Let me pre-qual by officailly declaring that I do not claim to have the full truth on this nor do I know what the heck I am even talking about. But that this is where I am on the journey...
Without an understanding of God's Judgement you can swing many different wrong ways. These are two extreme pictures but hopefully you will see the picture I am trying to paint.
If you think God is still out to clobber us, his beloved, you will live in fear of a Holy God even though you have been adopted, grafted into the vivne, accepted in the beloved, etc. Your image of Him is that of a fierce, hard Father who's love is conditional, who is stingy when it comes to mercy and whose word is weak. His Mercy and forgiveness is, in your perception, conditional upon your behavior/ability - along with His provision, protection and other blessings. Your prayers sound more like a guilty beggar pleading with a distant powerful King whose heart is far from his people, than a bride speaking to her Loving Bridegroom. As a result of seeing yourself this way, you also see others this way. After all, doesn't God love everybody the same? This makes us all worms - vile sinners at the capricious mercy of a moody, angry God. If you know there is the judgement of a Holy God against His enemies, and you are still afraid of Him, you do not have a revelation of his love for you - in short, you think you are God's enemy.
If you think that there is 100% no judgement whatsoever you will not have a revelation of salvation. After all, if there is no judgement, what have we been saved from? Your answer to Paul's question "in light of God's grace, should we continue sinning?" is "Sure why not!" In extreme cases, your life spirals down a string of compromises and eventually you may begin to wonder what the point of your salvation was anyway. You don't feel alive but instead, feel distant from God and wonder why that could be if He really does love you and forgive you for everything. You have been lulled into a false sense of well-being. Sure you escaped hell, but do you know Him? You have only accepted a part of who God is and what He is like. Granted, the revelation of God's love and mercy for you is the most foundational part necessary for being able to embrace all of who He is, however, if you stop there, your perception of Him will become pretty much whatever you want it to be that will fit around your own brain. What you will have is a naked foundation with building materials scattered about that has not fulfilled its purpose or seen its potential. You will be like a house boasting of a door that you have no hinges to hang it upon.
Before I talk about judgement, I want to give a few of the parameters - to back up and look at the big picture.
God - He is Love. He is our Father. He is King over all and He is the Ultimate Just Judge. His desire is to Love and to be loved. When we love we display something of the character of God. This brings Him glory. To rightly love is to rightly display the character and attributes of God, Who is love. This is done by loving God, worshipping Him, and loving each other the way that God loves us. This is also done by receiving love from God - in other words, by allowing or embracing God's love for us. His love is so deep, so powerful and so unconditional. We can never fully comprehend it but what little we can grasp empowers us fully to love others in a way that we don't even have the capacity to understand. Many times this overwhelming love, this inconceivable way, causes us to display, or desire to dislplay the characteristics of God that our little heads can't understand. In these moments, we can either go with our notion of what is right and deserved and choose not to do what our heart is strangely suggesting - or we can abandon our own knowledge of love and let the strange crazy out-there powerful love of God flow through us in actions, deeds and words that defy our own perception of what is deserved or even appropriate.
Satan - There is an enemy of God who does not want lovers to exist. He hates love and will do all that he can to destroy it. After all, his enemy is love. Satan's goal is to destroy anything that gives his enemy love, glory, attention, pleasure, etc. If it makes God happy, he wants to destroy it. If it makes God look good and displays God's glory, he wants to discredit it and steal the honor. If it brings God worship and/or draws more lovers to God, he wants to kill it. If he cannot destory, steal or kill Love he will detroy steal or kill anything that loves. He is Hate - the anti-love. I will not give him the title "opposite" because for something to be opposite it would have to be as stong or at least competatively stong in power - but hate is completely powerless against love.
In the beginning Love created Lovers. He began to create a display of beauty that had never before been seen in this form. He wanted to display Himself. He wanted someone to love and to reveal Himself to. He gave the lovers attributes of Himself, of love. One of those attributes was choice. This is amazing to think of because it speaks of how it is God's choice to love us. For His love to be rightly displayed in the earth, love had to have a choice. Love had to be love in order to love and to be loved.
But everything He created, hate tried to destroy. Hate deceived the lovers into thinking that love was not trustworthy, that love had not given them a choice. Hate told the lovers that Love had lied to them in order to trick them into loving only Him. Hate wanted them to believe that Love had made love-slaves, not objects of affection. Hate said - God is not love. And the lovers believed hate. Hate was not looking for lovers for himself. His only thought was to kill Love. His deceit had tricked the lovers into thinking that a selfish, self-focused life was what love was, not a giving sharing engaging life. He told them that Love was selfish and thought only of His own desires and that they could and should be selfish lovers of themselves too. The problem is that you cannot love if you don't have someone to love. The Enemy, Hate, found a way to get the lovers to love anything but Love Himself. And whatever display of love was left, he began to twist and pervert so that the lovers would equate love with pain, betrayal and evil perversions instead of purity, safety, comfort, peace and life.
Now they had given the whole world over to Hate. From that moment on, the first thing a lover would feel would be suspicion and distrust. Their ability to freely love and to be loved was stifled and destroyed. Their hearts would always carry the scar of this choice and they would pass it on to their children. Hate's plan worked - or it seemed to, for the moment. Hate had discredited Love - but there was something Hate had forgotten about Love.
Lovers became proud and envious, impatient, cruel, selfish, short-tempered, bitter and flighty. Lovers began to enjoy the sorrows and pains of others, and the joys of others only made them even more envious. Lovers could not trust. Lovers could not hope. Lovers would only look out for themselves. The Lovers could not see what they had become. They no longer knew what God was and were suspicious of His character. They would try to love but without receiving True Love, they failed. And the seeds of Hatred were planted in the heart of every lover from that time on because they had chosen Hate and they now belonged to him.
But God did not abandon them. They were His creation and they were a part of Him. Each one was made in His image. The enemy was destroying that image and every perversion, every lie, every deceit, every distrust and despair was an affront to God and a mockery of Love. The enemy had spent centuries trying to re-write the DNA of the lovers. If it wasn't for the mercy of God - the true, real, strong, generous mercy of God on behalf of the lovers, His created ones - the enemy would have suceeded. But the creative power of God and the nature of love turned the hearts of men toward their maker. With hearts turned toward God, He could, right in the middle of enemy territory, display His Glory. And His glory revealed His character. And His character is Love. So He delivered, gave light, brought hope, fulfilled promises proving Himself trustworthy, and He did all this even when it was not merited showing the lovers even more of His love for them. Through the centuries He continuously declared Who He was and passionately wooed back the lovers.
But they were in bondage and they belonged to Hate. Love had only one way to set them free. Hate had captured them by telling lies. Love would set them free by showing them the truth. When the world was created, it belonged to love. Love gave Himself and the world to the lovers. The lovers surrendered the world and themselves to Hate. Hate held the world and the lovers captive. The only way Love could have them back was to redeem them. Love had to make the ultimate display in the earth. Otherwise the lovers would belong to Hate forever.
Love is Pure. It is completely Holy and Righteous. Love defines what is right and seperates what is right from what is wrong. That which is right or righteous is seperated and becomes Holy or set apart. These words are more than ideas and definitions. They are the fabric of our very existence. That is why no matter how hard anyone tries they will never be able to re-define life without some principle of right and wrong. People who try to create an environment where no one can tell anyone what is wrong and what is right will end up with chaos because invariably someone will determine that some thing is "inappropriate" or "offensive". They will always end up using some sort of guidelines or structure. Whoever defines that structure will invariably place a footprint of sorts, of their own character or personality, on that environment. God, when He created the world and the lovers, put His character and personality in the very fabric of this plane of existence. The very order of nature and elements bears testimony to His attributes and the truth of Who He is. This is why Romans 1:20 says "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Since God is the One who created this world and everything in it, it is only right, fitting and it automatically results, that the rules which apply were not just made by Him but are what they are because that is what He is - who He is. When Love redeemed us, we were brought out of the domain of darkness and were translated back into the Kingdom of Love. Before we were redeemed we were doomed to walk in the domain of darkness, stumbling about, never trusting love, living in despair and suspicion. Now we are in the Kingdom of Love but our perception of God and of Love must be corrected and that is something that only God can do.
So God continues to show us the truth and reveal true Love in all its glory. Everytime He reveals Himself we are shocked at how different He is than what we thought. He has many lies to dispell and many truths to reveal. As we are delivered, set free from bondage and healed we begin to trust Him more. As we begin to trust Him, a hope rises in our hearts that there could be more - that God really might actually like us and that we will be able to one day love freely and without fear. The more we realize that we belong to Love and that He will not let us go, the more secure we are in His love, the more able we are to enjoy Him, His blessings, His life - we are able to receive His Love. As we receive His love, we are able to love Him back. After all, unless He loves us, we do not know the first thing about what love is. All we have are twisted impure images that may resemble something like love but are self-based and full of self-preservation, fear and pride.
Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (I Cor 13)
Without an understanding of God's Judgement you can swing many different wrong ways. These are two extreme pictures but hopefully you will see the picture I am trying to paint.
If you think God is still out to clobber us, his beloved, you will live in fear of a Holy God even though you have been adopted, grafted into the vivne, accepted in the beloved, etc. Your image of Him is that of a fierce, hard Father who's love is conditional, who is stingy when it comes to mercy and whose word is weak. His Mercy and forgiveness is, in your perception, conditional upon your behavior/ability - along with His provision, protection and other blessings. Your prayers sound more like a guilty beggar pleading with a distant powerful King whose heart is far from his people, than a bride speaking to her Loving Bridegroom. As a result of seeing yourself this way, you also see others this way. After all, doesn't God love everybody the same? This makes us all worms - vile sinners at the capricious mercy of a moody, angry God. If you know there is the judgement of a Holy God against His enemies, and you are still afraid of Him, you do not have a revelation of his love for you - in short, you think you are God's enemy.
If you think that there is 100% no judgement whatsoever you will not have a revelation of salvation. After all, if there is no judgement, what have we been saved from? Your answer to Paul's question "in light of God's grace, should we continue sinning?" is "Sure why not!" In extreme cases, your life spirals down a string of compromises and eventually you may begin to wonder what the point of your salvation was anyway. You don't feel alive but instead, feel distant from God and wonder why that could be if He really does love you and forgive you for everything. You have been lulled into a false sense of well-being. Sure you escaped hell, but do you know Him? You have only accepted a part of who God is and what He is like. Granted, the revelation of God's love and mercy for you is the most foundational part necessary for being able to embrace all of who He is, however, if you stop there, your perception of Him will become pretty much whatever you want it to be that will fit around your own brain. What you will have is a naked foundation with building materials scattered about that has not fulfilled its purpose or seen its potential. You will be like a house boasting of a door that you have no hinges to hang it upon.
Before I talk about judgement, I want to give a few of the parameters - to back up and look at the big picture.
God - He is Love. He is our Father. He is King over all and He is the Ultimate Just Judge. His desire is to Love and to be loved. When we love we display something of the character of God. This brings Him glory. To rightly love is to rightly display the character and attributes of God, Who is love. This is done by loving God, worshipping Him, and loving each other the way that God loves us. This is also done by receiving love from God - in other words, by allowing or embracing God's love for us. His love is so deep, so powerful and so unconditional. We can never fully comprehend it but what little we can grasp empowers us fully to love others in a way that we don't even have the capacity to understand. Many times this overwhelming love, this inconceivable way, causes us to display, or desire to dislplay the characteristics of God that our little heads can't understand. In these moments, we can either go with our notion of what is right and deserved and choose not to do what our heart is strangely suggesting - or we can abandon our own knowledge of love and let the strange crazy out-there powerful love of God flow through us in actions, deeds and words that defy our own perception of what is deserved or even appropriate.
Satan - There is an enemy of God who does not want lovers to exist. He hates love and will do all that he can to destroy it. After all, his enemy is love. Satan's goal is to destroy anything that gives his enemy love, glory, attention, pleasure, etc. If it makes God happy, he wants to destroy it. If it makes God look good and displays God's glory, he wants to discredit it and steal the honor. If it brings God worship and/or draws more lovers to God, he wants to kill it. If he cannot destory, steal or kill Love he will detroy steal or kill anything that loves. He is Hate - the anti-love. I will not give him the title "opposite" because for something to be opposite it would have to be as stong or at least competatively stong in power - but hate is completely powerless against love.
In the beginning Love created Lovers. He began to create a display of beauty that had never before been seen in this form. He wanted to display Himself. He wanted someone to love and to reveal Himself to. He gave the lovers attributes of Himself, of love. One of those attributes was choice. This is amazing to think of because it speaks of how it is God's choice to love us. For His love to be rightly displayed in the earth, love had to have a choice. Love had to be love in order to love and to be loved.
But everything He created, hate tried to destroy. Hate deceived the lovers into thinking that love was not trustworthy, that love had not given them a choice. Hate told the lovers that Love had lied to them in order to trick them into loving only Him. Hate wanted them to believe that Love had made love-slaves, not objects of affection. Hate said - God is not love. And the lovers believed hate. Hate was not looking for lovers for himself. His only thought was to kill Love. His deceit had tricked the lovers into thinking that a selfish, self-focused life was what love was, not a giving sharing engaging life. He told them that Love was selfish and thought only of His own desires and that they could and should be selfish lovers of themselves too. The problem is that you cannot love if you don't have someone to love. The Enemy, Hate, found a way to get the lovers to love anything but Love Himself. And whatever display of love was left, he began to twist and pervert so that the lovers would equate love with pain, betrayal and evil perversions instead of purity, safety, comfort, peace and life.
Now they had given the whole world over to Hate. From that moment on, the first thing a lover would feel would be suspicion and distrust. Their ability to freely love and to be loved was stifled and destroyed. Their hearts would always carry the scar of this choice and they would pass it on to their children. Hate's plan worked - or it seemed to, for the moment. Hate had discredited Love - but there was something Hate had forgotten about Love.
Lovers became proud and envious, impatient, cruel, selfish, short-tempered, bitter and flighty. Lovers began to enjoy the sorrows and pains of others, and the joys of others only made them even more envious. Lovers could not trust. Lovers could not hope. Lovers would only look out for themselves. The Lovers could not see what they had become. They no longer knew what God was and were suspicious of His character. They would try to love but without receiving True Love, they failed. And the seeds of Hatred were planted in the heart of every lover from that time on because they had chosen Hate and they now belonged to him.
But God did not abandon them. They were His creation and they were a part of Him. Each one was made in His image. The enemy was destroying that image and every perversion, every lie, every deceit, every distrust and despair was an affront to God and a mockery of Love. The enemy had spent centuries trying to re-write the DNA of the lovers. If it wasn't for the mercy of God - the true, real, strong, generous mercy of God on behalf of the lovers, His created ones - the enemy would have suceeded. But the creative power of God and the nature of love turned the hearts of men toward their maker. With hearts turned toward God, He could, right in the middle of enemy territory, display His Glory. And His glory revealed His character. And His character is Love. So He delivered, gave light, brought hope, fulfilled promises proving Himself trustworthy, and He did all this even when it was not merited showing the lovers even more of His love for them. Through the centuries He continuously declared Who He was and passionately wooed back the lovers.
But they were in bondage and they belonged to Hate. Love had only one way to set them free. Hate had captured them by telling lies. Love would set them free by showing them the truth. When the world was created, it belonged to love. Love gave Himself and the world to the lovers. The lovers surrendered the world and themselves to Hate. Hate held the world and the lovers captive. The only way Love could have them back was to redeem them. Love had to make the ultimate display in the earth. Otherwise the lovers would belong to Hate forever.
Love is Pure. It is completely Holy and Righteous. Love defines what is right and seperates what is right from what is wrong. That which is right or righteous is seperated and becomes Holy or set apart. These words are more than ideas and definitions. They are the fabric of our very existence. That is why no matter how hard anyone tries they will never be able to re-define life without some principle of right and wrong. People who try to create an environment where no one can tell anyone what is wrong and what is right will end up with chaos because invariably someone will determine that some thing is "inappropriate" or "offensive". They will always end up using some sort of guidelines or structure. Whoever defines that structure will invariably place a footprint of sorts, of their own character or personality, on that environment. God, when He created the world and the lovers, put His character and personality in the very fabric of this plane of existence. The very order of nature and elements bears testimony to His attributes and the truth of Who He is. This is why Romans 1:20 says "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Since God is the One who created this world and everything in it, it is only right, fitting and it automatically results, that the rules which apply were not just made by Him but are what they are because that is what He is - who He is. When Love redeemed us, we were brought out of the domain of darkness and were translated back into the Kingdom of Love. Before we were redeemed we were doomed to walk in the domain of darkness, stumbling about, never trusting love, living in despair and suspicion. Now we are in the Kingdom of Love but our perception of God and of Love must be corrected and that is something that only God can do.
So God continues to show us the truth and reveal true Love in all its glory. Everytime He reveals Himself we are shocked at how different He is than what we thought. He has many lies to dispell and many truths to reveal. As we are delivered, set free from bondage and healed we begin to trust Him more. As we begin to trust Him, a hope rises in our hearts that there could be more - that God really might actually like us and that we will be able to one day love freely and without fear. The more we realize that we belong to Love and that He will not let us go, the more secure we are in His love, the more able we are to enjoy Him, His blessings, His life - we are able to receive His Love. As we receive His love, we are able to love Him back. After all, unless He loves us, we do not know the first thing about what love is. All we have are twisted impure images that may resemble something like love but are self-based and full of self-preservation, fear and pride.
Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (I Cor 13)
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