Month: May 2016

from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. (Ps 90:2)

his understanding has no limit. (Ps 147:5)

I am God Almighty. (Gen 17:1)

God of all, we acknowledge the immensity of our limitations in comprehending the infinity of who you are. Help us to quietly adore and to allow you to be who you are.

In high school I worked a couple summers in the mountains of Colorado. I will never forget those summers and the powerful beauty of the Rockies. One night, the guys in my cabin decided it would be fun to sleep on the roof.  We took our blankets up there and froze, and because it was so cold, I didn’t get any sleep. I, thus, spent the entire night gazing at the heavens. The stars on a clear night at 10,000 feet are a spectacle to behold. Galaxies spread out before your eyes, and the quiet beauty penetrates your soul. Deeply. You feel small in the presence of such an expanse. The heavens really do declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1).

That night on the roof, I got a glimpse of a small portion of the universe.  The universe is immense, but the universe is finite. It may be expanding, but it has an end. In fact, if it has no end, it cannot expand. To God, the universe is like an atom, a little neutron, so small you can hardly see it under a microscope. You must understand. God is infinite.

When people encounter infinity, the proper reaction is something like, “Oh my!” We cannot grasp it. It is beyond us. The human mind may be marvelous and mysterious, but it is limited, and one of the great mistakes people make about God is that they think He is limited too. Too often we put our parameters around God. We somehow think He is like us. This thinking disrobes God of His divinity. A god smaller than our minds is not God. The real God has no boundaries.

This does not mean that God’s love can behave unlovingly or His justice be unjust or His holiness sin. Rather, it means that when God acts in a fashion consistent with His nature, His love and justice and all the rest have no bounds. This aspect of God boggles us, for everything around us has boundaries — including the universe. Truly, we do not understand infinity. We may say we do, and we may have a limited idea of what it is, but our idea is at best a nod of the head or more likely a boast like that of an eight-year-old claiming to understand the mysteries of quantum mechanics. The infinity of God is a statement of His incomprehensibility If God is infinite He cannot be fully understood. But the church has often replaced God with a god it can understand. Tozer puts it well:

“The God of Abraham has withdrawn His conscious presence from us, and another God whom our fathers knew not is making himself at home amongst us. This God we have made and because we have made him we can understand him; because we have created him he can never surprise us, never overwhelm us, nor astonish us, nor transcend us.” (p.43).

Infinity should give birth to humility. No matter how great our intelligence, riches, strength or influence, how deep our love, or how pure our life, when we put these things next to God we are empty. The infinity of God precludes our ever coming before Him as if we are the big man on campus. And yet we can humbly take heart, for the love He has for us never ends, the wisdom ordering the events around us is limitless, the power fighting for our good cannot be overcome, and His faithfulness to His people will never be betrayed. We cannot outsin His mercy or outrun His grace. We cannot thwart His justice or defile His purity. We cannot stump or stop infinity. No power or force or plot or deceit can conquer infinite sovereignty. Every attribute of God is colored by His infinitude. His knowledge is infinite.  His riches are infinite.  His power is infinite.  His love, His purity, His faithfulness, His mercy, His justice.  All of these are infinite.

We can never grow tired of God. The beauties and marvels of the Majestic One are forever inexhaustible. After we have worshipped in heaven for a million milleniums, we will still find new aspects of the infinite God to revel in. Eternity in glory will not exhaust the infinitude of God. Behold your God. But truly you cannot behold Him.

The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty … (Ex 6-7a)

 O Lord, I have heard the report of you, and your work, O Lord do I fear … in wrath remember mercy. (Hab 3:2)

 Lord, your judgment, your wrath, your mercy and your grace go together. Praise you, for though I do not fully understand, I know enough to worship and to be grateful.

I was teaching American Literature, and my class had just read Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon he preached in 1741. In the sermon, Edwards relates rather vivid pictures of the judgment and wrath of God, and those pictures are what most people remember — a spider hanging by a thread over a fire, a bow and arrow pointed to our heart, a great flood being stopped by the hand of God. I asked my students what they saw in the sermon. Anger, judgment, hell … these were the first answers. I then asked them if they saw any mercy. They had to think, and then one person said, “Yes.”

“Where did you see the mercy?” I asked.

“The spider was not in the fire. The arrow had not been fired. The hand of God was the only thing between the flood and us.” That was the gist of his answer.

“Yes,” I said and then pointed out a statement Edwards makes toward the end of his sermon. He says, “And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners …” He goes on and speaks of the love Christ has for us and how He has washed us from our sins in his own blood.

I then asked my students how Edwards can put the judgment of God and the mercy of God together. “Which is it?” I asked. “Does God judge or show mercy? How can He do both?” The class was silent. I then said, “Could you say that judgment is a prerequisite for mercy?” I saw the wheels turning inside their heads. They had never thought thoughts like this before. Finally two people spoke up simultaneously. One said “yes,” the other “no.” So I told them this parable.

A man robbed a bank. The police arrested him and charged him with robbing the bank, so the man had to go on trial. The jury found him guilty, and he then stood before the judge. A second man in another city did not rob a bank, but he was on the scene of a bank robbery at the time the robber fled, and the police mistakenly arrested him. They charged him with robbing the bank, and he went on trial where the jury found him innocent. He then stood before the judge. In the case of the second man, the judge said, “You are free to go.” In the case of the first man, the normal sentence was up to twenty years, but the judge said, “Well, these circumstances and those … four years.”

So I asked my students, “Which man received mercy?”

“The one who robbed the bank,” they said.

“Why?” I asked. “He got four years, but the other man got nothing.”

“But he was supposed to get more,” they said.

In other words, the presence of judgment gives meaning to mercy. You cannot forgive someone who has done nothing wrong. You can’t lighten a sentence that is already at zero. The mercy of God implies a real and just judgment. Mercy and judgment are woven together. To separate them makes no sense. Edwards understood this, for while judgment and wrath are central to his sermon, so are mercy and grace.

And this is how the Bible talks about God. Jesus spoke about hell more than any other person, yet it is Jesus who willingly gives His life to bring us forgiveness. Judgment and mercy kiss.

We must understand that when we remove the judgment of God, we remove His mercy.  God does not owe us mercy. If he owes us anything, it is judgment, for that is what we have earned. When mercy is an obligation, it ceases to be mercy. God shows us mercy because He wants to. It is a free and gracious expression of His love. We do not have it coming to us, and it is most certainly not a duty.

We must, thus, be careful in our attitude. God’s people cannot imperiously demand mercy, as if God were a store clerk dispensing it and somehow owed them good customer service. Rather we must acknowledge our bankruptcy before God. We must understand that, if the truth be told, hell is what we deserve. The difference in these two approaches to mercy is no light thing. One group knows it has no claim on God’s mercy; the other sees mercy as a right. One group approaches God with a broken heart; the other with a presumptuous heart. One group lets God judge them; the other judges God and thinks He is not such a grand chap unless He conforms to their view of Him. Both groups talk of God’s mercy, but their hearts are as different as heaven and hell. I oversimplify to illustrate, but unless our hearts are like the broken group, we do not know God’s mercy.