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When love came down…
In the
previous three papers we have sought to shape our theology by Jesus Christ.
Jesus is theology – He is the Word of God (the ‘logos’ of ‘theos’ – from
which the word ‘theology’ is derived). All words spoken about God must be
guided by the Divine Word who alone can reveal the Truth. Only in the
God-Man are men brought to God. This not simply a truth about salvation,
it is a truth about revelation also. There is no true knowledge of God
that is not begun with, shaped by and focused on Jesus Christ.
Yet historically, humanity has had many words to say on the matter of
God. And many of those words have infiltrated the church and shaped our
thinking of the Living God.
In our last paper, The God who is… bigger than you think , we
saw that Christians have often tried to accommodate a philosophical god
in their thinking. It’s usual for many people to imagine some kind of
Divine Essence underlying the Three Persons.
This impersonal essence is supposed to
be foundational to the Being of God and is made up of classical
attributes such as omnipresence, omniscience, immutability
(changelessness), omnipotence and timelessness.
Yet this turns out to be a real
hotch-potch of Biblical truth and philosophical speculation. No-one in
the Bible ever encounters a divine essence! All true encounter with the
Living God is personal encounter. Furthermore, all true experience in the
fullness of Christian maturity is experience of the Persons of God.
Paul (a mature believer!) wants to
know Christ (Phil 3:10) – he never wants to go deeper than Christ to the
real God! His desire and prayer for the churches is to know the length
and width and height and depth of the love of Christ (Eph 3:18).
According to Paul, that is the way believers are filled to the full
measure of all the fullness of God – not by going beyond the Persons but
by appreciating more fully the Persons. Paul wants us to keep in step
with the Spirit (Gal 5:25); and by Him to cry to our Father as Abba (Rom
8:15).
Never are we given a foretaste of
God’s essence before encountering Christ. Never are we counseled to ‘go
beyond’ the Persons to the real God. Never are we offered an experience
of Deity that is not of personal fellowship with the Persons. We must
renounce this impersonal Divine Essence and get back to a Biblical
understanding of God’s nature.
The Being of God does not form the Three Persons.
Rather the Three Persons form the Being of God.
To answer the question “Who is God?”
we say: God is a loving relationship of Three Persons: the Father, the
Son and the Holy Spirit. The divine nature is not an abstract principle
of God-ness. The divine nature is that relationship of Persons.
In the words of John Zizioulas in
“Being as Communion”, “The substance of God has no content, no true being,
apart from communion.”
If a philosopher forced us into a
corner to answer the question “what is the substance of God?” we could
reply “loving communion is what makes God, God.” Or better still we could
simply turn to the Bible and say “Would you like to know what is at the
heart of God?: 1 John 4:16 - ‘God is love’!
God is love
“We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us
of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his
Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is
the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely
on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in
God, and God in him. (1 John 4:13-16)
Here again we see that the Bible’s picture
of the height and breadth and depth of our experience of God never goes
beyond the Three Persons. We have the Spirit of God, by Whom we
acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God, and by that we enter into the
life of God. It is all so relational – the Father is the Father because
He has the Son. The Son is the Son because He has the Father. The Spirit
is His Spirit because He belongs to the Father. The identities of these
Divine Persons are constituted by the loving relationships which they
share. And the identity of the Being they form is made from this loving
relationship. This is what the Bible means by the phrase ‘God is love.’
It does not say ‘God is loving’ (which would be true). It is rather that
the Three Persons are constituted as One God by love. The Being of God is
far from impersonal – it is love.
How different this is to the
philosopher’s god!! The philosopher’s god has, at its essence, an
impressive CV of attributes, but is extremely short on personality. The
very stuff of the Living God is personal and passionate emotion!
The Passions of God
If this is so – that love constitutes
the very being of God – then one outcome is this:
If we dismiss or minimize the emotions of God
we dismiss or minimize God Himself.
The God who is love is deeply passionate.
The God of Hosea 11:1-11, for instance, shows gentle parental love. He
displays caring and condescension and compassion, acts of loving kindness
and a heart turned upside-down in love. This same God is also a God who
has fierce anger, a God who roars like a lion, a God of wrath. In verse 8
we see God’s passions battling it out within Him.
“How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?”
The LORD describes His own heart as
changed within Him, all His compassion is aroused. We noted last week, as
we studied God’s omnipotence, that there is no moral code or
character-umpire who is forcing God to show mercy. The only reasons for
God to act are within Himself. Nothing and no-one stands outside of God
to compel Him to act – not ethics, not logic – nothing! So if there’s a
struggle going on, it is a struggle within God and we ought to take
notice of these core motivations. In verse 8 we see that those motives
are passionate, emotional motives. Here the battle for what God will do
is the battle between His just anger and His merciful love. And,
wonderfully, the battle is won by His love.
Now this talk of God’s heart being
changed within Him has alarmed many Christians. Many are not used to
thinking of God as passionate in this way. Therefore people have tried to
down-play these words by saying that ‘God Himself isn’t changed in heart
but the Bible accommodates itself to our understanding of emotions. God
is portrayed to us as emotionally churned-up even though He really isn’t
like that. It’s just a way of God explaining Himself to us in terms that
we’d understand.’
Even the mighty John Calvin falls for
this on Hosea 11:
“As to this mode of speaking, it appears indeed at the first
glance to be strange that God should make himself like mortals in
changing his purposes and in exhibiting himself as wavering. God, we
know, is subject to no passions; and we know that no change takes place
in him. What then do these expressions mean, by which he appears to be
changeable? Doubtless he accommodates himself to our ignorances whenever
he puts on a character foreign to himself.”
Why does Calvin use those words “we
know”? What do we know of God except what we are told in His Word? If God
appears emotional (and He does!) we ought not to doubt the sincerity of
His self-disclosure.
Why would we want to say that God is not emotional?
Calvin notes one reason when he says
“we know that no change takes place in God.” God’s unchangeable character
is sometimes called the doctrine of God’s immutability. Under the
classical attributes of God this simply says that God is subject to no
change in His Being. The god of the philosophers is immutable – he/she/it
is timelessly, unyieldingly constant no matter what happens. He/she/it
does not change – after all, how can you improve on perfection?
Yet last week we saw that the Bible
has no problem with saying that God the Son learns and grows and is made
perfect (Luke 2:52; Heb 5:8,9). There is change. God Himself has a
history – there is a time before the incarnation and a time after, there
is a time before Pentecost and a time after etc etc. Furthermore His
Trinitarian relationships reveal real and deep interactions between the
Persons where they take on certain roles with One Another. We mustn’t say
that there is no change in God whatsoever – this is to reject the Bible’s
plain teaching. The way in which God is unchanging is in His
faithfulness: God never goes back on His promises. In this way He is
unchanging. Yet within the Being of God which is the relationship of the
Persons, there is clearly a very rich diversity of feeling.
Perhaps another cause for our
reluctance to acknowledge emotions in God is that we don’t want to
ascribe ‘hot-headed’ qualities to God. ‘Isn’t it the pagan gods who fly
into rages and change their minds depending their mood swings?’ However,
this is to project fallen human emotions onto God. We may ‘lose our
temper’, or be ‘swept off our feet’, yet the LORD is in possession of
Himself at all times. One of the fruit of the Holy Spirit is
self-control. So God is not rash. Yet He is emotional. After all the rest
of the fruit is ‘love, joy, peace…’! It is just these kind of emotions
which characterize the living God throughout Scripture. It would be near
impossible to get through a single Psalm without being confronted by an
intensely passionate God.
Anthropomorphism / Anthropopathism?
Yet still people remain uncomfortable
with the idea that God is emotional. Many resort to saying that, though
the Bible describes God like this, He is, in Himself, unemotional.
We saw a similar issue last week when
we noticed that the Bible describes the Father (and the pre-incarnate
Son) in bodily, humanoid terms. People have tried to dismiss these
passages as anthropomorphisms. (Anthropomorphic means ‘seeming to have
human shape’). It is suggested that while God is not really bodily, the
Bible describes Him as such to accommodate itself to our finite
understanding. We noted last week the dangers of dismissing Biblical
descriptions in favour of abstract principles gained elsewhere! Here we
have the same issue replayed with regard to God’s emotions. Biblical
passages describing God’s emotional life are often dismissed as
anthropopathisms. (Anthropopathic means ‘seeming to have human
emotions’). Again it’s suggested that the Bible’s account of God’s rich
emotional life is not how God really is but is simply a way of speaking
which we can understand.
This, however, raises far more
questions than it answers. Can the Biblical witness really be trusted if
we begin to doubt whether any of the descriptions of God actually
describe Him as He is? Who is this God we’re called to trust in if He’s
not the One shown to us in His Word? On what basis are we making
distinctions between God in Himself, and God as He presents Himself? How
could we ever know if God was any different ‘behind closed doors’? To say
that God is different “at home” to how He presents Himself “at work” is
to make two errors: First, it is a claim to have a window onto the real
Divine Life. It is to claim special insight into the true nature of God
which is not actually revealed to us. Secondly, it paints God as
duplicitous.
We have no reason to doubt God’s
self-portrait. When it says He is emotional, then He is emotional! In
fact, He is more emotional than we are. What do we know of emotions
compared to the God who is the loving relationship of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. All that we know of emotional life is because we have been
created in His image!
The Passion of God
Fundamentally we must sign up to the
emotional God because the gospel of God entirely depends on it. Those
twin realities revealed in Hosea 11 of God’s tender-hearted love and His
fearful wrath find their fulfilment and true expression at the cross.
There the heart of God was turned more than at any time before or since.
At the cross, the Triune God’s determination to love His wrath-deserving
creatures made for an event we call the Passion. The just anger of the
Father is poured out on the obedient Son who was made to be sin for us.
Think of all those Scriptures about the LORD God’s personal hatred of
sin.
"A fire has been kindled by my wrath, one that burns to the
realm of death below. It will devour the earth and its harvests and set
afire the foundations of the mountains."
(Deuteronomy 32:22)
Yet at the cross, the Eternal Son (who
is the Rock who speaks these words (v18)) becomes sin and suffers the
torments of hell. The Son does not suffer this stoically. There is no
stiff upper lip with the Living God. The prospect of the cross makes
Christ, in the garden of Gethsemane, sweat blood and beg the Father for
another way (Matt 26:39). The obedient Son actually expresses a will
different to His Father’s for the first time in the history of God. The
very Being of God is threatened at the cross. Think for a second: if God
is the loving relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then what is
happening when the Son cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?” The life of God is on the line. God is defined by the love of the
Father for the Son – yet here the Father turns His face away. The anger
of God which should burn against you or I is unleashed on the Eternal Son
and He feels every last drop.
We mustn’t lose the passions of God.
The cross is not a clinical transaction. The Father doesn’t click on the
icon marked ‘Human Sin” and drag it across to Christ’s account. When
Jesus cries “My God my God why have you forsaken me?” He is not asking
for clarification. He is feeling the wrath of the Divine Anger. And the
God who IS the loving relationship is severed. The Son is thrust away
from the Father. “Is this the end of God?” That is the question we should
be asking as we see God meting out His fury on God.
What kind of God do we follow? A God so
passionate He would threaten His own existence in order to satisfy His
righteous anger against sin. All humanity can do is watch in awe as God
propitiates God.
And yet from the cross flows such
love. The Scriptures resound not just with the fearful anger of the cross
but fundamentally with the love demonstrated there in sacrificial
service:
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one
and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life.
Rom. 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While
we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and
sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Far from us loving God – all we have
ever done is anger Him. Yet God jeopardizes His very existence in order
to reconcile to Himself unlovely sinners like ourselves. Such amazing
love shown to such unworthy recipients! No wonder we will sing into
eternity of the Lamb who was slain (Rev 5:13). God’s love and God’s anger
– the height and depth of His emotional life – are revealed in the
central action of God. God is passionate – infinitely more so than us. To
say otherwise is to destroy the gospel!
What motivates God?
Now that we have established God’s rich
emotional life we are in a position to answer the question ‘what
motivates God?’ Clearly nothing outside God can referee His behaviour.
Yet within God we have seen reasons (passionate reasons!) for His acting.
In the history of Israel (Hosea 11) and at the cross we have seen that
our emotional God displays varied emotions yet it is His love which seems
to have the last word.
Is that the motivation of God then? Do
we just say that God is love and therefore God acts accordingly? Well we
can be more specific than this. In its context in 1 John, it is clear
that ‘God’ refers to the Father. John does not say that ‘God is love’ in
the sense that love is the glue in between the Persons. Rather He speaks
of ‘love’ as being particularly a property of the Father. So to be
precise: God is love in that the Father loves the Son in the unity of the
Holy Spirit. It is the Father’s love for the Son which is foundational to
the identity of God.
All the Scriptures which refer to the
pre-creation existence of God speak of the Father acting or choosing with
a focus on the Son.
From before the world began, the
Father has focused all His plans in the Son who He loves (John 17:5, 24;
1 Pet 1:20; Eph 1:4-6). The act of creation was done through Christ and
for Christ (Col 1:15-17; Prov 8:22-23). All of history has been purposed
as the putting of all things under Christ (Psalm 110:1; Eph 1:10). The
Father’s will is that all should look to Christ for salvation. (Psalm 2;
Luke 9:35; John 3:16; 6:29,40). John 3:35 is typical of the Bible’s
portrait of the Father’s mode of acting:
“The Father loves the Son and has
placed everything in His hands.”
What motivates the Father is His
immense love for the Son. From before the world began this fountain of
love has flowed from the Father to the Son. In the act of creation, this
love spilled over and spread itself. The creation itself is ‘for Christ’
– it is a love gift. The Father has made His Son the Head over all
creation and is determined to bring all things into submission under Him.
Even though humanity has stolen itself away from Him, He is determined to
make for His Son a pure spotless bride. This determination takes God to
the depths of the cross but now, in resurrection hope, the Father is
waiting for the great marriage of His Son to His bride. This is the
rationale for everything that happens in heaven and on earth.
When we see the infinite love which
the Father has for the Son, then we have our finger on the pulse of
reality. With that in mind turn to John 17:24-26:
“Father I want those you have given me
to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you have given me
because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father,
though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you
have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make
you known in order that the love you have for me may be in tham and that
I myself may be in them.”
We tap into the Divine Love Affair
when we are united to Jesus. The love which the Father has had for the
Son from everlasting, the love which brought the cosmos into being, the
love that directs history, cascades over to us. We are as loved by the
Father as Christ is.
What motivates God is love for the
Son. To be included in the purposes of God, one must be included in
Christ who is the focus of the Father’s concern. In Christ we are caught
up into the very heart of God.
Following the God who is Love
If this is true then how should we
respond? If the Being of God is love, what difference does this make?
Well let’s think about the two alternatives for a second.
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The
Philosopher's god
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The Living
God
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Essense
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Impersonal
Attributes
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Loving relationship
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Glory
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Absolute freedom of
will
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Freely chosen
condescension - Grace!
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Motivation
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The will
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Love (esp. of Father
for Son)
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If the underlying essence of god is a
more-or-less impersonal set of attributes then the glory of this god is
shown in the display of his glory. This glory is not self-sacrificial
love, but rather the display of power through an unyielding sovereign
will. This god is motivated not by love but by logic. The will of this
god is foundational. To ask ‘why does this god act in this way?’ would
provoke the response “because he wills it.” To ask “why does he will it?”
is unanswerable– there is no reason for his acting beyond his sovereign
will.
How do you go about following such a
god? Well, you try to copy him. His character is shown in the excellence
of his virtues (his wisdom and power etc), and so you set out to make
your own character as great as his. You build your own CV of attributes.
Of course you’ll come well short of his standard since you are finite and
he’s infinite. But the way you’ll go about imitating god will be to set
your will on achieving the character and works that you want to achieve.
After all, that’s how the god of the philosopher’s works.
In such a religion, emotions are off
the radar screen. They don’t belong to god and so they are neither
praiseworthy nor blameworthy. The philosopher commonly says: emotions are
not subject to moral categories. How we feel lies outside the scope of
approval or disapproval. We've often heard the saying ‘Feelings are
feelings, they aren’t right or wrong – it’s what you do with them that counts.’
In such thinking, what matters is the will. What matters is the actions.
Emotions are incidental. That’s the god of the philosophers.
The God who is love is very different.
The Passionate God does not consider the emotions outside of moral
categories. If we ask the Living God why He acts, He does not reply
‘Because I have willed it and you can’t stop me.’ The reason He acts is
because He loves the Son and acts accordingly. It is not the will which
determines the LORD’s affections – His burning affections (for the Son)
determine His will.
For we who follow the God who is both
constituted and motivated by love, our emotions are not incidental.
Rather the core of our worship, our religion, our morality is a heart
focused on loving trust towards Christ. The gospel is not about achieving
a moral CV of attributes. It is not about setting our will on achieving
the good. The gospel is about a needy, broken heart, renouncing its deeds
and fixing its affections on Jesus.
The Bible is full of commands about
how we ought to feel if the truths of the gospel are firmly entrenched in
our hearts – for instance: Contentment (Exodus 20:17); Heart-felt love (1
Peter 1:22); Peace (Colossians 3:15); Zeal (Romans 12:11); Sorrow and Joy
(Romans 12:12; Philippians 4:4); Desire (1 Peter 2:2); Gratitude
(Ephesians 5:19,20).
Our feelings matter very much!
When Jesus is asked what is the
greatest commandment, He deliberately shies away from moralistic
definitions. He replies: ‘Love the LORD your God with all your heart and
with all you soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ And
‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ (Mark 12:30,31) We fail to see how
radical this is because we are so indoctrinated by a works mentality that
we read this command through the grid of works-righteousness. We say
“Wow, that’s a wonderful standard for our actions.” But Jesus is not
giving us a more excellent description of the deeds we ought to do. He is
describing an utterly different morality. Christ's morality is founded on
the passions. The will doesn't affect the passions rather we begin with
the passions (right passions of love!) and they affect the will.
Of the seven churches which Christ
addressed in Revelation only the church at Ephesus is threatened with
removal. In among the crimes of the other churches which included mass
sexual immorality, idolatry and false teaching, the crime of the
Ephesians’ was considered worst: “You have forsaken your first love.”
(Rev 2:4)
Perhaps the most confronting passage
of Scripture on our emotional lives comes from 1 Corinthians 13. In
verses 1 and 2, Paul lists a number of amazing spiritual gifts that are
being exercised for the building up of the church. There is impressive
giftedness being used in the service of God and Paul says it means
nothing. If it is not done out of love, it does not even show up on the
radar screen. In verse 3, Paul describes amazing sacrificial service –
the abandonment of our goods, our freedoms, our very lives. Yet if it is
not done out of love it is worth nothing. It is possible to be incredibly
gifted, to employ those gifts in godly ways, to even sacrifice everything
in Christian service and yet to be a spiritual zero.
So often people say ‘love is a
decision of the will.’ Well there has to be more to it than that. The
people in v3 chose to lay down their lives for others – which Jesus says
is the greatest display of love possible (John 15:13). Yet Paul says that
this decision of the will does not count as love, and their sacrifice is
worth nothing in God’s eyes. Steel-willed service is not a substitute for
love. Without warm-hearted love we are nothing. If it were true that love
is simply a decision of the will then all morality would collapse into
acts of the will and we’d be back under the works righteousness of the
philosopher’s god.
A person may ask: “What am I to do
when I don’t feel like praying or laying down my life for my wife? Should
I stop trying until the feelings return?” To answer: of course you
shouldn’t stop. The doing and the feeling are organically united – to
stop the doing will do your feelings no favours whatsoever! Yet we should
never think that we’ve solved the problem by pressing on in unfeeling
service. Our lack of love is a problem in itself! It is the root problem,
and no amount of passionless service for God or others will atone for it.
Our affections themselves need to be brought before God. They are not
outside of moral categories, they are essential to them.
Conclusion
The foundation of all reality is love.
To be precise, it is the love of the Father for the Son. We find our
foundation and purpose when we also love the Son. All our Christian
discipleship is about a life of love focused on Jesus. We do not follow
the Living God through disinterested moral piety. We follow the affectionate
God with our affections. It is impossible to read the Bible properly if
we don’t take seriously its continual expectations for our emotional
life. Our emotions are not off the radar screen – they are at the centre
of the life of God and they ought to be at the centre of our lives too.
Having said all this, let me clarify
three points in conclusion:
1) All of this must be thought through
in the context of the God who loved us first. (Rom 5:8; 1 Jn 4:10). The
new commandment (Jn 13:34) is not to be followed as the new legalism! If
we had trouble fulfilling the external code of the Old Covenant, how much
more trouble will we have with this radically demanding standard for our
hearts! We must realize that such a life of zealous, joyful affection towards
God and mankind is not at all humanly possible but a mircale that is to
be worked through us. We must, first of all, remind ourselves that we are
loved – as loved by the Father as Christ (John 17:24). Only then can the
love of God be channeled through us to others. Even then it will be a
faltering and imperfect channeling since the ‘heart is deceitful above
all things’ (Jeremiah 17:9). Yet fundamentally we stake our eternity on
God’s love for us – NOT on our love for God. (1 Jn 4:10, 16) Remember grace!
2) We must pray! A change of the heart
is a miracle of God and we must beg the LORD Jesus to make our hearts
like His. ‘Love comes from God’ (1 John 4:7). We do not have it within us
to conjure up the kind of love God is looking for, we must ask for it!
3) We must meditate on the love God
showed for us. Think often, pray often, worship often at the foot of the
cross. That is the place love came down. Once we are secure in the love
of God, we are enabled to pass on to others what we have received. As Augustine
once said: “One loving spirit sets another on fire.”
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