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Who is this God? – Part 8

The justice of God is that attribute of God which emanates from His holiness that is concerned with legalities and the implementation of righteousness or the punishment of the lack of righteousness.

The justice of God is seen throughout scripture in passages such as Col 3:25:

“For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.”

and Acts 17:28-29:

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed and of this he has given assurance by raising Him from the dead”

There is coming a day of judgement.  This judgement will be conducted in righteousness – that means that the judge will be prefectly righteous – with no evil or malice or prejudice in Him and with no pre-conceived thoughts or capacity to accept bribes or other means of changing his mind.  There is no variation or change with God – and least of all with regards to the stability of His judgement.

It is not possible to talk God around.  If you’ve done wrong you will be judged for that wrong (Col 3:25).  You cannot convince God that he needs to look the other way – He is not susceptible to bribes (2 Chron 19:7) or favouritism (Eph 6:9).

Its also not possible to complain under grounds of not having the law (if you for example in the middle of the Amazon rain forest for the last few thousand years), as God will judge us all by the knowledge we have.

If we have no supernatural law, we still have the world around us, and the conscience within us, both of which are more than ample to condemn us for our failure (Rom 1:18-23, Rom 2:12-16).

Ultimately we will all be judged by the justice of God, and we all will have nothing to stand on of our own righteousness, because our own righteousness is worthless before the perfect holiness of God.  However, that is the significance of the next topic. 

Without the next topic, ever human being on earth would be condemned and without hope entirely.  But it is not so.

Who’s afraid of the Holy Spirit?

I’ve been reading parts of this book for a few months now and I’m loving it.  I’m taking my time with it because a) it is a demanding book to read and b) the points in it are very important and worth thoroughly digesting and internalising.

I was initially made aware of this book when I listened to a seminar on "catering for the cessationists among us" which was done by a non-cessationist.  I’m of strong cessationist tendency, however, I’m not totally satisfied with the explanations of either cessationists or non-cessationists.  I won’t go into reasons why here.

Having heard a non-cessationist extol the value of this book I thought it would be worth a read, and it certainly is.

The book itself is a series of essays from a variety of cessationist scholars including Daniel Wallace, James Sawyer, J I Packer and others (as well as a foreword by Josh McDowell) who are concerned that the person and work of the Holy Spirit is and is being marginalised by the wider Evangelical church today (which I agree whole heartedly with).

Here are the titles of some of the chapters:

• Who’s afraid of the Holy Spirit – the uneasy conscience of a non-charasmatic Evangelical
• The Spirit and Community: A Historical Perspective
• The Witness of the Spirit in the Protestant Tradition
• The Ministry of the Spirit in Discerning the will of God
• The Spirit’s role in corporate worship
• The Father, the Son, and the Holy Scriptures? (my favourite chapter title)

There are of course lots of other excellent chapters too.

The book has a foreword and response by Wayne Grudem who is probably the worlds foremost non-cessationist scholar.

In my opinion, this book hits home the key problem that is so prevalent in western churches in particular today – a lack of real spiritual life – due to either the repression of the Holy Spirit or the pure absence of the Spirit in the lives of those who call themselves His people.  It also further solidifies my understanding of the issues around apologetics and evangelism (that we’ve discussed before).

It also helps the reader understand how things like higher criticism, modernism, individualism and other changes in secular thinking has had on the churches understanding of the Holy Spirit.

If you are a Christian and keen to understand how the Holy Spirit works and has been understood to work through the ages past, you MUST get this book.  It is a demanding book to read – but take your time and you’ll learn a lot from it.

Who is this God? – Part 7

Now we start coming to the pointy end of who God is – not because it is difficult to understand, but rather that most people don’t like to hear it.  Everything we have covered so far paints the picture of the "Godhood" of God – His bigness, power, knowledge, etc.  What we will be dealing with over the next five posts will be the things that make God both fearsome and gracious.

We’ll start with the holiness of God.  God’s holiness is often confused with His justice (which we’ll cover in a later post) in that it is often thought of as His moral rightness (actually it could be said that justice, righteousness and holiness all get confused in this sense).

To consider the holiness of God, lets consider the following passages:

"There is none holy like the Lord; there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God" (1 Sam 2:2)

"Behold, God puts no trust in His holy ones, and the heavens are not pure in His sight" (Job 15:15)

"This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5)

These verses indeed imply purity and righteousness, but that is not all the meaning they carry.  They also put God in a completely different category, and this is fundamentally the meaning of holiness.  God is separate from everything else.  There is a gulf of difference between God and His creation. 

When we read in the Old testament "You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev 19:2) the intention is that those being addressed were to regard themselves as set apart to the Lord – because the Lord is set apart from everything.

This is most obvious in the gulf that Isaiah notices between himself and God in Isa 6:1-5:

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”"

Note that Isaiah was likely to this point a "moral" person – he was a good Jewish bloke, well respected by his peers.  Yet the key point of the passage is the sheer gulf of difference between the greatness of God and the lowness of man.

This is obvious from Isaiah’s reaction.  He sees this vision and his response is conveyed in the phrase "Woe is me!  For I am lost!". 

The Hebrew word translated woe conveys "sorrow, i.e., a state of intense hardship and distress" (Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains : Hebrew). 

The Hebrew word translated "lost" means "destroy, i.e., be in a ruinous state" (ibid).

In other words, immediately Isaiah understood the magnitude of the difference between himself and God and at once pronounced that he was in woe – intense hardship and distress and he concluded rapidly "I am lost" – i.e. I am in a state of ruin or destruction.

The holiness of God is that gulf between God and His creation that can never be bridged.  It is the seperateness of God – or as R.C Sproul said the "otherliness" of God.

In a very real sense we are nothing like Him – we cannot be – He is infinite and we are finite.  It is this gap – the brought about by the sum of the attributes of God – that we call the holiness of God

I posted a sermon by R C Sproul on the Holiness of God and Isaiah 6 earlier.  If you are interested in listening to it click here. I hope you do