For so long, I struggled with uniting the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament. They just seemed like two separate entities, like two different people with distinct value systems and beliefs. It seemed to me like it was the Old Testament God of wrath vs. the New Testament God of Love. I would look at Old Testament verses like those in Deuteronomy 7, where God commands the Israelites to “destroy” seven nations of people completely and to “show them no mercy,” alongside verses like Luke 6:36 where Jesus tells the people to “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” and just get big question marks above my head as to how the Gods that the two profess do not contradict each other.
But in reality, God’s justice and wrath as shown here in Deuteronomy actually affirm and verify God’s character in a really beautiful way. Looking at the context of Deuteronomy 7, God had waited over 400 years for the sins of those people to “be complete” or “reach its full measure” (Genesis 15:16) so that the command for destruction - His justice - would be justified. So He waited, because even 100 years of iniquity was not enough to provoke the execution of God’s wrath. 200 years, 300 years: they weren’t enough either. He waited 400 years so that His justice would be justified, so that He gave these people endless chances to turn and repent, so that His wrath would not come without valid reason. And we are a culture that seems to understand this: we become angry about senseless murder (killing someone) but are a little bit more complacent about someone being killed under the death penalty (killing someone with reason). I am not at all suggesting that God’s wrath is parallel to the death penalty, but are you catching the incredible patience there in those verses? Are you catching how it reveals the depths of His love for his people? The reason God commands total destruction is essentially to protect and restore His chosen people. We are, again, a culture that seems to understand this: we become angry about a man killing a random man (senseless murder), but we support a father who must kill someone attacking his family in order to protect them (again, killing with reason). The God of wrath, the God of Love; they are cohesive, they are one.
I have been a Christian for years now, and I am beginning to come to terms with this just this year. And it has been so life-giving. It is a whole new facet of God that I never spent ample time looking into, and honestly, that I never knew was even there. I think we tend to get in the mindset sometimes - with whatever it is: learning, relationships, religion - that we have pretty much reached the deepest point we can.
In Ephesians 3:20, it lays out a beautiful promise, that God is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. But it is not only His actions that extend beyond our dreams, hopes, imaginations; it is God himself. God himself is more than we could ever ask, dream, hope, or imagine. More than we ever could, and more than we ever will. No matter how deep we are, no matter the level of understanding we think we have reached regarding Him, we have always only scratched the surface. We will never reach a point of complete understanding because he is more than we could ever imagine. We will never exhaust the breadth of God’s perfect Love, never reach a depth where we must be stagnant because there is just nothing more to Him.
And what a beautiful thing it is to have a God we can not and will never understand completely! If God could fit the parameters of our human understanding, that would make him far too small to be a God worth worshipping. What a small God that would be, if we could understand his every move. That would mean He is on level with us, that He operates out of our same human thinking. Even spanning across vastly different cultures, time periods, and religions, while beliefs have varied, a common belief has held that God or gods is/are meant to be set apart and honored as someone or something beyond ourselves. Above ourselves. We get that if God is truly God, we will not understand everything about Him. We are a culture addicted to answers; but there is beauty and power in the mystery of God.
“Can you fathom the mysteries of God?
Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?
They are higher than the heavens - what can you do?
They are deeper than the depths of the grave - what can you know?
Their measure is longer than the earth
and wider than the sea.” Job 11:7-9
I'm going to leave you with an excerpt from The Hungering Dark by Frederick Buechner (and a shameless plug to go buy the book and read it...so good). Remember: God is Love, and when necessary, He exhibits wrath. He is not wrath. Everything, even judgment and wrath, is under the umbrella of a Love that we may not understand, but that is good. And the boundaries of this Love, we will never reach. There is no telling the lengths to which God will go in his wild and beautiful pursuit of man.
“Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there, too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully...and nothing is ever quite the same again.”
written by Taylor Fohr
Thanks goes to my youth pastor for some of the thoughts and examples used!
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