God's Love and Blessing and Wrath

GOD’S LOVE AND BLESSING AND WRATH

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God after being tempted by Lucifer the first thing they did was to hide from God in the garden, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. That was the beginning of a mistaken mindset of hiding from a God whom they thought was angry and was now going to punish them for doing wrong. The fig leaves were a useless way of covering up their shame and guilt for doing wrong. That was not God’s way of thinking, and he needed to change that mistaken mindset.
God told Adam to come out into the open and talk to him. He was going to cover Adam with the skin of an animal (lamb, ram, sheep, goat?) to replace the useless fig leaves. 
So God shed blood and covered Adam.
This is a prophetic picture for us of God providing Jesus as a blood sacrifice for the sins of humanity. This blood sacrifice covers the shame and guilt we all experience as sinful human beings, and the fig leaves represent our futile attempts to cover our shame of exposure by covering up for ourselves instead of letting God’s mercy cover our shame.

Without a mindset of faith and trust in God for this, we will always live at a distance from God and hide like Adam because of shame and guilt instead of coming close to him through his loving mercy and forgiveness.
That was the beginning of a lesson from God to us, that he does not want us to hide from whom we think is an angry God that wants to punish us. He wants us to know that we do not have to hide who we really are with our weak and frail humanity but to let him redeem us with his sacrificial love - the sacrificial lifeblood that he shed for us then and always. 

God used another prophetic picture of sacrificial lifeblood for us when he told Abraham to offer his only son Isaac on an altar. God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of countless children and in him all the families in the earth would be blessed. Abraham had to wait 25 years for the promise of a son to be fulfilled and then he was told to offer him as a sacrifice (It is believed that Isaac was a teenager at the time). Abraham was about to plunge the knife into Isaac when God at the last moment stopped him and provided a ram (lamb?) for a sacrifice. 
But this time he added the dimension of faith, where Abraham had to trust God to the utmost limit, that he would provide the sacrifice. 
Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, was in the act of offering up his only son … He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, in a manner of speaking, he did receive him back.
This was a different lesson for us. This is the lesson of faith in the promise of God through Jesus to bring to pass the promise of his resurrection life to us when we take up our cross and trust in him by surrendering our will to his will.
Without a mindset of faith and trust in God for this, we will always live at a distance from God instead of coming close to him in hope and expectation of his goodness to us.

In the first three hundred years after Jesus the early Church Fathers like Athanasius and Irenaeus spoke powerfully about this redeeming and lifegiving work of God through Jesus which restores close heart-to-heart and trusting fellowship between us and the Father. Then soon after that, Augustine, who was in fact a devoted heart-to-heart disciple of Jesus, began to use Greek philosophical language to describe God in terms of his ‘essence’. Then came further well-meaning descriptions of God’s exalted attributes like Omnipotence and Omniscience, which mean ‘all powerful’ and ‘all knowing’, and it is inspiring to realize these awesome qualities. However if these attributes are all we are told about who God is we could perceive him as distant and judgmental and non-relational instead of intimate and loving and forgiving.

The Roman Catholic and Judaistic legal mindset and the Greek philosophical style of thinking inadvertently allowed there to develop from all of that a tendency for many people to see God as an all-powerful God that was waiting to punish us if we disobeyed his set of rules. 

When this kind of thinking is taken to its extreme it gets lived out as legalistic Christianity, and this extreme has influenced Christianity throughout the centuries.
It oppresses God’s people through a misuse of authority and power.

The other extreme is that God is an easy-going person who wants to gratify his needy children with whatever personal comfort and spiritual accessories that would help make life on this earth more bearable, until we can have a nice mansion in Heaven. 

In between these two extremes of legalism and self-gratification sits the weighty reality of God’s wrath. God’s wrath is a profound expression of God’s protective love towards his children – it is his intense indignation against sin and its harmful destructive effect upon humanity (like a mother bear defending her cub).

The beginning of God’s wrath
Satan is the classic example of the extremes of both of the two bad postures of legalism and sinful self-serving gratification. 
Lucifer abused his place of authority as a covering angel (Ezekiel 28:14) and brought temptation into humanity’s appetite to gratify itself by offering Adam and Eve a taste of independent self-serving autonomy and causing them to despise God’s goodness towards them. In doing this he brought deathly oppression upon all of humanity.

What indignation would this cause God’s heart, to see such deadly sinister deception cause so much harm and destruction to his sons and daughters!
The wrath of God plays out in the awful consequences of harmful and destructive sin, missing the mark of oneness with God – all starting with deception, rebellion and pride.
Can you imagine from God’ point of view, giving us the gift of life and watching it turn against him as he has to let it play out in repulsive and offensive and destructive behaviour.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed (apokalypto – uncovered) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Note; This is present tense)

God’s wrath is being revealed or put on display around us in the world, in the harmful and destructive personal and political and ideological conflicts that are shredding peoples’ souls and causing such grief and loss and misery and pain. History has repeated itself over and over and we find ourselves in this day and age in a suffering world separated for the most part in mind and heart from God, but he still remains faithful. 
Romans 5:8 But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

Wrath only came into existence because of sin, and sin is going on all the time.

Paul shows us the way of freedom – a way of living with sin, but above sin.
Paul realised he had a problem and he said ‘It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I find that evil is present within me. Now if I am doing what I don't want to, it is plain where the trouble is: sin still has me in its evil grasp. Who will ever get me out of this death trap?’ (Romans 7:20). 
Paul here is describing the ‘law of sin and death’ which is what we all live under.
This law made him feel stuck in a pattern of wanting to do the right thing but ending up doing the wrong thing and then feeling guilty and cut off from God and his peace. His mind was full of all the mistakes and failures and this made him dread the consequences – what would God think and what would people think – he felt trapped and just wanted to hide. This is what the law of sin and death does. He and we want to hide from God, like Adam did.

That law of sin and death was like the law of gravity. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to jump up in the air to get higher, gravity pulls you down with a thud.
Paul knew he couldn’t kid himself that he wasn’t a failure in his own natural strength, even though he achieved much as a legalistic Pharisee – he knew that didn’t count any more. He knew that as natural human being we are all failures as far as being spiritually perfect. He knew he had sin within him even when he wanted to do good!
He knew he couldn’t pat himself on the back for being spiritual, and if he did he’d better watch out and not think more highly of himself than he ought to or he would come down with a thud. What a paradox.
The Holy Spirit had given him the wonderful revelation of another law of the Spirit which overcame that law of sin and death. 
Romans 8:2 For the powerful law of the Spirit of Christ Jesus has freed me from the law of sin and death.
Paul saw that the experience of being set free was not the absence of sin in him but the presence of God in him. 

So there was only one thing to do - just hang on for dear life to the only perfect one and get lifted into a higher way, like having another natural law that could overcome the law of gravity, so that if you went up in the air you didn’t come down with a thud – you stayed up there. This is how the law of aerodynamics operates. When we fly in an aeroplane, we overcome the law of gravity, and in order to do that the plane must use two things, first, an enormous thrust from the engine and secondly, lift with the wings. The Holy Spirit gave Paul the wonderful revelation of another law of the Spirit which overcomes that law of sin and death, just like the law of aerodynamics overcomes the law of gravity.
We need a different kind of power that we could ever humanly muster for the thrust, and we need wings that keep us in the air, like an eagle. An eagle was created to fly, and when we talk about a higher spiritual way for ourselves, we too were created to mount up with wings and fly like an eagle.
So we have the thrust of the Holy Spirit combining with the spiritual aerodynamics of the wings of an eagle and we can live above the law of sin and death. God doesn’t motivate by fear or outside pressure but by inside inspiration from the Holy Spirit.
So how do we live in this law of the Spirit of life and escape the law of sin and death.
The Bible says that ‘they that wait upon the Lord will exchange their strength with his strength, they will rise up with wings of an eagle.

It is when we wait upon The Lord that we exchange our strength with his strength. We have our heart-to-heart conversation with him about what is going on inside of us. We bring him our confusion or distress or pain from the past, or our anxiety for the future, and we sit with all of this in his presence, and we do not hide from our feelings of shame and guilt, as much as we would like to run away from them and escape them if we could. 

How does this make the problems lose their power over us? They simply have to move over because we are not focussing upon them but upon the greatest reality, which is that he desires a close relationship with us despite our weaknesses and failures, and he knows that our shame and guilt about those things make us feel separated from him.

A life hemmed in by the closed horizon of ourselves and our problems is too dismal to give our lives real meaning. Once we welcome the present moment which contains a present Jesus and give him that place in our minds and hearts, we understand what reality is all about. Instead of talking to ourselves in our lostness, we do the heart-to-heart talking with God and become found in him. Jesus is always seeking and finding and restoring with deep compassion all that is lost and broken in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Amen.