Saturday, June 25, 2011

It Takes No Faith to Believe a Loving God Will Save Lovable People

I haven't been working on my blogging lately.  I've been planning for the next homeschool year.  Both blogging and homeschool planning take the same creative level of my brain, a level with room for only one occupant.

But something has been on my mind to the point that the thoughts on the subject were starting to invade that part of my brain, and in order to get on with my educational pursuits, I had to empty my brain onto my blog.

When the bible talks about "storms", does it mean the "storms of life"?


I hear this a lot: "Jesus will give you the faith to face the 'storms of life'", as if faith is something primarily to help us through the hard times in this world.  And often when  you hear teachers teach on the passages of the bible concerning storms and floods, those teachers relate storms to the hardships in our life.  But is the faith God calls us simply faith to be saved from life's trials?  Is this what it means to be "saved"?

Lately, I've been paying close attention to all the passages containing tempestuous terminology.  Storms, floods, tempests, etc. seem usually (if not exclusively) to God's coming judgment--whether earthly or eternal.

There are too many passages to quote, but the first one that ought to come to everyone's mind is the flood that destroyed all life on earth except that life protected by the Ark.  But there are also numerous verses, through the Psalms and the Prophets, like this one:

"Behold the Storm of the Lord!
Wrath has gone forth
A whirling tempest;
it will burst upon the head of the wicked.
The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back
until he has executed and accomplished
the plans of his mind.
In the latter days, you will understand this."
-Jeremiah 30:23,24
and also:

"Therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him. (Psalm 32:6)
And I suppose the most notorious is in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7, when Jesus preaches about the different ends to the house built on the rock and the one on built on the sand.  The test of these houses where when the rains fell and the floods came.  There is no biblical basis for believing Jesus was speaking of anything other than the last judgment.  In fact, he had just preached before that parable that not everyone who says to him "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven.  The context of the story points to the Last Day.

Our God is a Holy Terror

I recently saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, "On Stranger Tides".  There is this scene early in the movie where the pirate Blackbeard punishes a man by sending him off in a dinghy into the sea.  Blackbeard then turns the ship to follow the man and the dinghy somehow causes the ship to throw forward, out onto the water, tremendous flames of fire to consume the poor sailor and his little boat.

It was a truly horrifying scene--a scene designed to set up Blackbeard as a truly evil villain and bring us to a point where we would long for his demise at the end of the movie, but will our situation after death be much better than that sailor's unless we are saved by God's mercy through Jesus and his atonement on the cross?  But ever since I saw that movie, I can't get the verse out of my mind from Psalms, "Fire goes before him and burns up his adversaries all around." (Psalm 97:3)  Judging from this and many similar passages of scripture that there would certainly be justification for us to be quite as terrified in his presence, filled with horror you would expect from any victim in the worst slasher movie you could imagine, multiplied times a thousand.  I'm quite sure I could easily fill a few pages of blog space writing about the modern euphemistic treatment of the term "fear-of-God".   Along with Hell, "fear of God" is a doctrine of which we've become ashamed and become compelled to explain it away.

God - A Schizophrenic Fellow?


Am I the only one that has noticed that, throughout scripture, God appears to go through some serious mood swings?  One minute God speaks with the voice of a husband enraged at his unfaithful wife, and the next minute he's writing love sonnets.  Well, not really love sonnets, but he speaks with eagerness for his people to turn back to him and shows that he longs for reconciliation.

Now any parent, if they consider carefully, would not find this schizophrenic but completely understandable.  Little stirs anger in the heart of parent as your kids become stubborn after being bad and act like they haven't done anything wrong and have no idea why you are so angry.  This is just a fraction of how God must feel when we've wronged him and we've rebelled in so many more ways than one--breaking his law daily, hourly even--and have a bent to love sin and hate righteousness.  And usually we're clueless to our fault, but like the child who remains stubbornly confused, this does not make us innocent in the matter.  Our clueless attitude only adds to God's rage.

Now you might comfort yourself saying, "But parents always long to be reconciled to our children!  We get angry, but long to give mercy."  I would say to you that you must consider that those who remain dead in their sins are not children of God, but children of the Devil. (John 8:44).  And we must examine the words of God carefully and not be too easily confident that we know which group we belong to.  Jesus spoke these words in John 8 to Jews who were quite confident that they were in God's favor simply because they were Jews.  What is your reasoning, and is it found in God's word?  I may be accused by some of encouraging people to "doubt their salvation", but surely the Apostles exhort us, as do I, to be "sure of our salvation".  There are many warnings throughout God's Word to those who have false assurance.

God has every right to be enraged with every one of us.  And we have every reason to be afraid of him.  Again, I ask those who are parents, is there anything that rings true in the repentance of a child who seems to have no true fear of what might happen if he does not repent? Fear of God is appropriate for everyone, including his children.  Perhaps especially his children.  Scripture speaks of the "God-fearing" as synonymous to the "righteous".


Does it Take Any Faith to Embrace a God who has no Wrath Towards Us?


Most consider themselves to be pretty good people, with good intentions.  We think that we fall short, not terribly short, but enough to need our bill paid.  And some think that God is just so in love with us that he had no problem dying on the cross for us.  I myself, for years, I considered myself a very likable person, lovable in fact.  If others didn't see that than they just needed to wake up, smell the coffee and realize what they've overlooked all these years.  This view has nothing to do with reality and ignores both the biblical view of the disgusting, wretched nature of our sin and the righteous wrath of God against that sin.

Some think that viewing God as wrathful went out of fashion after Jesus came.  Many, if only subconsciously, do not connect the God of the Old Testament with Jesus of the New Testament.  But God never changes.  The God of the Old Testament, when he speaks, is the same thing as Jesus speaking.  (Jesus is the Word, right?)  A God of Wrath is not just confined to the Old Testament.  Has anyone forgotten the God who turned over the money changer's tables or who cursed the fig tree (a symbol for the Temple in Jerusalem) because it bore no fruit?  Are we forgetting the Jesus who used terms like "brood of vipers" and "children of the Devil" to refer to some of his listeners?

"That is Not Huggable!"


I used to watch the TV show "Everybody Loves Raymond".  In one episode, Raymond is desperately taking every suggestion given him to tame the monthly mood swings of his outrageously hormonal wife.  In one scene, Debra delivers a furious raging speech about Raymond's insensitivity, that he's going about helping her in the wrong way.  She yells, "Have you ever considered giving me a hug!?"  He is speechless, slack-jawed in disbelief at her suggestion.  "A hug!!??  This... this is not huggable!!"

The scene is funny, because the suggestion is not only outrageous to Raymond but to most who are watching the show.  But is our call to faith in Jesus for our salvation any more outrageous?  Imagine being covered in sewage and you're told, "Go into that pristine room with white carpet and designer furniture, and they'll get you cleaned up in there."  Or even closer to home, you're responsible for the death of someone's child, and you're told that the father of that child hold's your only hope for escaping the death penalty.  And the father says that your only hope of forgiveness is to be covered in their child's blood.

This outrageous faith is the faith that will save us.  God grants us to see that it is as impossible for us to be saved as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (or for the dead to be raised), and then through his word we receive faith that with God, all things are possible.

Is this the way the Gospel is presented today?  I seem to hear more about our need to have faith in a loving God to save lovable people. Do we need regeneration for such faith?  Can the spiritually dead among us have this kind of faith?  And does this kind of faith reflect, in any way whatsoever, the kind of faith the bible presents that we must have to please God?

Is this the kind of faith that can bring the spiritually dead to life:

"For by grace you have been saved through faith.  And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." (Ephesians 2:8)

The kind of miraculous faith that is given only by God is the kind that will fortify us at Jesus' second coming.  When others are asking the rocks to fall on them so they can hide themselves and are casting their idols into the fire in a last-ditch effort to receive God's favor, we will amazingly raise our arms and expect to be lifted up, eager to be received by him, confident, through faith, that we will indeed be saved.

"'...but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.'  But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls."  (Hebrews 10:38-39)

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