Why does our loving God condemn?
So why won’t God allow those who reject Christ to enter into fellowship with him? Maybe a better question would be, how can we expect someone who is in rebellion against God to have fellowship with the God they are challenging? How can love remain perfect if we allow imperfect self-love to enter into the fellowship of agape? Perfection and imperfection cannot coexist.
Man enters God’s perfect love through Christ as he lets go of the things that ensnare his soul. Anything else is corruption, and God will not compromise his perfect character, nature, or love. Someone once illustrated this well. If someone had a gallon of pure water, and added one drop of sewage to it, would you drink it? What about half a drop? The truth is, any amount of sewage introduces something harmful to the water and makes it impure. A few bacteria can start a disease that will destroy our bodies. The same is true with God’s perfect love. To allow man to bring his corrupt nature into fellowship creates an impure love that is no longer agape. We cannot expect God to cease from his perfection in order to have fellowship with man. It is as if many are asking God to fall and corrupt himself, rather than allowing him to redeem and cleanse fallen man.
With what we have learned from scripture, we can understand what it means to love God with all our heart. The Bible says that when we surrender to the love of God through Christ, we are born again as a new creation, born after the Spirit (2 Corinthians 5:17). As part of that new birth, the Spirit of God indwells us (1 Corinthians 3:16, 1 John 3:9). And the love of God is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).
Loving God is taking the love that God has poured out in our heart, and giving it back to him through our lives by abiding in fellowship and obedience. Through fellowship with God, we naturally have fellowship with those who are drawing near with us, and we will do good works to those God is touching through our lives. We give, because we have received. Our new lives are born after the Spirit of God, and in order to draw near to God, all we must do is walk in the Spirit. This is accomplished through studying and yielding ourselves to obey his word.
The scripture has been given to us as a glimpse into the infinite nature of God. We know him by seeking the Lord through the word. Because God is infinite, we never exhaust the depth of what there is to seek. Think of the scriptures as a fraction of infinity. God has taken part of himself, and revealed it to us. I can divide the scriptures infinitely, and never exhaust what he can reveal about himself through the Bible. This is why we can study the Bible all our life, and continuously discover new truths in passages we’ve read hundreds of times.
Consider this passage from 2 Timothy 2:15
15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
Notice that God instructed us to ‘rightly divide’. To rightly divide, means to take a portion of scripture, dig it out to examine it closer, search its depths, and keep it within the whole of scripture. To divide the word, we examine another fraction, but we do not divide it from the whole. To rightly divide the word, each passage and doctrine must remain in harmony with the rest of scripture. To divide one scripture from another is to separate it from God’s perfection, thus making it corrupt. We can then no longer accurately call it the truth. We divide by exploring, not separating. The scriptures show us all that God has revealed about himself, but not all that God is. Yet through this small revelation of God, we can explore God to the limits of man’s ability to understand as the Holy Spirit enlightens our understanding.
Through the word, salvation is revealed, our path is made clear, we are cleansed from our sins, and we learn to have fellowship with God. Let’s conclude this study by looking at John 14:23-26
23 Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.
24 "He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me.
25 " These things I have spoken to you while being present with you.
26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
Through keeping the word, we discover the love of God, and find the promise that both the Father and Son will abide in us. God indeed loves us, and came to deliver us from our condemnation so we could be partakers of the divine nature through Christ.
Eddie Snipes
http://exchangedlifediscipleship.blogspot.com
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment