God is ____ - Just (will by no means clear the guilty)

Listen in as Anthony and Jon wrap up our series God is ___ and see the wrath and justice of God unfold through the story of scripture.

 

Notes/Quotes:

Screens:

 

Ex. 34:6-7

“One sign that your theology has become problematic is that you bible has become inconvenient.” Matt Smethurst

 

• “This whole question of divine anger (ira dei) has been the subject of some sharp debate in the history of the church. It became known as the question of divine possibility (the quality or aptness in God to feel, suffer, or be angry) or impassibility (the denial of those qualities). Under the strong advocacy of Gnosticism (a philosophy that combined Greek and Oriental ideas with Christian teaching and professed access to truth that was a mystery to outsiders) a doctrine of God emerged that took the strongest exception to any claim that God could feel or suffer anything or that He could be angry.”
• “believed that the God of the Old Testament was a ‘Demiurge’ (a god subordinate to the supreme God and responsible for the creation of evil) whose involvement in war, suffering, and judgments disqualified Him from being the God of grace and goodness whom Marcion found in most of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament.”
• “Lactantius, wrote his De Ira Dei, ‘The Anger of God.’ For him passions or emotions were not in themselves evil, but avenues of virtue and goodness when kept under control. Furthermore, God must be moved to anger when He sees sin and wickedness in men and women just as He is moved to love them when they please Him.”

 

• “He who loves the good, by this very fact hates the evil; and he who does not hate the evil, does not love the good; because the love of goodness issues directly out of the hatred of evil, and the hatred of evil issues directly out of the love of goodness. No one can love life without abhorring death; and no one can have an appetency for light, without an antipathy to darkness.”

 

• “our problem with anger is that we define it as Aristotle did, ‘the desire for retaliation’ or a desire to get even and get revenge for a slight or real harm done to us. With anger goes the idea of a ‘brief madness’ and ‘an uneasiness or discomposure of the mind, upon the receipt of an injury, with a present purpose of revenge.’ But Lactantius defined anger as ‘a motion of the soul rousing itself to curb sin.’ - Walter Kaiser

“Therefore knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men.”     

(2 Cor. 5:11 KJV)

“Yahweh is forgiving, but sin is not. Sin is unforgiving—merciless, petty, and cruel. Our sin has consequences. We can miss out on blessing irretrievably. We can end up like Israel—forgiven, yes, but lost in the trackless desert waste.” - John Mark Comer

My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with man in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship. - Miroslav Volf