The Terrible God of Grace!?!

The other day I was surfing some xangas and came across an entry about Christian legalism and judgmental piousness. It seems to be a recurring theme that I often come across. Generally it goes something like this.

I am a Christian. You know what bugs me? Christians who are legalistic and judgmental. Just because I don’t think it is wrong to drink, smoke, swear, dance, watch R rated movies (insert whatever else here), that doesn’t mean I don’t love God. God is a God of grace and love. Instead of your pointing those things out to me (the error of my ways, as it were), why don’t you get off your pious perch and start loving people the way Jesus loved people. open your hearts to them, embrace them. You have no right to judge me for something that, ultimately, is so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. After all, We need to be relevant to our cultures. We need to understand them and meet them where they are. I have grace even though I struggle with stuff, so I need to accept you in your legalism too.

This is a theme that I have heard discussed over and over in Christian circles. I am honestly not even sure that I entirely understand it all. To black and white me, it seems like a whole bunch of rationalization and justification for sin, as well as missing the complete picture of who God is. We so easily and quickly embrace the love and grace of God. We want grace. We need grace! I need grace every day to live this life. But that grace [should] bring with it … change. Grace is what causes me to look at my sinfulness and fallenness. Grace is what causes me to desire a greater depth of intimacy with Jesus. His amazing grace is what pulled me out of the miry clay of this evil world and into the light of the awesome truth of who He is.

The truth is that when we really begin to get a tiny fraction of understanding about the grace that was given to us (Eph 2:8-9) it will change who we are. It will change our hearts and in turn, change our actions. Then those things that we so desperately cling to [like using profane language, polluting our bodies through smoking, overeating and alcohol, destroying our minds and searing our consciences with the foul language, perversity, violence and sexuality that the world system embraces and promotes] those “things of earth” will fall by the wayside. Those things will truly be non-issues. Because when our character is so molded by Jesus, when our mind is renewed daily (Rom. 12:1-2), when we walk in His will, in our purpose and destiny, we will reach people. We will be able to truly love people in truth and freedom. We will be relevant to our cultures by simply showing them the love of Jesus – the transparency of our lives will show Him … not us. That’s relevance.

The other side of the coin is this. Because of His great holiness, God is a terrible and jealous God. He is a God of judgment and justice. There is swiftly coming a day when all of our pitiful excuses for living the way we do – our way – will become obviously foolish and heartbreaking. We will understand why James encourages us to confront our brothers and sisters in love when we see them in sin. Because this team is so essential for end time living. We need each other as soldiers in an end time army – together, unified, and passionately running for Him – advancing the kingdom of light into the kingdom of darkness. God will not tolerate sin. It is as simple as that. The day will come when we understand that even though many have thought for so long that “God is tolerant,” “God is grey,” etc. But I submit that He has always been a God of absolutes. God is black and white, because truth is black and white. When it all comes down, there will be no “sort of” serving him. There will be no “sort of” getting into heaven. Your name either will or will not be in the book. You will be either saved or lost. In his great love, he offered a gift. For those who reject that gift, their punishment is severe. And we so often fail to stress that enough. There are consequences to embracing the post modernist, tolerant, relativistic worldview of God that is based on human thinking. That view leads to humanist thinking and, ultimately, to certain death and hell.
We can not rationalize or understand how God can be a terrible God of judgment and justice while at the same time being a God of such great love and compassion. (Eph. 2:1-10) “It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.”

The God of the universe desires friendship with us! It’s so amazing. So all that to say this… I have not yet figured it all out yet. I think grace is good. I am so grateful for Grace. But as Paul said in Romans 6:

“So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good? That is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind; when we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace – a new life in a new land! When we are lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus; when we are raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Each of us is raised into a light-filled world by our Father so that we can see where we’re going in our new grace-sovereign country. Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the Cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life – no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did. That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time – remember, you’ve been raised from the dead! – into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God. So, since we’re out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we’re free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom! I’m using this freedom language because it’s easy to picture. You can readily recall, can’t you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing – not caring about others, not caring about God – the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God’s freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness? As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn’t have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you’re proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.”