Taken Serious ...

Thursday, Jan 14, 2016. There is an inherent tension in Christian teaching and philosophy, which I would like to address today. The tension is between the fantastic and overwhelming grace which God gives to us in Christ Jesus, and the wrath of God towards sin and pain, towards a behaviour and live which does not find to truth and love. God takes things serious! But how do I know?

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Where Wickedness Starts …

If you read the biblical books, they are full of God's struggle with our wickedness - when I use the work “our” I mean those of mankind, many people, perhaps all people. The point is that often we do not even realize what we do, we do not realize how ignorant we behave, we do not realize our destruction - we ignore it! We could go into hundreds of examples, pulling out destructive, egoistic and ignorant behavior which takes place around us or in our own life.

The biblical books also talk about things which are one layer deeper. Do we honor God? Do we give him the role which he should have, which he deserves? Do we see reality, or are we half blind, or completely blind towards the presence and actions of the God of this world? The apostle Paul claims that we could see, if we wanted, that everything is there to see in principle. In his letter to the church in Rome, he writes:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 people are without excuse. (Romans 1, 18-20)

Not Superficial …

Sometimes in Christian churches we find a quite superficial treatment of sin. People follow some rules, for example: have one husband only. That is clearly a good thing. But they do not follow the rule that your heart should be pure and that you should let all things go. They do not walk the path of discipleship, they do not put God into the center of their life. We still want to please others, we still want to be honoured. We search riches and success, leisure and pleasure. But we should start to find true life, not the false life of illusion!

What are things we need to talk about? First, we need to fully understand this huge distance between God/grace/love/truth on the one hand and hate/ignorance/godlessness on the other. It touches basically each and every layer of our life, some very easy rules, but much more than that, our self-esteem, our motivation, our feelings and the way we see things, we plan things and we carry out things day by day.

At some point we can start to understand the wrath of God. His anger is against everything which destroys life. If you take it together with him being the source and ultimate aim of all life, with him being love, truth and grace in essence, you start to get a sense of how he must think about our ways to do things, everywhere on the planet. Look around you, and then think about how things could be, if we would follow the spirit of Jesus, you will be angry - and then come to the cross and see how he resolved this tension … ! (RWEP) ... more texts