"Knowing God" [IV]

- The Love of God -

"To know God's love is indeed heaven on earth. And the New Testament sets forth this knowledge, not as the privilege of a favoured few, but as a normal part of ordinary Christian experience, something to which only the spiritually unhealthy or malformed will be strangers."

"With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Thus, we show a great deal more interest in the gifts of healing and tongues--gifts of which, as Paul pointed out, not all Christians are meant to partake anyway (1 Cor. 12:28-30)--than in the Spirit's ordinary work of giving peace, joy, hope, and love, through the shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God. Yet the latter is much more important than the former. To the Corinthians, who had taken it for granted that the more tongues the merrier, and the godlier too, Paul had to insist that without love--sanctification, Christ-likeness--tongues were worth precisely nothing (1 Cor. 13:1 ff)."

"'God is love' is not the complete truth about God so far as the Bible is concerned. It is not an abstract definition which stands alone, but a summing up, from the believer's standpoint, of what the whole revelation set forth in Scripture tells us about its Author. This statement presupposes all the rest of the biblical witness to God. The God of whom John is speaking is the God who made the world, who judged it by the Flood, who called Abraham and made of him a nation, who chastened His Old Testament people by conquest, captivity, and exile, and who sent His Son to save the world, who cast off unbelieving Israel and shortly before John wrote had destroyed Jerusalem, and who would one day judge the world in righteousness. It is this God, says John, who is love. It is perverse to quote John's statement, as some do, as if it called into question the biblical witness to the severity of God's justice. It is not possible to argue that a God who is love cannot also be a God who condemns and punishes the disobedient; for it is precisely of the God who does these very things that John is speaking."

"[The] God who is love is first and foremost light, and sentimental ideas of His love as an indulgent, benevolent softness, divorced from moral standards and concerns, must therefore be ruled out from the start. God's love is holy love. The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for His children is that they should be 'perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect' (Matt. 5:48). He will not take into His company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life, and those whom He does accept He exposes to drastic discipline, in order that they might attain what they seek. [Heb. 12:6-11] God's love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved. Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love we may look to Him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness, or to shield His loved ones from trouble when He knows that they need trouble to further their sanctification."

"What essentially is [the love of God]? we ask. How should we define and analyse it? In answer to this question, the Bible sets forth a conception of God's love which we may formulate as follows: God's love is an exercise of His goodness towards individual sinners whereby, having identified Himself with their welfare, He has given His Son to be their Saviour, and now brings them to know and enjoy Him in a covenant relation."

- The Grace of God -

"It is a truism of Christian scholarship that grace, far from being an impersonal force, a sort of celestial electricity received like a battery charge by 'plugging in' to the sacraments, is a personal activity, God operating in love manwards. It is repeatedly pointed out in books and sermons that the Greek New Testament word for grace (charis), like that for love (agape), is a wholly Christian usage, expressing a notion of spontaneous self-determined kindness which was previously quite unknown to Graeco-Roman ethics and theology... [God's grace] is love freely shown towards guilty sinners, contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit. It is God showing goodness to persons who deserve only severity, and had no reason to expect anything but severity."

On the Moral Ill-Desert of Man. "Modern man, conscious of his tremendous scientific achievements in recent years, naturally inclines to a high opinion of himself. He views material wealth as in any case more important than moral character, and in the moral realm he is resolutely kind to himself, treating small virtues as compensating for great vices and refusing to take seriously the idea that, morally speaking, there is anything much wrong with him. He tends to dismiss a bad conscience, in himself as in others, as an unhealthy psychological freak, a sign of disease and mental aberration rather than an index of moral reality. For modern man is convinced that, despite all his little peccadilloes--drinking, gambling, reckless driving, 'fiddling', black and white lies, sharp practice in trading, dirty reading, and what have you--he is at heart a thoroughly good fellow. Then, as pagans do (and modern man's heart is pagan--make no mistake about that), he imagines God as a magnified image of himself, and assumes that God shares his own complacency about himself. The thought of himself as a creature fallen from God's image, a rebel against God's rule, guilty and unclean in God's sight, fit only for God's condemnation, never enters his head."

On God's Retributive Justice. "The idea that retribution might be the moral law of God's world, and an expression of His holy character, seems to modern man quite fantastic; those who uphold it find themselves accused of projecting on to God their own pathological impulses of rage and vindictiveness. Yet the Bible insists throughout that this world which God in His goodness has made is a moral world, in which retribution is as basic a fact as breathing. God is the Judge of all the earth, and He will do right, vindicating the innocent, if such there be, but punishing (in the Bible phrase, 'visiting their sins upon') law-breakers (cf. Gen. 18:25). God is not true to Himself unless He punishes sin. And unless one knows and feels the truth of this fact, that wrongdoers have no natural hope of anything from God but retributive judgment, one can never share the biblical faith in divine grace."

Grace: The Source of the Pardon of Sin. "The gospel centres upon justification; that is, upon the remission of sins and the acceptance of our persons that goes with it. Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance. Justification is by faith; it takes place the moment a man puts vital trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as his Saviour. Justification is free to us, but it was costly to God, for its price was the atoning death of God's Son. Why was it that God 'spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all' (Romans 8:32)? Because of His grace. It was His own free decision to save which brought about the atonement. Paul makes this explicit. We are justified, he says, 'freely (i.e. with nothing to pay) by his grace (i.e. in consequence of God's merciful resolve) through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God set forth to be a propitiation (i.e. one who averts divine wrath by expiating sins), through (i.e. becoming effective for individuals by means of) faith, by his blood' (Romans 3:24 f., RV; cf. Titus 3:7)."

Grace: The Motive of the Plan of Salvation. "Pardon is the heart of the gospel, but it is not the whole doctrine of grace. For the New Testament sets God's gift of pardon in the context of a plan of salvation which began with election before the world was and will only be completed when the Church is perfect in glory. Paul refers briefly to this plan in several places (e.g. Romans 8:29f; 2 Thessalonians 2:12f), but his fullest account of it is in the massive paragraph--for, despite subdivisions, the flow of thought constitutes it essentially one paragraph--running from Ephesians 1:3 to 2:10. As often, Paul starts with a summary statement and spends the rest of the paragraph analysing and explaining it. The statement is, 'God... hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places (i.e. the realm of spiritual realities) in Christ' (verse 3). The analysis begins with eternal election and predestination to sonship in Christ (verses 4 f.), proceeds to redemption and remission of sins in Christ (verse 7), and moves on to the hope of glorification in Christ (verse 11 f.) and the gift of the Spirit in Christ to seal us as God's possession for ever (verse 13 f.). From there, Paul concentrates attention on the act of power whereby God regenerates sinners in Christ (1:19;2:7), bringing them to faith in the process (cf. 2:8). Paul depicts all these items as elements in a single great saving purpose (1:5, 9 11) and tells us that grace (mercy, love, kindness: 2:4, 7) is its motivating force (see 2:4-8), that the 'riches of his grace' appear throughout its administration (1:7; 2:7), and that the praise of grace is its ultimate goal (1:6; cf. 12, 14, 2:7). So the believer may rejoice to know that his conversion was no accident, but an act of God which had its place in an eternal plan to bless him with the free gift of salvation from sin (2:8-10); God promises and purposes to carry His plan through to completion, and since it is executed by sovereign power (1:19 ff.) nothing can thwart it."