Month: August 2020

What Does it Mean that God Is a Person?

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An elementary truth claim of Christianity is that God is a “Person”. Not a thing. Not a force. Not a principal of reason or intangible construct, or a feeling.

But what does that mean?

We may smirk at the practice of people in the Bronze Age who constructed gods out of hand-made objects and worshiped them. We may think ourselves better than primitive people who worshiped the sun, moon,  mountains, and trees. We may not worship physical objects anymore (most of us), but are we any different than they?

When we conceive of God as a force indistinct from the universe, we are doing the same thing, albeit with more subtlety. Our concepts of God may be more sophisticated than most people in primitive cultures in the past, but only in degree.

When we approach think of God as an intellectual construct or a feeling, we may be walking in the footsteps of our primitive ancestors. The same is true when we view God as an abstract idea. An abstract idea, or ideal, is still a thing. Not a thing made of human hands, but a thing imagined by human intellect.

When we construct a god, whether by our hands or in our minds, or view God as indistinct from the universe, we are not perceiving God in the way He is revealed in the Bible. These are constructs are “idols” that are poor substitutes for the “person” of God.

Continue reading “What Does it Mean that God Is a Person?” →

Should We Hate the Sin, and Love the Sinner?

The focus on hating the sin, but loving the sinner is a distortion of what Jesus instructs us to do.

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The phrase, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner”, sounds biblical. The phrase, itself, isn’t found anywhere in Scripture, but it sounds kind of right, right?

God certainly does hate sin. No punches are pulled on the subject. For instance, we read the following in Proverbs 6:16-19:

There are six things the Lord hates,
    seven that are detestable to him:
        haughty eyes,
        a lying tongue,
        hands that shed innocent blood,
        a heart that devises wicked schemes,
        feet that are quick to rush into evil,
        a false witness who pours out lies
        and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.

And there is no doubt that God loves sinners. Paul made that perfectly clear when he said:

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8)

To that extent, we can say that God hates sin, but He loves sinners. The phrase, however, is usually stated as a way that we should orientate ourselves toward other people. More specifically, the phrase is usually suggested as a way of orientating ourselves (Christians) toward “certain” people.

We say it because we hate the sin, especially their sin, and we are reminding ourselves to love the sinner.

It’s a phase that Christians generally seem to like, but non-Christians don’t seem to like it nearly as much as we do. We could chalk it up to them not understanding, not believing in the Bible and not appreciating what Jesus did on the cross for us. But is it really biblical?

While it’s biblical to say that God hates sin, but loves sinners, is it biblical instruction for us to say, “Hate sin but love sinners”? Jeff Frazier at the Chaplestreet Church in Batavia, IL (who preached on this subject August 2, 2020, and who’s sermon inspires this post) suggests that it isn’t biblical, at least not in the way we usually apply it.

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God Is Always Doing a “New Thing”

We need to be open to hear God’s voice and the direction He wants us to go in these present times

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I think many Christians, most of them, look a bit skeptically at the charismatic element of the Church universal. We conjure up images of the prosperity Gospel and “holy rollers”. The New Testament, though, reads like a charismatic diary.

 The dispensationalists will say that God worked like that only for a time, only until the New Testament was “codified” into a cannon. Now we don’t need God to speak to people directly through prophetic words and such. We don’t need signs and wonders because we have the Bible now.

They might be right, but maybe not. God doesn’t fit into the boxes we prepare for Him.

I have come to view all the movements in the history of the Church as various times in which God emphasized specific things to His people for specific purposes. The move to get the Bible in print in plain language for the masses enabled worldwide, grassroots growth of the Gospel. The move to emphasize that salvation is by God’s grace that we receive through faith was necessary to counter error in the notion of how salvation works.

In my view, denominations formed around these movements as people put down tent stakes and tried to camp on those things God was emphasizing at particular times, but God is always doing a new thing.

Not that God changes, or that the truth changes. We change, and the flow of history changes. God is always working through it all to accomplish the ends that He has planned from the beginning.

I think we can never go wrong asking the question: What is God doing now? What does God intend for a time such as this? What is God saying in these times?

So, I am open to the possibility, which I think is a probability, that God is still “speaking” in these times through people to whom God is willing to entrust His voice. There are disparate voices, of course, even in the Church, but it’s always been like that.

I don’t believe God will say anything that contradicts what He has said in the past, but He might be saying things that contradict what we believed in the past. God might be calling us to new ways of doing things.

When God became flesh and lived among the people to whom He had intimately and directly revealed Himself, they didn’t recognize Him. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were amazed as Jesus opened the Scripture to them to reveal all the ways it spoke of Him. They didn’t see it until He opened it up to them.

In the same way, we need to have the humility to recognize that we might have wrong ideas about things. Maybe they aren’t “wrong”, but they just aren’t effective any longer in this time. The last thing that I want is to remain standing still when God is moving.

We need to be open to God showing us “new things” that we didn’t previously understand or appreciate. We have to consider the possibility that we might not recognize God when He is speaking today in the same way that God became flesh, came to His own people, and His own people didn’t recognize Him.

I say these things only as a preface to talk about an article, Continue reading “God Is Always Doing a “New Thing”” →