God is a good God!
He isn’t mad at us.
He not only loves us, He likes us!
He will never leave us nor forsake us, no matter how badly we miss it.
His mercies are new every morning!
Our sin does not affect His opinion of us nor cause Him to withhold His blessing!
Great is His faithfulness!!!!
These sound like very radical statements! Just think about the typical Christian teaching concerning God today. Usually, God is presented as stern, angry, and ready to get us for the slightest misstep. Or at least He certainly won’t answer our prayers if we sin. That’s wrong, and it leads to wrong conclusions and attitudes toward God that hinder an intimate relationship with Him.
So why is the Lord represented so harshly? The answer can be partly found in the lack of understanding of the harmony between the Old and New Testament. In the Old Testament, the Lord vented His anger and judgment often, and in very devastating ways.
• There was Noah’s flood;
• the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
• a death angel killed all the firstborn of Egypt in one night;
• another angel killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night;
• And on and on the list goes.
Matter of fact I have heard one local artist sing “Muliro gwake” and I think this is largely derived from the old testament in 2Kings when Fire came and consumed 102 men and its says in 2Kings 1:12 “…and the Fire of God came down from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.”
There is no doubt our God is a holy God who hates sin and demands justice, but if your eyes are only upon the Judgmental side of God, then you will think that is His default side, or the better part of Him.
However, there is also the portrait of God that Jesus painted for us through His teachings and actions, how,
• He showed mercy to the worst of sinners,
• associated with publicans and harlots,
• loved the unlovely, and then
• His ultimate action of dying for our sins proved beyond any doubt that He came to save the world, not condemn it.
1) How does this fit with the Old Testament view of the harshness and severity of God?
2) Are the new and old testaments insinuating that God schizophrenic?
3) Does God sometimes love us and other times hate us?
4) How can we have a healthy relationship with someone who gets these mood swings?
These questions present a dilemma that has kept many people at arm’s length from the Lord. The vast majority of people KNOW there is a God; they just don’t know how to relate to Him. They are confused because mixed signals have been sent to them, often by the church.
A minister will say that it was the Lord, in His sovereignty, who killed a baby; and in the next breath, the minister will ask if anyone wants to serve this GOOD GOD. We are told that God won’t answer the prayer of anyone in sin, and yet we are told that the bible says we have all sinned. Where does that leave us? Without a prayer!
There is a simple answer to these questions, and a harmony between the wrath and mercy of God.
God is not schizophrenic.
There is one, true nature of God clearly represented in the Word, and that is LOVE!
First John 4:8 says,
“God is love.”
He doesn’t just love at times. Love is the nature of God! Jesus gave us the greatest representation of the true nature of God ever presented. Anybody who loves also wants to be loved, this means God too wants Love, and that’s why He embeds Love inside us. We love because He first loved us.
God placed our sins on Jesus and punished Him in our place. God satisfied His own demands for justice, not by punishing us, but by punishing His Son in our place. This wasn’t a partial payment which required adding our holiness; it was a total payment that leaves us with nothing to do except;
• Believe and receive, or
• Doubt and do without.
Jesus’ payment for our sins forever changed our relationship with the Father. If Jesus had made His sacrifice for sins in the Old Testament, then we wouldn’t have seen the wrath of God vented as recorded in the Old Testament scriptures.
Here’s an example. In 2 Kings 1, Elijah called fire down from heaven and killed 102 soldiers who had come to arrest him. Jesus’ disciples (specifically the sons of thunder) attempted to bring the same to bear on Samaria, by asking the same thing and cited Elijah as their example. Jesus rebuked them for even thinking about such an act and said,
“Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:55-56).
Jesus rebuked His disciples for trying to follow Elijah’s example. This shows that if Jesus had been present on the earth in His role as Messiah, this act of judgment wouldn’t have happened. There is a difference between the way God dealt with mankind under the Old Covenant and the way He deals with mankind under the New Covenant.
Before the sacrifice of Jesus, there was judgment. But it wasn’t because the Lord desired to punish us. His nature has always been love. However, a price had to be paid for sin, and until that sacrifice was made, there had to be consequences.
It’s similar to training children. If you wait to begin disciplining your children until they are old enough to fully comprehend exactly what you say, you and the child will be in big trouble. A child has to be restrained from doing wrong from a very young age.
At one or two years old, they may not understand that it’s the devil tempting them to take their sibling’s toys. However, they can understand, “If you do that again, you are going to get a spanking.” They may not comprehend heaven and hell issues, but when the devil tempts them with covetousness, they will say NO, because they fear a spanking.
It can also be said for a malignant wound that is eating up somebody’s leg. While a doctor may have to amputate in order to save the rest of the leg, this does not mean that the doctor hates you, he is merely saving your life. This is what Happened to Man in the beginning in the Old Testament, and religion concluded that God was a Stern Judge, but God was simply saving the situation from getting very bad.
Before the new birth, people were sinning and that sin was destroying their lives. God didn’t want to punish them. He was willing to show them mercy on credit, in a sense, looking forward to the sacrifice of His own Son for their sins. People began to take the lack of God’s judgment as approval.
This can be clearly seen with Cain and his descendants. Cain killed his brother Abel because of jealousy (Gen. 4). Instead of punishment, God extended mercy toward Cain, even putting a mark on his forehead to warn others that God was protecting him.
Cain’s great-great-great-grandson, Lamech, interpreted this as approval of murder. He killed a man in self-defense and, therefore, felt more justified in his killing than Cain. He said that if God would avenge Cain sevenfold, then He would avenge Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
God didn’t say that, Lamech did. Lamech was presuming on God because of His grace toward Cain. Therefore, mankind began to move so far away from a proper standard of holiness that if God hadn’t intervened, there wouldn’t have been a virgin left to give birth to Jesus.
Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 10:12,
“But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”
This has always been the case. If one person gets by with sin, others will take that as an approval of sin. So before the Lord could produce the new birth, where He lives within us and guides us through the indwelling of His Holy Spirit, He placed external restraints on sin that even lost people could understand. “You sin and you die.” That’s the way it was.
That wasn’t the way God really wanted it to be, but sin had to be restrained until Jesus’ atoning sacrifice was made. God’s withholding of punishment for sin had led to a total loss of a true standard of right and wrong. Mankind had compared themselves with others so often and for so long that no one knew what God originally intended. Something had to be done.
Sin was destroying the human race and needed to be restrained. Therefore, God gave the Law. But why didn’t He give the Law to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden 2,000 years earlier and prevent these problems? Because of love. The Law had serious side effects of condemnation and guilt. God didn’t want us running from Him out of fear but to Him because of love and grace.
The Law was never God’s plan for salvation. It was God showing us that we could never measure up to His holy standard. It was given to drive us from self-righteousness and toward receiving the sacrifice of Jesus by faith. By the law is the Knowledge of Sin, and the Law activates Sin. The law also increases sin.
Amazingly, the church has interpreted it in the opposite way. Most Christians think the Law is wonderful, that God expects us to keep it, and that His response to us is based on our compliance. That’s just not true!
The Law was given for two main purposes. First, the fear of God’s punishment constrained sin in people’s lives, thereby diminishing Satan’s inroads. Second, it totally took away all hope of being saved by any virtue of themselves. The Law made everyone guilty before God with no hope of justice. We needed mercy.
Those were the main purposes of the Law. It was not God’s list of steps one through ten thousand of what you must do to be right with Him. It was God’s list of all you have done wrong, proving that you can never be right with God unless He provides another form of payment. It was not to set you free. The Law was to bind and destroy you. It was a severe spanking for the whole human race to turn us from sin, self righteousness, self effort and self-salvation.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Getting to KNOW God
If you ask a group of people what the greatest thing in life is, you will probably get as many answers as… Certainly many things contribute to a full and happy life, but If you are a believer I hope you will agree with me that knowing God is absolutely the greatest and most important thing of all there is. Without that, everything else just doesn’t make sense.
The Apostle Paul put it this way in Philippians 3:8:
“Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the Excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”
Think of this: Paul wasn’t a loser. He hadn’t hit rock bottom with nowhere else to go. He wasn’t turning from a life of failure and counting that, as “dung.” He was one of the most educated and accomplished men of his day. He was the elite of the religious class. People knew him and they wanted to be like him.
Think of the most elite of our society today, guys with serious achievements. The kind of fellas that most Dads tell their sons to emulate in any society, and that was Paul for you. By then he was called Saul. I could think of a person like say Professor Balunywa or Patrick Bitature or even to the level of respectable socialites from the telecom companies in Uganda. That’s what you could equate to Paul or Saul at that time in his day.
You see Paul wasn’t writing just about the time before he was born again. Remember as Saul, Paul was the Chief-Harassing-Officer (CHO) of the Christians back then. He had been a Christian for decades at the time he wrote this. After He had gotten saved and having traveled the world and used of God as few men ever had or ever will be, Paul came to the point of Phil 3:10. After all that experience he was still seeking to know God more (Phil. 3:10).
Paul was saying that the best life had to offer and the greatest accomplishments and pursuits of any man, when compared to knowing God, ranked in the same category as manure. He was admitting that he hadn’t arrived but that he had left and was pressing toward that goal of knowing God more (Phil. 3:12-14).
In my 37 years of doing time on this earth so far, I have seen how people exalt qualifications and being very learned. They even hang their achievements on the wall and prefer to be called doctor this and doctor that, or bishop this and honorable that, or even the rightest Reverend Father blah blah blah… Anyway I am not bashing qualifications but Paul looked at similar achievements that he had attained and said they were nothing but dung, compared to knowing God. Whew Imagine that?
What does it say, when the man who wrote half of the New Testament was still pursuing knowing God decades after his conversion? Certainly there has to be a depth of knowing God that goes far beyond just getting saved. Paul spoke of this in Ephesians when he prayed that the Ephesian Christians would come to know the height, length, depth, and breadth of God’s love (Eph. 3:18-19).
He said something very interesting in Ephesians 3:19:
“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
At first glance this seems confusing. How can we know something if it passes knowledge? How on earth does knowing transcend knowledge. Again in my 37 years I have found out that there are things we know by studying and educating the mind or the brain, but then there are those that we know that we know that we know that we know… this is the experiential knowledge. Knowing by interaction and intuition.
Paul is speaking about experiencing God’s love in a way that is infinitely greater than mere intellectual knowledge. And notice that when we experience God’s love in this way, we will be filled with all the fullness of God. What a statement!
All we have to do is look at our lack of experiencing God’s fullness in order to realize we don’t know God’s love the way Paul described it. If we did, we would be filled with all His fullness. Therefore, there is a dimension to knowing God that the average Christian hasn’t experienced. This is where you know God by faith rather than by carnal Manifestations. You know His heart and you have a deep consciousness of His presence in you. Thinking about how the creator of Heaven could Fit into a physical body and manifest on earth as Jesus Christ should help you in understanding that now He dwells inside you and its not something you need to prove in the physical but by faith you choose to believe God’s Word.
How then do we get there?
First of all, we have to realize that there is more to knowing God than just becoming a Christian. Multitudes of people have received salvation, and if they were to die, they would go straight into the presence of the Lord, without knowing God.
They don’t know that He loves them because He is love and not because they are lovely. They think they have to earn God’s favor, and they are needlessly suffering condemnation and lack of fellowship with Him because they feel unworthy. They don’t know Him as a loving heavenly Father but see Him as a harsh taskmaster, or the mean Judge.
Many Christians think our Father is the source of all their troubles and suffering. They think He uses those problems as tools to teach them something or change their behavior, even though the Word clearly proves the opposite (James 1:13). They don’t know their God as Healer or Provider, or in any other of the ways He manifests Himself to them. Truly, God’s people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge about Him (Hos. 4:6).
Much of the blame for this falls on the church. The Bible says in Romans 10:17,
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
The church, as a whole, has proclaimed that Jesus died for us to keep us from going to hell. Now, that’s true and quite a benefit. If that’s all there was to salvation, that’s more than we deserve. I would emphasize that message if that was all there was, but that’s not what the Scripture teaches.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
That verse specifically says the goal of salvation is “everlasting life.” And everlasting life was defined by Jesus in John 17:3, which says,
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
I REPEAT ETERNAL LIFE IS NOT JUST LIVING LIFE WITHOUT END, BUT IT IS KNOWING THE ONLY TRUE GOD AND JESUS CHRIST, PERIOD!!
Knowing God the Father and Jesus Christ is eternal life. That doesn’t start when we go to heaven. Knowing God (eternal life) is something we can have right now (John 3:36).
The word “know” is used in Scripture to describe the relationship between a man and his wife that produces a child (example: Gen. 4:1) – knowing is used in the same sense as sexual intercourse. It is speaking of intimacy. So “knowing God” is speaking of intimacy with Him, not in the raw physical sense but in a deep and spiritual way by faith.
To receive salvation and then stumble through life without experiencing intimacy with the Lord is to miss or ignore the most important part of what Jesus provided. Let me put it this way: if you received forgiveness through the sacrifice of Jesus and then continue on without an intimate, personal, close relationship with God, then according to John 3:16, you are missing the real purpose of salvation. This is where the vast majority of Christians live. You cannot be living by faith.
People believe they need to get saved because that’s the message they’ve heard. So they get saved and then they get stuck. They aren’t hearing that knowing.
God is the real goal or that it’s even attainable. They are waiting on the sweet by and by, but struggling in the rough here and now.
Knowing God in the way I’m discussing isn’t even on the radar screen of most Christians. They aren’t pursuing it and they aren’t experiencing it. It begs the question, how do we get started in our pursuit of intimacy with the Lord? We can begin by spending time getting to know Him through His Word.
The Apostle Peter said in 2 Peter 1:3-4,
“According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
It’s through the knowledge of God that we are able to receive all things that pertain to life and godliness. He has already given them, but it’s knowing Him that allows us to partake of His divine nature, to receive all His great and precious promises, and to escape the corruption of this world. What a deal!
Knowing the Word is knowing God. When you know Him through the Word, then as you behold His image that is being written on your Heart you get transformed from Glory to Glory until there is no difference between you and Him. I am talking about the transformation of your mindset, not your spirit man, because your spirit man is perfect and has the same identity and properties as God Himself. That’s the Kind of Intimacy God desires where your mind in the soulish realm concurs with His mind completely, because the two of you have become one. There also comes a time when more than just the word but His very essence and presence permeates within you and you know what His word says without even reading it.
Did you know that when you are in love with somebody and you have been communicating through letters, when finally you meet face to face, you do not need to continue writing letters. So am talking about an experience where you have had an experiential understanding of God that even without His word you know what He is saying because the two of you are so much in oneness that you know what He saying without reffering to His word per se.…. Hope you catch my drift.
Andrew Wommack Whose teachings I have become so fond of recently taught a new series that focuses on knowing God, and it expounds on many of the key things he has learned about God through the Scriptures. He expounds the real meaning of eternal life, how to see with our hearts clearer than with our physical eyes, and much more.
This is a series that may not sound really interesting on the surface, but it is one of the most important messages he teaches.
If you ever want to fulfill what God has called you to do, you must know Him personally, and I believe this message will make a huge difference in your relationship with the Lord.
One last thing, the bible says that the Just Shall live by faith. Unfortunately faith is one of those places we take short vactions to but arent living or dwelling there. We are supposed to walk by faith, not by sight or by physical senses - which is canality on its own.
The Apostle Paul put it this way in Philippians 3:8:
“Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the Excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”
Think of this: Paul wasn’t a loser. He hadn’t hit rock bottom with nowhere else to go. He wasn’t turning from a life of failure and counting that, as “dung.” He was one of the most educated and accomplished men of his day. He was the elite of the religious class. People knew him and they wanted to be like him.
Think of the most elite of our society today, guys with serious achievements. The kind of fellas that most Dads tell their sons to emulate in any society, and that was Paul for you. By then he was called Saul. I could think of a person like say Professor Balunywa or Patrick Bitature or even to the level of respectable socialites from the telecom companies in Uganda. That’s what you could equate to Paul or Saul at that time in his day.
You see Paul wasn’t writing just about the time before he was born again. Remember as Saul, Paul was the Chief-Harassing-Officer (CHO) of the Christians back then. He had been a Christian for decades at the time he wrote this. After He had gotten saved and having traveled the world and used of God as few men ever had or ever will be, Paul came to the point of Phil 3:10. After all that experience he was still seeking to know God more (Phil. 3:10).
Paul was saying that the best life had to offer and the greatest accomplishments and pursuits of any man, when compared to knowing God, ranked in the same category as manure. He was admitting that he hadn’t arrived but that he had left and was pressing toward that goal of knowing God more (Phil. 3:12-14).
In my 37 years of doing time on this earth so far, I have seen how people exalt qualifications and being very learned. They even hang their achievements on the wall and prefer to be called doctor this and doctor that, or bishop this and honorable that, or even the rightest Reverend Father blah blah blah… Anyway I am not bashing qualifications but Paul looked at similar achievements that he had attained and said they were nothing but dung, compared to knowing God. Whew Imagine that?
What does it say, when the man who wrote half of the New Testament was still pursuing knowing God decades after his conversion? Certainly there has to be a depth of knowing God that goes far beyond just getting saved. Paul spoke of this in Ephesians when he prayed that the Ephesian Christians would come to know the height, length, depth, and breadth of God’s love (Eph. 3:18-19).
He said something very interesting in Ephesians 3:19:
“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
At first glance this seems confusing. How can we know something if it passes knowledge? How on earth does knowing transcend knowledge. Again in my 37 years I have found out that there are things we know by studying and educating the mind or the brain, but then there are those that we know that we know that we know that we know… this is the experiential knowledge. Knowing by interaction and intuition.
Paul is speaking about experiencing God’s love in a way that is infinitely greater than mere intellectual knowledge. And notice that when we experience God’s love in this way, we will be filled with all the fullness of God. What a statement!
All we have to do is look at our lack of experiencing God’s fullness in order to realize we don’t know God’s love the way Paul described it. If we did, we would be filled with all His fullness. Therefore, there is a dimension to knowing God that the average Christian hasn’t experienced. This is where you know God by faith rather than by carnal Manifestations. You know His heart and you have a deep consciousness of His presence in you. Thinking about how the creator of Heaven could Fit into a physical body and manifest on earth as Jesus Christ should help you in understanding that now He dwells inside you and its not something you need to prove in the physical but by faith you choose to believe God’s Word.
How then do we get there?
First of all, we have to realize that there is more to knowing God than just becoming a Christian. Multitudes of people have received salvation, and if they were to die, they would go straight into the presence of the Lord, without knowing God.
They don’t know that He loves them because He is love and not because they are lovely. They think they have to earn God’s favor, and they are needlessly suffering condemnation and lack of fellowship with Him because they feel unworthy. They don’t know Him as a loving heavenly Father but see Him as a harsh taskmaster, or the mean Judge.
Many Christians think our Father is the source of all their troubles and suffering. They think He uses those problems as tools to teach them something or change their behavior, even though the Word clearly proves the opposite (James 1:13). They don’t know their God as Healer or Provider, or in any other of the ways He manifests Himself to them. Truly, God’s people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge about Him (Hos. 4:6).
Much of the blame for this falls on the church. The Bible says in Romans 10:17,
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
The church, as a whole, has proclaimed that Jesus died for us to keep us from going to hell. Now, that’s true and quite a benefit. If that’s all there was to salvation, that’s more than we deserve. I would emphasize that message if that was all there was, but that’s not what the Scripture teaches.
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
That verse specifically says the goal of salvation is “everlasting life.” And everlasting life was defined by Jesus in John 17:3, which says,
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
I REPEAT ETERNAL LIFE IS NOT JUST LIVING LIFE WITHOUT END, BUT IT IS KNOWING THE ONLY TRUE GOD AND JESUS CHRIST, PERIOD!!
Knowing God the Father and Jesus Christ is eternal life. That doesn’t start when we go to heaven. Knowing God (eternal life) is something we can have right now (John 3:36).
The word “know” is used in Scripture to describe the relationship between a man and his wife that produces a child (example: Gen. 4:1) – knowing is used in the same sense as sexual intercourse. It is speaking of intimacy. So “knowing God” is speaking of intimacy with Him, not in the raw physical sense but in a deep and spiritual way by faith.
To receive salvation and then stumble through life without experiencing intimacy with the Lord is to miss or ignore the most important part of what Jesus provided. Let me put it this way: if you received forgiveness through the sacrifice of Jesus and then continue on without an intimate, personal, close relationship with God, then according to John 3:16, you are missing the real purpose of salvation. This is where the vast majority of Christians live. You cannot be living by faith.
People believe they need to get saved because that’s the message they’ve heard. So they get saved and then they get stuck. They aren’t hearing that knowing.
God is the real goal or that it’s even attainable. They are waiting on the sweet by and by, but struggling in the rough here and now.
Knowing God in the way I’m discussing isn’t even on the radar screen of most Christians. They aren’t pursuing it and they aren’t experiencing it. It begs the question, how do we get started in our pursuit of intimacy with the Lord? We can begin by spending time getting to know Him through His Word.
The Apostle Peter said in 2 Peter 1:3-4,
“According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
It’s through the knowledge of God that we are able to receive all things that pertain to life and godliness. He has already given them, but it’s knowing Him that allows us to partake of His divine nature, to receive all His great and precious promises, and to escape the corruption of this world. What a deal!
Knowing the Word is knowing God. When you know Him through the Word, then as you behold His image that is being written on your Heart you get transformed from Glory to Glory until there is no difference between you and Him. I am talking about the transformation of your mindset, not your spirit man, because your spirit man is perfect and has the same identity and properties as God Himself. That’s the Kind of Intimacy God desires where your mind in the soulish realm concurs with His mind completely, because the two of you have become one. There also comes a time when more than just the word but His very essence and presence permeates within you and you know what His word says without even reading it.
Did you know that when you are in love with somebody and you have been communicating through letters, when finally you meet face to face, you do not need to continue writing letters. So am talking about an experience where you have had an experiential understanding of God that even without His word you know what He is saying because the two of you are so much in oneness that you know what He saying without reffering to His word per se.…. Hope you catch my drift.
Andrew Wommack Whose teachings I have become so fond of recently taught a new series that focuses on knowing God, and it expounds on many of the key things he has learned about God through the Scriptures. He expounds the real meaning of eternal life, how to see with our hearts clearer than with our physical eyes, and much more.
This is a series that may not sound really interesting on the surface, but it is one of the most important messages he teaches.
If you ever want to fulfill what God has called you to do, you must know Him personally, and I believe this message will make a huge difference in your relationship with the Lord.
One last thing, the bible says that the Just Shall live by faith. Unfortunately faith is one of those places we take short vactions to but arent living or dwelling there. We are supposed to walk by faith, not by sight or by physical senses - which is canality on its own.
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