You have a mighty arm. Strong is Your hand; high Your right hand. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne. Steadfast love and faithfulness go before You. Blessed are the people who know the festal shout, who walk, O Lord, in the light of Your face, who exult in Your name all day and in Your righteousness are exalted. For You are the glory of their strength. By Your favor our horn is exalted. For our shield belongs to the Lord, our king to the Holy One of Israel. (Verses13-18) Italics mine.
"I am He. I am the first and I am the last. My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens. When I call to them, they stand forth together." Isaiah 48
Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am." John 8:58
I have been reading a book about a man who claims to have gone to heaven. There, the great and mighty unnamed god of the universe tells him three things: You are loved, you have nothing to fear, and you can't do anything wrong. Hmm. The God of the Bible would tell His children, those saved by the righteousness of Christ imputed to them, that the first two things are true, for sure. That last one, though, is a kicker. I know Christ would say, we can't, on our own strength, get anything right. We are born into sin and must be reborn out of it. Given a new nature. Even that new nature struggles with the old man and must be cleansed on a daily basis just like our earthly bodies need a good washing after the dirt they collect pursuing life on planet Earth.
The bigger question is this: If God is a God of love, can He look away from wrong and not deal with it. Under the premise of this "word" from the universal god, everyone goes to heaven. Everyone. No one has wronged humanity enough to merit judgment, or at all. That god has issues. Hitler, Idi Amin, serial killers, mass murderers like Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, and the list of evil goes on and on, are enjoying the fruits of heaven alongside the greatest compassion and selflessness humanity expressed, including our sinless Savior. Since there is essentially no right or wrong, to borrow a phrase, "What difference does it make?" how we live our lives? How I treat my neighbor or my pet? I am okay just the way I am. Don't need to be better for I am fully loved as I hack a British soldier to death in the middle of a busy London street or bomb innocents in Boston or Baghdad.
The God of all is righteous and just. That is the very foundation of His throne. His character is built on the fact that He has established a right and a wrong. Good and evil exist and He alone parses them fairly. Because He can. But it isn't simply good and evil our God is interested in. Always going before His judgments are steadfast love and faithfulness. How perfect! Were Almighty God only about rewarding good and punishing evil, He would be as one-dimensional as the god of the book I'm reading. But always before He makes a final decision about His creation, love and faithfulness have spewed from His presence like perfume from an atomizer. Covering our sin with His grace and mercy. On only one condition.
This God of ours can't be separated from Jesus Who proclaimed clearly to the religious leaders of His day that He is the Great I Am spoken of in Exodus 3 when Moses asks God what he is to tell the people if they ask the name of his God. "I AM WHO I AM. Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" We have seen the face of God and understand His grace and might in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The First and the Last hung on a tree of His own creation to cover us in a righteousness we don't deserve. Raised Himself up on the third day to ascend once more to heaven from which Jesus came again through the Holy Spirit to give us that same power that brought Him from the tomb. So that...whosoever believes in Him, shall not die, but have eternal life. In this is the working of righteousness, our cleansing from all wrong, that we take on His rightness and exult in it, not in our own substandard, often murderously incorrect, sense of justice and goodness. Right and wrong are harsh and arbitrary when men and women decide it. It isn't permeated with steadfast love and faithfulness, but instead with "I'm right and you're wrong! Off with your head!".
The one condition is the stumbling block. The mighty God of heaven and earth has a mighty arm ready to reach down to save us from ourselves and up to call off the enemy or signal legions of angels from heaven. Jesus is the way for us to know Him fully. The only way. For He is God Almighty, come in the flesh, to save us from our very propensity for wrong, not just from the awful things we do. If we think we can't sin, we think we don't need a Savior. If we think we can't do wrong, we are silly. And we listen to a silly god. We know this in our hearts. With or without Jesus.
I am happy today to know that I can boast about the lovely face of God reflected in the light of Jesus. That He is my righteousness. I know what it's like to shout from the rooftops His great love. To swim in the righteousness of Christ rather than drown in my own ridiculous attempts at earning rewards for my meager attempts at goodness. All of Jesus's perfection is given to me, imperfect, screwed up me, because, also by His great grace, I believe in Him for salvation. That isn't justice. I deserve to pay for all the dumb things I stumbled into as well as the overt wrongs I have committed that are downright evil. How merciful of the God of all to allow grace to trump the rules! Just one thing we need. Jesus. I AM made flesh to live among us. The glory of our strength.
"I am He. I am the first and I am the last. My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens. When I call to them, they stand forth together." Isaiah 48
Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am." John 8:58
I have been reading a book about a man who claims to have gone to heaven. There, the great and mighty unnamed god of the universe tells him three things: You are loved, you have nothing to fear, and you can't do anything wrong. Hmm. The God of the Bible would tell His children, those saved by the righteousness of Christ imputed to them, that the first two things are true, for sure. That last one, though, is a kicker. I know Christ would say, we can't, on our own strength, get anything right. We are born into sin and must be reborn out of it. Given a new nature. Even that new nature struggles with the old man and must be cleansed on a daily basis just like our earthly bodies need a good washing after the dirt they collect pursuing life on planet Earth.
The bigger question is this: If God is a God of love, can He look away from wrong and not deal with it. Under the premise of this "word" from the universal god, everyone goes to heaven. Everyone. No one has wronged humanity enough to merit judgment, or at all. That god has issues. Hitler, Idi Amin, serial killers, mass murderers like Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, and the list of evil goes on and on, are enjoying the fruits of heaven alongside the greatest compassion and selflessness humanity expressed, including our sinless Savior. Since there is essentially no right or wrong, to borrow a phrase, "What difference does it make?" how we live our lives? How I treat my neighbor or my pet? I am okay just the way I am. Don't need to be better for I am fully loved as I hack a British soldier to death in the middle of a busy London street or bomb innocents in Boston or Baghdad.
The God of all is righteous and just. That is the very foundation of His throne. His character is built on the fact that He has established a right and a wrong. Good and evil exist and He alone parses them fairly. Because He can. But it isn't simply good and evil our God is interested in. Always going before His judgments are steadfast love and faithfulness. How perfect! Were Almighty God only about rewarding good and punishing evil, He would be as one-dimensional as the god of the book I'm reading. But always before He makes a final decision about His creation, love and faithfulness have spewed from His presence like perfume from an atomizer. Covering our sin with His grace and mercy. On only one condition.
This God of ours can't be separated from Jesus Who proclaimed clearly to the religious leaders of His day that He is the Great I Am spoken of in Exodus 3 when Moses asks God what he is to tell the people if they ask the name of his God. "I AM WHO I AM. Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" We have seen the face of God and understand His grace and might in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The First and the Last hung on a tree of His own creation to cover us in a righteousness we don't deserve. Raised Himself up on the third day to ascend once more to heaven from which Jesus came again through the Holy Spirit to give us that same power that brought Him from the tomb. So that...whosoever believes in Him, shall not die, but have eternal life. In this is the working of righteousness, our cleansing from all wrong, that we take on His rightness and exult in it, not in our own substandard, often murderously incorrect, sense of justice and goodness. Right and wrong are harsh and arbitrary when men and women decide it. It isn't permeated with steadfast love and faithfulness, but instead with "I'm right and you're wrong! Off with your head!".
The one condition is the stumbling block. The mighty God of heaven and earth has a mighty arm ready to reach down to save us from ourselves and up to call off the enemy or signal legions of angels from heaven. Jesus is the way for us to know Him fully. The only way. For He is God Almighty, come in the flesh, to save us from our very propensity for wrong, not just from the awful things we do. If we think we can't sin, we think we don't need a Savior. If we think we can't do wrong, we are silly. And we listen to a silly god. We know this in our hearts. With or without Jesus.
I am happy today to know that I can boast about the lovely face of God reflected in the light of Jesus. That He is my righteousness. I know what it's like to shout from the rooftops His great love. To swim in the righteousness of Christ rather than drown in my own ridiculous attempts at earning rewards for my meager attempts at goodness. All of Jesus's perfection is given to me, imperfect, screwed up me, because, also by His great grace, I believe in Him for salvation. That isn't justice. I deserve to pay for all the dumb things I stumbled into as well as the overt wrongs I have committed that are downright evil. How merciful of the God of all to allow grace to trump the rules! Just one thing we need. Jesus. I AM made flesh to live among us. The glory of our strength.
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