God is … but what is it that God is? For most of us, serious God promoters, we add on love or some other pseudonym, instead of grappling with God’s true character. The fact is that when Moses was given a name to take to the Egyptian Pharaoh the name he was given, was in its English translation, “I Will Be Who I Will Be.” Even the emissary who brought God’s people home didn’t get a descriptive word for God’s character.
Don’t get me wrong I am not saying that God is not love. On
the contrary, my position is that love is of God; intrinsically so. In fact we only love because of the love that
He has shed abroad. He is more than love. It is just one of the characteristics
that He demonstrates to we humans. It is
a characteristic that we experience and in return demonstrate to others.
“God is love” does appear in the New Testament. It is equally true that there is a passage
where He is quoted as saying. “Vengeance
is mine” says the Lord “I shall repay.” This
may seem to be contradictory but these are just two terms that the Bible tells
us apply to Father.
Now most of us have known a father in our lives. Some of them have been less than what we
would have wanted a father to be while some have been better than others. The fact is that, for good or not so good,
each have failed the Father-God test of a totally loving father. For that matter do we as kids deserve a love
like that?
In Gal 5 we find “All
the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: Love your neighbour as
yourself” in verse. This
verse is followed by a whole swag of verses starting at verse 16 through to verse
23.
“My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated
by God’s Spirit. Then you won’t feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there
is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit,
just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of
life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times
another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don’t you choose to
be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated
existence?
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to
get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking
accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for
happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat
competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an
impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded
and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a
rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community.
I could go on.
This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If
you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom “
Sorry about the cut and paste but Paul says it
better than I could and his writing has been around have for 2000 years or
there about. Further he had a more immediate relationship with Father than most. Face it there is no comeback to Paul’s writing.
And this piece was predicated on the slant
that if God is love how we, His followers, cannot treat others to God’s love.
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