Yes, I'm still here!

I'm down in Florida right now; Mom had her first cataract surgery tomorrow morning, and wanted me to be here to manage things while she's not up to par (boy, I've really hoodwinked her, don'tchathink? LOL).

Anyway, I've continued my reading of J.I. Packer's Knowing God, and the eighteenth chapter, "the Heart of the Gospel," is just ripping me to shreds! Wow. Wow, wow, wow, WOW!!!!

[God's Anger] is not the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered and conceited anger which pagans attribute to their gods. It is not the sinful, resentful, malicious, infantile anger which we find among humans. It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the demands of God's moral law ("Be holy, because I am holy" 1 Peter 1:16), and of that righteousness which is expressed in God's acts of justice and reward. [...]

God's wrath is "the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness" (John Murray, Epistle to the Romans). And this is righteous anger - the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature. So far from the manifestation of God's wrath in punishing sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for him not to show his wrath in this way. God is not just - that is, he does not act in the way that is right, he does not do what is proper to a judge - unless he inflicts upon all sin and wrongdoing the penalty it deserves. [...]

God propitiates his wrath by his own action. He set forth Jesus Christ, says Paul, to be a propitiation; he sent his Son, says John, to be the propitiation for our sins. It was not man, to whom God was hostile, who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn his Father's wrath against us into love. ... [I]t was God himself who took the initiative in quenching his own wrath against those whom, despite their ill-desert, he loved and had chosen to save. [...]

Nor was this done as God's acknowledgment of some real devotion on our part; not at all. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that" - in a situation where we did not love him, and there was nothing about us to move him to do anything other than blast and blight us for our ingrained irreligion - "he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." [...]

The basic description of the saving death of Christ in the Bible, is as a propitiation, that is, as that which quenched God's wrath against us by obliterating our sins from his sight. God's wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness; it shows itself in retributive justice. But Jesus Christ has shielded us from the nightmare prospect of retributive justice by becoming our representative substitute, in obedience to his Father's will, and receiving the wages of sin in our place.

By this means justice has been done, for the sins of all that will ever be pardoned were judged and punished in the person of God the Son, and it is on this basis that pardon is now offered to us offenders.

Wow.

I am going to have to re-read this chapter several times! It really illuminates large portions of the book of Romans to me - a book I thought I knew pretty well. But no, it looks like there are whole new oceans of meaning and richness I can look forward to!

Comments

[norma]

1.

Read it once for me, because I started this book several times, and never made it through.