… a repost on the consuming Love of God.
When (the Scripture) says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, not the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but The Consuming Fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know…. We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become the objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased’. (And) To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled, by the certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.
~C.S. Lewis
See that you do not refuse Him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject Him who warns from heaven. At that time His voice shook the earth, but now He has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.
~ Hebrews 12:25-29
Oh beloved, how He Loves us! He Loves in such a way that He will shake us up. But He Loves us in such a way, that in the shaking, it removes those aspects of ourselves that keep us from Him. And further, He removes the things external to us that threaten us, or would bring harm to those near to us.
This writer got a bucket-full of this truth poured into his soul today as he witnessed his son being put into a situation of clear and present danger. The person putting my son into danger had been warned clearly in the past – but continued the behaviors that brought both peril and injury to my son. As i walked into the situation, only The Spirit controlled my emotions and actions – for in the flesh, i might have brought the perpetrator into their own grave danger of ceasing to breath. By His grace, instead of rage, He brought me to a place of clear thinking and decisive action to remove that person from the situation so that they would no longer be able to bring the danger to bear on my son again. Upon getting this person away – instead of beating them, i blessed them – but made sure they understood that they might be in severe danger if they stepped beyond the boundaries of my warnings again.
And as i was processing the events by walking down a sun-baked and humidity-soaked road in the northwest of Jakarta, i asked Him if i had erred. His answer was emphatic: “How do you think I feel about it?” And i immediately understood that my mind was in many ways tracking exactly with how my Father feels about me and those He has put into my weak-abilitied care.
It became clear to me that This One we serve is indeed a Consuming Fire, and that He will indeed remove those things that put us into danger. He will remove the things that bring death in our lives that there might only be things that bring or reflect the unshakable aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven.
He will even kill our own bodies that our souls might Live in Him. Surely others are a danger to us at times – but it is our own self who puts us into mortal danger on an almost daily basis. We make the decisions that continually drive us away from Him, and sometimes He must, in His great mercy, remove the flesh that inspires such foolishness. This is the “sin unto death” spoken of in His Word. And it is most surely not a punishment, but a Divine mercy.
Can we see it friends? The Love of G_d is something He applies to us. His Love is who He is towards us. He will not abide sin. He will not stand by as we put our selves and others into mortal danger. He will act to remove that sin from among us and from within us that He might draw us ever closer to Himself.
Yeah, this is our G_d. He is wonderful! He shows us clearly that He will do and has done everything necessary to bring us close to Himself by using His own Son to bridge the gap between us and Him.
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.
~ Stanley Lindquist
