I Finally Understand -- the Goodness and Severity of God

*funny... was trying to email blog this post, but the content sensor at the office blocked this out due to words that went against policy..... wonder which of these words it is..... =O*

18.7.2012

For years I have wondered, why God can’t just forgive everyone and not have to die on the cross. And if He just forgave the whole world then it’d be all over. To put it in Singlish terms – “Why must salvation?”

today, I realise that because He is good, He cannot let sin pass without dealing with it. Rephrasing --- It would be immoral for God to let sin go and forgive it without the sin being paid for. Because He is the King, and because He is absolutely perfect, it is impossible for God to let sin pass.

Before we go on saying God is all self righteous and egoistic, let’s realise – that the self of God ­is righteous.  And faced with that, we can only come to two conclusions – either God is all up Himself and trying to be a pain in the butt and be all good, or – God is       good, and we need to do something about ourselves because of that.

and after thinking that, I realised that...we actually want a God like this. When we suffer injustice, we don’t want God to let it pass. We want Him to deal with it. The good news – God will deal with “it”. “It” means – ‘it’ and including... everything inside you.

Behold the Goodness and the Severity of God.

Double edged – niceness = good. Severity = good. Righteous = Good. God. Good God.

Forget what the world has taught you, or even what you’ve learnt in church about unconditional love and a God who will accept you just as you are – the parable of the wedding banquet and the person who got invited but turned up without changing his clothes into wedding clothes got thrown out into hell – tells us that even though God calls all, and He will treat you as a saint positionally after accepting Christ however if we keep on sinning and not changing our clothes into ones presentable to Him with his Righteousness as a cloak, always indulging ourselves in our sins, then we have not proved our repentance by deeds and to a point God will give up investing in us and let us be, and He has no choice but to hate us as a person because we refuse to part with sin and he hates sin.

So all the talk about God hating sin but loving sinners is not only not Biblical, but it is actually a greek mindset, thinking that you can separate a person’s spirit our with their physical bodies (that’s why the Greeks sinned so much). However, we Christians need to recognise our Hebrew roots – and the Hebrew thinking: the body and the spirit are one, and unseparable. Because the recognition of this puts on us accountability for our actions. It makes us responsible for both our thoughts, emotions and act. It combines spiritual realm with physical realm, calling for wholistic accountability of every part of our lives. So when we sin, it is the entire us sinning. This is the us God sees.

God’s love is not unconditional. His forgiveness is not unconditional.

He can only forgive, only if the sin has been paid for, and that we prove our repentance by our deeds. It would be immoral for God to forgive without repentance on our part, cuz we would just continue and keep sinning. This is something that the Almighty God cannot do – He cannot be immoral/ act immorally, because perfect is who He is, and He is absolutely good. To be absolutely good means that He cannot be anything not good, or behave in any way that is not good. So His severity is His being good.

We need to repent, not only of our sins, but also of our self righteousness. Our self righteousness is like shit to God, says Paul. And when we bring our self righteousness in a bowl to God and say ‘look what I’ve done!’, it’s like bringing a potty of shit to God and saying ‘look what I’ve done!’.

I will never boast about my self-righteousness again.

-          Walking on Roma St? George St? From train station towards Brisbane Square today, had the prompt to go to jail to preach repentance for God... Woman’s correctional centre, perhaps?
The difference between you and me – why you are behind bars and why I’m not – is that the law has not caught me – and that the law realises that if it were to start prosecuting every bad thought, everyone would be in jail. What the Law could not do, Christ did. He is the God of our thoughts.

**Listening to David Pawson’s The Goodness and Severity of God.