Monday 30 May 2011

God’s mitigating grace

So we live in a world where we are allowed free will and where we experience the consequences of our choices. Sometimes the choices we make are neither here nor there. At other times, the choices we make change our lives (for better or worse). Sometimes it is not easy to make good choices. Sometimes making a poor choice is the easier option. The consequences are nevertheless real. Sometimes we can’t see clearly what the best choice is and we feel we are forced to make our choices in the dark. Sometimes we don’t realise that we are making choices, especially when it comes to our attitudes and responses towards situations. Nevertheless, consequences follow the choices we make irrespective of the extenuating circumstances.
We also live in a world where other people are equally allowed free will and where we live in the wake of other people’s choices. We can see this all around us in our daily lives. Sometimes it isn’t a big deal. Sometimes living in the wake of other people’s choices is annoying and frustrating – someone’s bad parking for example. Sometimes we are forced to live in the wake of people’s choices against us, which make us angry, hurt us, even crush us. If God chooses to allow people their choices, he has to allow people their bad and evil choices as well.
But because God is Love, God gets involved in our lives in order to minimise the effect of evil. If invited to, he intervenes, mitigates and does not allow evil to wreak havoc unchecked. (I believe this is an important part of intercessory prayer – but that is for a different blog). At the end of the day, God is sovereign. Even though he will never betray his own character and act lovelessly, neither will be defeated by evil.
We can see God’s mitigating work, his grace, in the world today. When we look around, we see what a devastated place the world really is and how much evil and grief and pain and sadness and jealousy and struggle for power there is. But whilst there is a lot of evil at work, most of us would probably agree that there could be more. But God is at work, minimising, limiting, and mitigating the Evil One’s reign on earth.
Why does a God of Love allow so much suffering? How can a God of Love allow so much evil? There is no easy or glib answer for a question that has dogged humanity since the dawn of time. But perhaps it would help if we rephrased the question, if we started to look at it this way: if there were not a God of love, in a world full of sin, in a world full of death, in a world where the “Prince of this World” remains enthroned, how much more suffering would there be?

Thursday 26 May 2011

A God of Love and of grace

Because God is Love he is also a God of grace. He gives plenty of opportunity to respond to Him and to turn to his Love before the time of judgment comes. He gives plenty of opportunity to amend our ways in line with his Love and to learn to live according to his ways of Love. He has to allow the consequence for sin, but he also allows us time to avoid the full brunt of those consequences.
Judgment cannot follow choice immediately or on a consistent basis because the result would be conditioned response, rather than genuine choice. It is one thing to make decision in relation to outcome, something else to make a decision out of love.
If every time I make good choice I receive a blessing, I would quickly become conditioned to making that choice. I would no longer act in a way that reflected the genuine choice to love. I would be acting in response to the stimulus of blessing. Conversely, if every time I did something bad I received punishment or something bad happened to me, then I also will become trained and conditioned in my behaviour. I would avoid certain behaviour, not out of love, but to avoid punishment. (For how many of us, if we are honest, is avoiding punishment the basis of our relationship with God?) That type of conditioned behaviour, whether positive or negative, is not what God wants for a relationship or partnership with man. He wants and longs for a genuine love relationship.
And so God’s judgment can seem unpredictable and random. There are times all through history when God, in his wisdom, chooses to bring judgment, in line with the bigger picture, in line with his long-term plan for redeeming a broken world. But equally there are times throughout history when it appears that people have got away with it and that God has not judged. This can lead to confusion. This can lead man to interpret that God does not really mean what he says. If God is in the business of giving us choice and then giving us time to correct ourselves, it may appear as if God is not being completely fair. If God creates a universe where we can freely choose and then in grace and love acts to minimise the damage when we choose wrongly, it might look as if people are getting away with bad choices. If God has clearly outlined the consequence of a choice and that consequence is not immediate, then it might look as if God isn’t like he says he is. So God’s very kindness and very love can actually mask the fact that love also requires judgment. People begin to think that there is an excuse, that others have got away with it in the past and that they will too. 
But the truth is that because God is Love, he also judges. He has to allow us the consequences of our choices, and ultimately the consequences of our sin

Monday 23 May 2011

A God of Love and of Judgment?

Many people struggle with the idea of a God of Love bringing punishment. How can a God of Love punish, even destroy, those he loves? We often think that a God of Love should not be a God who punishes.
When the Bible talks about punishment, it often does so in relation to judgment. Judgment is when God allows man his ‘final answer’ and so also the consequences that come with it. God’s judgment on someone is their punishment. Every time God punishes, he judges our choice in the matter.
Humanly speaking we find it very difficult to separate punishment from the sense that the person wronged is seeking justice or vindication or making someone suffer for the hurt they have caused. I wonder if it is so because (or when) we look at it in a legal, transactional way. Looking at punishment in a relational context, for example in a parent – child context, sheds a different light on it. There, punishment is more about correction than about vindication or justice.
If God is Love, if that means he is not able to act in any other way but out of Love, then when God punishes, it is always in a relational context. God does not punish because he is hell-bent on justice (excuse the poor pun!), or because God wants vindication, or because God is power crazy. When God punishes, it is because it is time for judgment, time for the ‘final answer’ in relation to someone’s response to God. The Old Testament is full of examples of this.
Judgment is simply the consequence of the choices we make in relation to God’s Love, our response to God’s love. If there are different outcomes to our choices, a God who is Love must ultimately allow our ‘final answer’ and bring judgment. For a choice to be meaningful, and not simply a response to stimulus, God has to allow different outcomes for the choices we make and ultimately allow the consequence of the choice. There has to be a point at which an objective judge would say this choice leads to this outcome, and this choice to another. Love and judgment then are not incompatible but inevitable consequences of one another. Because he always acts out of love he has to judge. (As does a good parent).

Tuesday 17 May 2011

The consequence of sin

If God is Love, if God forgives us, why does God seem to insist on punishment for sin? Can he not just let it go? Why does sin have to be punished? Can God not forgive without having to have some sort of vindication? And if sin does have to be punished, why is the consequence of turning away from God death? Could there not be a less drastic consequence? If God is Love and therefore allows us our choices, why does he punish us if we choose not to respond to his Love?
Every choice we make entails consequences. The consequences of some choices are neither here nor there, for example what food to choose from a menu or whether to watch TV or a movie instead. On the opposite end of the sliding scale, the consequences of other choices significantly affect and shape our lives (and the lives of others), for example who we choose to marry (or not), where we choose to live or which career we choose to pursue.
Choosing to remain turned away from God (to whatever extent), choosing to act according to the sinful strongholds in our lives and according to Satan’s pattern, is to choose significant consequences.
The Bible does talk about punishment.
Sometimes when the Bible talks about punishment, it actually talks about consequences. Because God is Love he has to allow us our choices, which includes the inevitable consequences of those choices.
Death is the inevitable consequence of what happens when we are turned away from God. Just as we are unable to receive God’s Love while being turned away from him, so we are unable to receive his Life. Death is the absence of life. The ultimate consequence of sin is death because we will never be able to receive God’s Love and the Life that stems from his Love if we remain turned away from him if we persist in rejecting him. It is really important to understand that it is not so because God is so angry with us that he is rejecting us or because a particular sinful act merits a drastic punishment. It is so because where God’s life is absent there is death and any sinful act carries with it the hallmarks of death. When we live turned away from God (to whatever degree), when we act accordingly, when we sin, something dies and we empower the enemy to act against us.
There are times however when the Bible does talk about punishment and about what God chooses to do in the face of man’s individual or collective rejection of God or in the face of actions that blatantly oppose God’s way of Love. If God is Love however, when he chooses to punish, he is not doing so out of vengeance, to vindicate himself or because he has an overly acute sense of requiring “justice” to be done. I believe that because God is Love, he forgives liberally and unconditionally and not only after justice has been done. But because God is Love he chooses not to turn a blind eye when our actions and attitudes fly in the face of who he is, of his character. In that sense he cannot leave sin unpunished.
Perhaps looking at it from a parenting point of view helps us to understand where God is coming from. Parents love their children with a deeper love than they ever thought possible. When the children choose not to listen to the parents’ instruction and they disobey, sometimes there is an inevitable consequence, for example a cut from a sharp knife. Sometimes when they choose not to listen to the parents’ instruction, parents impose a consequence. A good parent allows punishment not because they feel hurt and want vindication, not because they want to get their own back, or because they want the child to know just how upset they have made the parent, or because they want justice above all. A good parent is actually incredibly selfless. Good parents allow punishment in order to help the child learn, in order to enable to child to understand the significance of their action and in order to help the child mature into an adult who can exercise self-discipline and live a life of integrity.

Friday 13 May 2011

The law

If sin is essentially about the condition of our hearts, if sin is essentially about our response (or lack of it!) to God’s Love which consequently colours our behaviour, what then is the point of the Ten Commandments? Why does God bother giving his people a code of conduct, why is there a 'law', if conduct isn't really the point?
it seems to me that the law is essentially a description of what life looks like if we really were to live in the light of God’s Love, if our actions and our behaviour were defined by his Love. I have to be honest and admit that there are many aspects about 'the law' as it is written in the Old Testament that I simply don’t get. To my sanitised Western ears some laws come across rather gruesome and rather harsh and can make us question whether God really is Love. I am sure there are scholars who have studied the context of the culture at the time and who therefore have a better understanding of particular laws and can give explanations.
Nevertheless, to a simple mind like me, judging by what the law describes and judging by the way it is summed up even within the books of the law themselves and then significantly by Jesus, it still seems to me that the point of the law is to describe what behaviour determined by Love is like. The ‘law’ that overarches all of them, according to Jesus and according to Moses is: Love the Lord your God with all your heart ...
However, the Bible equally makes it very clear that living according to the law is not ‘it’. Living according to the law is not what produces relationship with God. A married couple could be living completely according to what a marriage should be like, according to the ‘laws of marriage’ if you like. But unless there is a bond of love, unless what they actually do is coloured by their love, it is meaningless. Living according to the God’s ways without the context of a relationship is equally meaningless. It is only if we have a meaningful love relationship with God because we have turned to him that living according to the law he gave makes any sense. 
Jesus often disputed with the religious leaders about this. “In the law it says you should not kill. Well, I tell you that if you hate your brother you have already broken the law.” “In the law it says you should not commit adultery. I am telling you, it goes deeper than that. If you look lustfully at a woman really you have already broken the law, even though you have not physically committed the act of adultery.” “It is not what goes into a person which makes him unclean, but what comes out of a person.” “Out of the overflow of man’s heart his mouth speaks.” His point is clear. It is always a matter of the heart.  
Paul explains that the point of the law is to highlight the fact that none of us live Love's way. For all of us, our behaviour is not always entirely infused by love. The law shows us how we all fall short of God’s standard and miss the mark of his Love. Because there is a law we become aware that there is more, that we have somehow fallen short. In that sense, the law condemns us. Yet while the law points out our shortcomings, God doesn’t! He is not surprised by our short falling.  He knows that without the indwelling of his Love in us we always fall short - yet he doesn’t hold that against us. He forgives us. In fact, because he is Love, he wants us to see that of our own efforts we cannot live defined by Love. None of us can keep the law! He wants that realisation to inspire us to seek Him with all our hearts, to open our hearts fully to him, to his Love and to allow it to transform us.

Monday 9 May 2011

Missing the mark of His Love

The state of a heart turned away from God inevitably affects how we live life and the choices we make. Sin has huge repercussions in our lives, to whatever extent we are turned away from God. We are only able to receive God’s Love according to the extent our hearts are turned towards him and the extent our hearts are open to receive it. Similarly, his Love only begins to affect our values and our behaviour according to the extent to which we have received God’s Love.
In a sense sin is a bit like a cancer that spreads through the body, to use a medical analogy. As we turn away from God, as we reject his Love and cut ourselves off from His Love, the cancer of un-love (self-centredness, greed, egotism, rebellion against God’s Love) becomes embedded in our hearts. The more the ‘cancer’ progresses, the clearer the symptoms. The more lovelessness takes root in our hearts, the more our values and then our behaviour are affected by it.
The more we remain turned away from God, the more we expose ourselves to Satan’s patterns of self-centredness, of jealousy, of greed, of wanting to be our own master. Strongholds begin to form in our hearts: our responses become habits, habits in turn become so deep-seated that they establish themselves as strongholds in our lives. Our responses, our habits, the strongholds that have established themselves in our hearts determine the choices we make and affect our behaviour.
And so sin, as well as being the state of our hearts in relation to God, is very much our actions. Our behaviour cannot be divorced from the state of our hearts, just as the symptoms of an illness cannot be divorced from the illness itself. When we behave in a way that misses the mark of his glory, that misses the mark of God’s way of Love, we sin. Behaviour that is not rooted in God’s Love is sinful. And because none of us truly allow God’s Love to infuse us and mould us and shape us, we are all sinful. We all fall short of living in the light of God’s Love.
The way I understand it, sin, then, is not about not being good enough because our actions don’t match up to God’s standards. It is not about failing to reach a particular standard because our efforts are not good enough, because we aren’t trying hard enough. Sin is falling short of God’s character (I guess that could be seen as failing to reach God’s standard) not because we have tried and failed, but because we are not living in the light of God’s Love, we are not fully saturated by it which ultimately affects our thoughts, our attitudes and our deeds. 
For me it has been crucial and incredibly liberating to get this the right way round: it is not specific (mis)deeds that make me sinful – rather it is the sinful state of my heart that causes my specific (mis)deeds. My sinful behaviour, the things we I wrong, the way I fall short of God's ways, is the outworking of not allowing God’s Love to fully penetrate my life.

Thursday 5 May 2011

Falling short of God’s glory

In spite of everything I have said previously about sin being the state of our hearts rather than the sum of the ‘bad’ things we do, the Bible seems to put plenty of emphasis on right behaviour and behaviour that goes against God’s ways. If sin is essentially the condition of our hearts, why then does the Bible talk a lot about sin in terms of behaviour?
Perhaps it is helpful to see human behaviour as a set of three concentric circles, one inside the other. Right in the middle, at the centre of everything, is the heart. Not the physical heart of course, but the seat of that which governs us. The condition of our heart affects our values (the next concentric circle) which in turn affects and directs our behaviour (the last and outer concentric circle).  Our actions are always defined by our values and the condition of our hearts. Jesus spoke truth when he said that out of the overflow of our heart, our mouth speaks and that that which we treasure will define who we are and what we do.
The meaning for the word “sin” is actually “to miss the mark”. According to the Bible, we have all missed the mark. Which mark have we missed? I grew up believing that it is the mark of his perfect standards we have missed. The Bible however says that we have all missed the mark of His glory. (Romans 3:23) What is God’s glory? Is it his perfection? Is it his holiness (which many understand to mean his separateness and his intolerance of the things we do wrong)? Is someone’s glory not that which makes them great? If God is Love, is his glory not simply his nature, his character, the essence of who he is? Is it not his Love in all its fullness that marks him out, that makes him different to everything else, that makes him glorious and that therefore is his glory?
For me it is helpful to understand it in this way: we have all missed the mark of God’s wonderful and unconditional Love. We fall short of living in the fullness of it and according to it! When we turn away from God, when we live turned away from him, we are unable to receive his Love. Not because he withholds it, but because we refuse (or do not allow ourselves) to receive it. His Love is not able to touch our hearts. It is not able to shape our values and our behaviour follows suit. If we refuse to respond to his Love, if we remain turned away from him, he is simply not able to build the relationship with us that he longs to have because God never forces himself on us. But so we fall short of his glory, his Love. And so our sin, the state of our hearts that are turned away from Him cuts us off from Him.
Because God is Love, he never stops pouring his Love in our direction. He continues to extend his Love to us. Sometimes it only warms the back we have turned to him. But as we begin to turn towards him, even a tiny bit, his Love begins to touch us, which has direct repercussions on our values and later on our behaviour.
I expect there are not that many people who live fully and completely turned towards God, fully basking in the light of his Love, fully saturated by his Love. Perhaps Jesus is the only one. Most of us are probably partially turned to God to one or other degree. We partially allow his Love to enter our hearts; our values and our behaviour are partially touched by his Love. 
I believe God delights in every degree that we turn to him and meets us accordingly. Yet he also constantly invites us into deeper, invites us to turn towards Him in a fuller and deeper measure so that his Love is able to saturate our hearts in increasing measure. It is only in this way that our lives become truly full. 

Sunday 1 May 2011

Separated from God

I believe that God is Love. In my experience, God, because he is Love, desires a love relationship above all and extends the offer of a love relationship with him to us all. So I spent a lot of time re-thinking sin in the light of God’s character of Love and in the light of what the Bible says about sin.
I have to confess that I now see things rather differently. It is not that I don’t believe what the Bible says anymore. I do! But when I read the Bible now, I no longer equate sin as the sum of the things I have done wrong. The way I understand it now, sin goes a lot deeper than our behaviour. Essentially sin describes the state of our heart, the condition of our hearts when it is not touched by God’s Love.
Sin is a big deal. There is never any question about that. Sin does indeed cut us off from God. But not because God puts conditions on our acceptability. Sin does not cut us off from God because God cannot tolerate behaviour that goes against his nature or because our behaviour somehow disgusts Him, making him turn away from us, or because our sin somehow contaminates Him and thus forces him to cut himself off from us. Sin cuts us off from God because when we are turned away from Him and from his Love, there simply is no connection.
Just as the side of the earth turned away from the sun is in darkness and unable to receive the sun’s light, so a human heart turned away from the God of Love is in sin and unable to receive the light of His Love.
When the Bible talks about sin separating us from God, I believe it doesn’t mean that our behaviour per se is unacceptable to God and therefore creates a barrier between him and us. If sin is a barrier between us and God, it stems from our rejection of him, from our turning our backs on him, figuratively speaking. Two people cannot have a meaningful relationship if one of them has their back turned toward the other. You can’t relate closely to someone, you can’t receive from someone, nor can you give to someone if you have your back turned to them. There is no meaningful connection when someone has their back turned towards you. In a similar way we cannot have a meaningful relationship with God if we are turned away from him. And so our turning away from him becomes a barrier, separating us from him. Our turning away from God, our rejection of him, is what the Bible calls sin. There are lots of reasons why we deliberately turn away from God. Perhaps the most profound reason is that we don’t really trust him, so we don’t believe he is who he says he is and so we don’t want to submit to his ways. We much prefer to do things our way and in a way that will benefit us. We want to be in the centre of our own existence. We want “me” to be in the centre of our lives. We want things to revolve around our happiness and our satisfaction. Perhaps there is a sense in which we want to be like a god – in charge and with power over others. So at the heart of sin, at the heart of our turning our backs on God, is rebellion against God’s kingship and God’s rule.