No Gospel without Law, no Mercy without Wrath

For Faith and Belief I suppose.On the thread, The Politics of Assassination, addressing the morality of the very idea of assassination as well as the rightness or wrongness of Pat Robertson's statement of his opinion in a particular case, we kept veering off into questions about the meaning of God's commandments. Nuggin has proposed a thread on the Death Penalty off that thread for instance.I would like to propose a more general discussion of the perennial theme of the seeming conflict between God's wrathful judgments in all their forms as shown in the Bible, and the mercies that are offered by Jesus Christ. Many claim to be Christians who nevertheless reject God's punishments and in fact denounce the very idea in tones of righteous indignation, either denouncing God Himself for them or denouncing those who believe that He did such things while they claim He couldn't have.The thesis of this thread is that there is no conflict at all, that in fact you cannot have the God of the New Testament without the God of the Old, cannot have mercy without wrath, salvation without condemnation, gospel without law.I begin with my answer to a post by Prophex on this theme, in which he struggles with embracing both sides of the conflict but is unable to do it: Prophex on the conflict between God's wrath and Jesus' mercyYou have put yourself in an unresolvable muddle this way I'm afraid. The deaths attributed to God that you refuse to accept were God's righteous judgments based on His righteous Law, and Jesus came to die for offenders against that Law, so that you can't truly know Jesus or say that He is a part of your being if you reject the very righteous Law that condemns us all under the wrath of God. Our condemnation under the Law is the reason Jesus died -- to save us from that very condemnation and clothe us in His own righteousness as we are sinners with no righteousness of our own.I'm not sure it's all that complex as you claim. It's merely hard for fallen nature to understand, and that's because fallen nature is at enmity with God and refuses to submit to His judgments, instead regarding its own fallen morality as superior to His.The apparent contradictions you are talking about result from giving yourself the right to judge God. If you let God's word judge YOU then you will learn something about why God's judgments are not the atrocities people accuse them of being. They are lessons in God's Law and Justice. They teach what is an offense to the very Law that runs this universe, and by which all human beings will ultimately be judged when we stand before Him.God gave the entire record of the Old Testament to teach His nature and His judgments, particularly how death is the wages of sin, which is also clearly preached in the New Testament. He gave us His commandments to teach us what sin is, that is, what violations of the Law are. He gave the description of the sin, and He gave the appropriate punishment for the sin, and He also showed in His own punishments of idolatrous nations how ALL sin is ultimately to be punished at the end of time.Throughout these teachings He also showed what righteousness is, how it's all about loving God, trusting in God and doing His will and how He protects those who obey in this fashion, and is ready to forgive their sins because of their faithfulness and good intentions of obeying Him. He also teaches that He is merciful to all, however, and gives plenty of time to sinners to change their ways before He brings about punishment. Hundreds of years pass before His judgments are enacted against the violators of the Law, and then He sends prophets to warn them that it's coming too. The God-fearers repent, as Nineveh did, and the threatened judgment is put off until they fall back into their old ways.Throughout all this, too, there is the thread of the promise of a Redeemer to come. All the way from Eden through the prophets of Israel this Anointed One is preached. Adam and Eve who first sinned against God and lost their communion with Him, already put their hope in the Messiah on God's promise to send Him, to save them from the sin they had committed. Every righteous generation afterward put their hope in this Redeemer to come and their trust in the God who promised to send Him. Job was a Gentile considered to have lived in the time of Abraham, who understood that God had promised a Redeemer, a Mediator who would have the authority to plead his case before God.The things that offend the morality of fallen man in the actions of God all come from the refusal to own up to sin, to personal violations of the moral Law of God, and to acknowledge God's right to judge us for that sin. Once it begins to dawn on you that you are seriously in the wrong in the eyes of the God of love who made you, that you are the offender, that His law is just and good, then you become less inclined to find the fault in Him and begin to find yourself at fault for your rejection of such a loving Creator. You can begin to learn that in fact one single lie makes you a violator of the infinite Law that runs the universe, one single unjust criticism of another, one single lust in the heart, one single coveting of something that belongs to someone else, one single dishonoring thought of your parents or in fact any legitimate authority, and certainly your violation of the first commandment to love God with all your heart and soul which nobody can deny. All are offenses, sins, that NO human being can claim to have never committed, and all it takes is ONE to put you under condemnation by the Law. James 2:10: "For whoever shall keep the whole Law and yet stumble in one point{just ONE}, he is guilty of all {ALL}."Jesus said "If you love Me you will obey Me." And what did Jesus teach but the Law, which is what the Sermon on the Mount is, the spiritual nature of the Law, the inner sins the Law condemns, not just the outer. The Law condemns ALL. NO-ONE can escape it -- except by repenting as Jesus called us to do, recognizing that the Law is just and that we are hopelessly but justly condemned by it, and asking God for mercy and forgiveness -- which He has made abundantly available through the sacrifice of the Son of God.Those who call themselves Christians but reject God's judgments are on precarious ground. You can't have Jesus unless you know that all God's judgments are righteousness and justice and that you are condemned justly for your offenses. Jesus came to save us from just that condemnation. What Jesus is it you think you are following if you reject the Jesus who came to save from the very Law that you are so offended by?If all you do, as so many here do, is shake your fist in God's face and call His condemnations unjust, putting your own judgments above His, you just dig yourself deeper into your own condemnation and take yourself farther away from the forgiveness, love and mercy He is holding out to all through the gift of the Messiah Jesus.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 10:16 PM

Good question. I had a sense I wasn't being clear enough, and maybe that's because I'm not completely clear about what all is included in the concept myself. Certainly it's the Ten Commandments, and I also include all the moral Law of Moses in the Pentateuch, excluding the ceremonial and dietary laws which the New Testament treats as fulfilled in Christ.It's all the moral rules of life God gave to the Israelites, which are really summed up in the Ten Commandments and otherwise explained and elaborated in the rest of the Pentateuch, obedience of which leads to life, and disobedience to cursing and death, as Moses sums up after the whole law has been spelled out to the people -- "Therefore choose life.." Deu 30:19 "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, [that] I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live."But in a broader or vaguer sense I find God's law throughout the Bible. For instance, I don't know how it is officially classified but I think of the book of Proverbs as a book of law, as it fleshes out the Ten Commandments in many ways, and certainly describes a supernatural moral reality that operates in the universe, something that reminds me of a version of the Hindu idea of karma or the Chinese Tao and other wisdom literature: "My son, do not forget my law, but let your heart keep my commands; for length of days and long life and peace they will add to you." {Prov 3:1)But just read the first psalm and it too is spelling out law --"Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly... whatever he does shall prosper. The ungodly are not so ...therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment."Jesus preached the Law too. The Sermon on the Mount, most thoroughly covered in Matthew 5 through 7, can be understood as an exposition of the Law of Moses, including the Ten Commandments, such as: "You have heard it said of old, 'You shall not murder'... but I say unto you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment" (Mt 5:21-22) and "You have heard it said of old ,'You shall not commit adultery' but I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart, and if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell..." (Mt 5:27-29).Not a brief explanation I guess.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-27-2005 01:34 PM

I'd rather let the thread kind of poke around various related themes for a while because as soon as we focus down on one I think it's going to go off topic. I want to try to keep the basic theme in mind of a moral law that is universal and binding on all humanity, that is most thoroughly spelled out in the Bible but also echoed in world literature and other religions.But the theme that launched this thread in my mind was the constant complaints about God's "evildoings" in His catastrophic punishments of various peoples, yes such as Sodom, such as His calling for the destruction of the Canaanites and the Amalekites, such as the threats of judgment and ultimate punishment of transgressors. The post I quoted from by Prophex describes the offense so many feel at these things, so often expressed on this site, but an understanding of the whole Biblical revelation shows them to be God's righteous judgments that are the just consequence of disobedience of His universal moral law, which is most pithily spelled out in the Ten Commandments, and and given as examples for us to take warning from.As for the idea of the Bible's being fiction or folktale, my answer to those who consider themselves Christians but reject various parts of the Biblical revelation, is that there is no more external evidence for the reality of the parts you choose to believe and follow than for those you reject as fiction or folktale or allegory, and that puts you in the role of judge, and gives everyone else equal authority to judge as well, which destroys all objective foundations for belief, and do you really want to trust your eternal wellbeing to your own subjective judgments?

Not being charged with contempt IS the mercy, in the case where you soundly deserve to be charged with contempt and would be except for the judge's choosing to have mercy on you. The point is that the idea of mercy is meaningless unless there is a punishment you deserve from which you are being spared by mercy. If punishment is not a threatening reality, something you have seen applied severely but rightly to others or experienced yourself on various occasions, if there is no *real* punishment to be spared FROM, then there is no *real* mercy either. Well, but it's the Moral Law that puts transgressors of it in danger, not a meaningless whim. The Moral Law is good and most of us at least vaguely recognize its goodness -- you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall love your neighbor as yourself -- we believe these rules are good. And the law goes on to say that if you obey it you will not be put in danger.The danger comes to us from disobeying this good law that most of us know in our hearts IS a good law and even want to obey -- though at the same time there is something that leads us to transgress it -- we put ourselves above others instead of loving our neighbors as ourselves. Even the best of us do.Start with our universal egocentricity or pride, that's not loving our neighbors as ourselves, that's loving ourselves above our neighbors. We can hardly help it. It's as if we were made that way. And yet most of us agree that conceit and pride are not a good thing. We like the idea of humility and generosity and in fact people are very generous to others often because it makes us feel better to be generous -- that's our affirmation of the moral law right there. But true selflessness is a very rare thing. Usually there is some form of self-deceit going on. Sometimes people will take the bull by the horns and affirm that ego and Me First is a good thing, but often that's just a sort of "Well we can't help it so might as well go with it" and an attempt to brush aside the guilt that we can't really brush aside. "In My Humble Opinion" we say. Well, what's that but the conflict we feel between our recognition of the rightness of humility but our sense of our own peculiar rightness nevertheless? So some go on to say "In my never-to-be-humble opinion" to affirm our inescapable egocentricity that we can't help lamenting in the same breath. Even those who put themselves down a lot often do it as a way to protect their ego. We feel ego wounds deeply, which just shows our basic egocentricity, whether our manner is to object and lash out or nurse them privately and seek subtle revenge or fall into deep depression and self-hatred -- we wouldn't hate ourselves for our failures if we didn't fundamentally love ourselves. We can ape humility but it is usually just another way to be proud of ourselves.We are a mass of conflicts morally. This is our fallen nature. This is some part of what it means to "know good and evil."Pride is sort of a "forgiveable" sin in our minds, just something we struggle with privately and most of us can contain well enough to make some room for the pride of others alongside our own. But ALL the moral commandments show up our propensity to put ourselves before others, beginning with putting ourselves above God Himself (Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart...) and again in our heart of hearts we agree that the law is good.Thou shalt not steal. We wouldn't want to be stolen from, and we don't overtly steal from others, we agree the law is good. But stealing covers many things. Do we steal from our employers by spending too much time on the internet at work? I do -- although I am self employed I should deliver the product sooner than I do many times. I feel terrible and I work ten times as hard periodically to make up for it, only to fall back again. I'm not loving my neighbor as myself. I should put my clients above my self-indulgences. And this is a particularly hard one for me. Others may have more self discipline than I do. We all have our peculiar areas of weakness. There are many ways to steal from others. Steal their good name by slandering them for instance. Being so angry that you don't mind saying something denigrating of another's character, in fact you delight in finding THE most hurtful way of saying something you can think of. Perhaps this is really more a violation of "Thou shalt not murder" than a case of stealing. As some here will recognize, this is another special fault of mine too. In principle we're no better than the out and out thief who takes someone's car or robs a house and gets a rush out of his ill-gotten gain at someone else's expense, or mugs someone and leaves him for dead, or DOES leave him dead.Sorry I'm getting so wordy. Felt a need to spell out the fact that we both recognize the moral law as good and transgress it all the time, and that THIS is what condemns us, not a whimsical remote or sadistic God at all, but a moral principle that God has established as the foundation of His universe that our own deepest selves KNOW IS GOOD although we violate it all the time and fight it with everything in us too.MERCY is the suspension of our just punishment for our transgression of this moral law which we recognize as a good and just law.When people complain about God's catastrophic punishments I think this same moral conflict we all feel is being shown here too: Part of it is our own terror of being judged and the sneaking suspicion that we deserve it as much as the Amalekites so that we can't allow the possibility that ANYBODY deserves such punishment and that way maybe we can convince ourselves that WE don't and even ultimately that it isn't going to happen to us. We are also trying to get God to back down by giving Him a good dose of our own righteous indignation too as if we could intimidate Him with OUR moral judgments against HIM.But it's all futile. Either we will come to see that God is just in all His doings and that we are no better than the Canaanites or Sodom and Gomorrah and deserve what they deserved, or we will go on fighting Him through a miserable eternity. We will either love the Law because it is good and admit our transgression and beg for God's mercy as transgressors of it, or we will hate the Law and God and be condemned forever.This is no Munchausen syndrome.

The judge doesn't have to be mad at you to slap you with contempt. Contempt of court is an objective matter, just like the rest of the law. The judge also doesn't have to be angry or have any feeling whatever in order to throw the book at you for the original charge. It's all according to his understanding of the requirement of the law.The expression "God's wrath" is really more of a description from our point of view, how it feels to us, not a description of God as actually angry. Wrath is the Law in operation against those who transgress it. It's inevitable and exacting.Mercy is a gift the judge may give according to his own judgment, and release you from your deserved punishment, for the contempt charge or for the original charge or whatever. It's up to the discretion of the court, not the judge's mood of the moment, unless he's a really bad judge. Sparing you his bad mood would hardly qualify as mercy except in the most childish sense. God of course, but my point was to show that the law is good and that most of us know that and yet transgress it. Judgment is not the capriciousness of God, it's the inexorable operation of the moral law that runs the universe. This Law issues from His very Being, characterizes His own moral nature, and since we were originally made in the image of that Being, we recognize the goodness of the Law in spite of ourselves as I've been saying. Our disobedience is what turns the Law into an instrument of punishment and God into a God of wrath, makes Him remote and angry-seeming to us. If you hope to make God responsible for your transgressions, have another think. Despite our transgressions He has offered a way out of our deserved punishment from the very beginning. That is true for fallen humanity. But it wasn't impossible for Jesus.

Must have been quite a genius, whoever the anonymous writer was who made up the character and teachings of Jesus. Pretty amazing geniuses who made up all the OT stories you say are fiction too. Too bad they're all anonymous so they never got any appreciation for it.Well, good luck with your subjective judgments, Jar. I don't know what else to say.I guess I could ask: So is your view of the Moral Law that it was all made up too and has nothing to do with God, or what? So what are we redeemed from through Jesus Christ, or saved from, or is all that fiction too?

Well, no, I don't think morality is determined by people. I agree there is no consistent objective moral law that can be discovered by reason, but there is one that is laid out in the Bible, God realizing that we'd never figure it out without His help. I believe that human beings retain the moral law originally built into us in some form, but that it has become more or less distorted by the transgression in Eden and by our own transgressions ever since, so that it can even get twisted enough that good is called evil and evil good. That's not quite what I get out of Jesus' words: "If you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins." Nothing about forgiveness to all, nothing about loving God and others, just believe He is God and if you don't you will die in your sins, which doesn't sound like forgiveness to all to me.

That IS loving others, to want people to be saved from their sins -- and for that they have to find out what sin is since many people don't know -- and to want people to believe what they need to believe in order to be saved -- so it has to be told to them, and to believe the Bible is literally true because it is true. That IS loving others. There are many ways of loving others but that's one of the most important, the work of the preacher and evangelist.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-27-2005 09:47 PM

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As to the moral law, where is it? Can you post it here?

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My first few posts of this thread are all about it, and I specifically identified it in my answer to Slim Jim Message 6. The Ten Commandments are the Law in brief. The whole Law of Moses is laid out in the Pentateuch, primarily in Leviticus and Deuteronomy but also in Exodus and Numbers. Also, Jesus preached the Law in the Sermon on the Mount and in many other teachings.

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I'm not familar with where Jesus said "If you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins." Can you point it out to me?

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John 8:24. I AM is the correct literal rendering of the Greek, but translators add the "He:" And to make it clearer, some commentators on the verse:Matthew Henry, 17th century: Jamieson Fausset and Brown, 19th century: Pastor Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel: This message has been edited by Faith, 08-27-2005 10:30 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 08-27-2005 10:41 PM

I provided the quotes, Jar, so don't be ornery. That was no paraphrase, that was the direct words of Jesus referring to Himself by the Name of God. Yes, "Chuckie" said Jesus used the Name of God, "I AM" --TO REFER TO HIMSELF, 'cause He was talking about Himself in John 8:24. The whole passage in John 8 is about who Jesus is.Yes, Jar, the Moral Law is spelled out in the Pentateuch, not merely "mentioned," and in a sense it drives the entire Bible from one end to the other.

Hello Brian, sorry I didn't catch this post of yours until now. They knew His universal moral law. God was not without witnesses and holy men outside the covenant with Abraham, for example Job and friends, but at the very least we know they had the law written on their hearts, which we are told in the New Testament characterizes the Gentiles who were without the Law of Moses. They are condemned as all of us are whether we know the written Law of God or not, unless we turn to Jesus Christ for salvation. The Ten Commandments were the more perfect, official version of the law written in the heart, given to the Israelites as part of the covenant with God to be His people ruled by Him.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-27-2005 11:41 PM

The MORAL Law, I hope you grasp -- I clearly distinguished it from the ceremonial and dietary laws that were only given to Israel. But OF COURSE we are to follow the moral laws -- in spirit or meaning, since literally some of them are specific to the culture of the times. But in spirit yes, ALL people should follow them. They ARE the Law of the God who created and rules this universe, who will judge ALL of us at the end. It's loving God to love and follow His Law and Jesus said "If you love Me you will obey Me." He also showed clearly that He IS the God who rules the universe.Without Jesus as our redeemer our obedience to the Law is useless, however. Our fallen nature is "enmity with God" and we can hardly do one right thing, which is why we are condemned and need a Savior. And even in Jesus we obey imperfectly and only with the help of the Holy Spirit. Obedience to the Law does not save us, however; We obey it out of love, not from a spirit of earning our salvation. Salvation is the righteousness of God imputed to us by grace; God counts our faith in Him as righteousness, as He did with Abraham, and receives us through the sacrifice of Christ, not by our works. But the Law is holy, perfect righteousness to be obeyed because not obeying it is out of synch with God and His universe. "Oh how I love Your Law," said David in psalm 119. That is the right spirit of the Christian.{Edited to improve clarity with a word here and there}This message has been edited by Faith, 08-28-2005 01:53 AM

The New Testament comments on the Old. The law is written on the hearts of all it says. It's all the same God. Besides that, all nations have their own laws and as I've said most of them contain similar principles to the Ten Commandments, showing that God's Law is known to all humanity. Hamurrabi's laws have similarities to the Israelites' for instance. That is evidence enough that people knew the Law of God. The existence of holy men of the time is also evidence that people knew God from such people. Certainly there were many more than Job and he sat in the gate of the city and was well known. We simply get to hear about him and not others. The great priest king Melchizedek lived in the land of Canaan in the time of Abraham. There was no dearth of knowledge of the ways of God.I'm giving the traditional Biblical view as far as I understand it. You are free to believe as you please, even believe that God is evil if you like. But in that case He wouldn't have bothered to send His Son to save us from the dire consequences of our violations of His Law. YOu don't need to believe that either or any of it.But for those who are interested in the traditional view, the point of the thread is that the idea of salvation makes no sense if we are not under condemnation for starters, and all the sufferings and calamities that people consider to be unjust acts of God demonstrate that we are definitely under condemnation and that we need a Savior. We would not be under condemnation except that there is a Law which we have violated. It makes sense of reality. It explains the human condition as nothing else can.But again, you are welcome to your own view.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-28-2005 09:00 AM

The point of the thread is that there is a rational explanation for all the calamities of life in human transgression of the Law of our Creator God, and that this is why we need the mercy of God, which is why Jesus came.But clearly you consider the judge the guilty party by definition and the defendant innocent, so have it your way. You don't have to buy any of it.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-28-2005 08:54 AM

OK this is a sign that I haven't been clear enough about what I mean by the Law. It's not the 613 commandments the Jews feel obliged to obey, it's not the Talmudic understanding of the Law, it's not the many laws that have to do with specific observances by Israel, or the dietary laws or the laws of sacrifice. Also, some laws are hard to understand such as the law against the mixing of fibers.The Law I'm talking about is the one embodied in the Ten Commandments, which Jesus said can be boiled down to love of God and love of neighbor, which He spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount, but which are also spelled out particularly in the Pentateuch but in fact throughout the Bible.This is a law to be understood and obeyed in spirit and not in legalistic obsessional letter, as Jesus said. It is moral principles to be grasped and applied to different situations. Many laws in the OT are too hard to translate into modern terms, but sometimes a principle can be extracted that applies even if the specifics don't.The mixing of fibers appears to have been a Type, or a symbol, of purity in some way, a lesson about a spiritual principle given through a concrete physical requirement. But it's the principle that is the important thing. In this case it's hard to understand the principle on the face of it, but maybe I'll research it.There is also a sense in which the entire word of God, the whole Bible, IS the Law, and we are called to live by all of it.I'm talking about the MORAL Law, the law of right disposition and right action toward God and humanity. It can be boiled down this way but to understand exactly what God means by this takes studying the Bible. While the law is written on our hearts, what WE think love is may be something other than what the Law means by it. Treating sin lightly for instance is NOT love.Again, the Law is holy and good, as most of us recognize if we think about various of the Ten Commandments, and our constant violations of it the reason we need salvation. The Law was given to teach us what sin is, and why we are under condemnation. Not quite sure what you intend to be saying, but in the broadest sense that is true as we all have violated most of them, and in fact as the New Testament says, that was the whole reason God gave the Law, to show us just how thoroughly we are transgressors of it. And that is the point of the thread, that we are transgressors of the Law under its condemnation.