speaker
The God of the Old Testament is the God who wove that covenantal story together so that Jesus Christ would be born and die to save you from evil. It was the wrath of God poured out on Christ, on that cross, so he could protect his own.
00:35:36
Speaker
It was Papa Bear, if you will, going to war for his children. And until we recognize that and see the loving power of his holiness, see the kindness of his holiness, we will read the Old Testament through a deceived lens and we will not see the goodness of his grace.
00:36:09
Speaker
There's so much more I could say about this topic, but I'm going to leave it for the book. If you are interested in learning more about the theology of God, his wrath, his justice, his sovereignty, his omniscience, his love, if you want to be able to explain this to those around you.
00:36:25
Speaker
Every Woman a Theologian is available for pre-order. There's a workbook and an eight-week video study too. And if you pre-order, you get the first chapter of the workbook and the video, as well as some other wonderful bonuses. You can grab that at everywomanatheologian.com. And as always, you guys, thank you for listening.
00:36:44
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Verity Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you take the time to leave us a review? It helps so many other women around the world find out about Verity and about every woman a theologian as a ministry and a shop. We appreciate you and I hope you'll be back next week as we continue to go deeper into God's word and the heart of Jesus Christ.