THE PROBLEM OF THE APPEAL OF OUR MODERN, EASYGOING, TOLERANT GOD

What is common to the biblical concepts of the holiness and the wrath of God is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. So sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin. Several vivid metaphors are used in Scripture to illustrate this stubborn fact.

The first is height. Frequently in the Bible the god of creation and covenant is called ‘the Most High God’. His lofty exaltation expresses both his sovereignty over the nations, the earth and ‘all gods’, and also his inaccessibility to sinners.

The second picture is that of distance. God is not only ‘high above’ us, but ‘far away’ from us also. We dare not approach too close. Indeed, many are the biblical injunctions to keep our distance.

The third and fourth pictures of the holy God’s unapproachability to sinners are those of light and fire. ‘God is light’, and ‘our God is a consuming fire’. Both discourage, indeed inhibit, too close an approach. Bright light is blinding; our eyes cannot endure its brilliance, and in the heat of the fire everything shrivels up and is destroyed.

The fifth metaphor is the most dramatic of all. It indicates that the holy God’s rejection of evil is as decisive as the human body’s rejection of poison by vomiting. Vomiting  is probably the body’s most violent of all reactions. The immoral and idolatrous practices of the Canaanites were so disgusting, it is written the ‘the land vomited out its inhabitants’. God cannot tolerate or ‘digest’ sin and hypocrisy. They cause him not distaste merely, but disgust. They are so repulsive to him that he must rid himself of them. He must spit or vomit them out.

All five metaphors illustrate the utter compatibility of divine holiness and human sin. Height and distance, light, fire and vomiting all say that God cannot be in the presence of sin, and that if it approaches him too closely it is repudiated or consumed.

Yet these notions are foreign to common man. The kind of God who appeals to most people today would be easygoing in his tolerance of our offences. He would be gentle, kind, accommodating, and would have no violent reactions. Unhappily, even in the church we seem to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes.’ In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away….

We must, therefore, hold fast to the biblical revelation of the living God who hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it, and refuses ever to come to terms with it….As Emil Brunner put it, ‘Where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored, there also will there be no understanding of the central conception of the Gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the Mediator’. Similarly, ‘only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy’.

When we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God, and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God, and acknowledge what we are, namely, ‘hell-deserving sinners’, then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.

The essential background to the cross, therefore, is a balanced understanding of the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. If we diminish either, we thereby diminish the cross. If we reinterpret sin as a lapse instead of a rebellion, and God as indulgent instead of indignant, then naturally the cross appears superfluous. But to dethrone God and enthrone ourselves not only dispenses with the cross; it also degrades both God and man. A biblical view of God and ourselves, however, that is of our sin and of God’s wrath, honors both. It honors human beings by affirming them as responsible for their own actions. It honors God by affirming him as having moral character.

(THE CROSS OF CHRIST, John Stott, pp.106-110)