Jesus was asked once, "What commandment is the foremost of all?" And in His answer He quoted from Deuteronomy 6:4 - not one of the ten commandments by the way - Jesus answered, "The foremost is, 'HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD;” And one application of that is that there is not one kind of a God of the Old Testament, and a different kind of a God that is revealed in the New Testament. There is one God, one Lord, over all, unchanging, eternal in the heavens.
But there is a trend today in some Christian circles to present God in just one dimension: as just a God of love. After all, the Bible does say that God is love, and so there is this tendency to pare all our theology and all our doctrines down to a one word definition of God. God is love. And that sounds good and plausible.
The problem with this philosophy is that God is much more than just love. But when you accept or assert that everything about God can be boiled down to just the concept of love, then you can end up destroying your theology. True theology recognizes that there are many dimensions to God’s character, and while love may be one of them, there are others that must be given equal consideration.
For instance, one of the major doctrines of God is that He is first of all holy. The Bible spends the first five books of the Bible particularly establishing the holiness of God. Take for example, when Moses saw the burning bush and went over to see what this strange thing was all about, as he was coming to the bush, the Lord spoke from the burning bush and said, “Moses, don’t come any further. Remove the sandals from your feet. For the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
Before God even told him who He was or what He wanted Moses to do, first of all God establishes that even the ground around the bush was holy and Moses couldn’t just blithely approach Him.
Now in those days, names meant something about the character of a person. And so at some point in the conversation, Moses says, “Well ok, suppose I go to this people and say so and so, but then they ask me who sent me? What is His name? What shall I say to them?” And God answered, “I Am who I Am. Tell them, the I Am has sent you.”
In other words, God was saying I am so much bigger than one name. By giving Moses His name, Moses could basically put God in a box. Like Love. Once you have God in the box labeled Love, you can define Him by that, and only that. And if something comes along, or even scripture teaches something that doesn’t really fit into that box labeled Love, then you can discount it, or say it must be just a metaphor or an allegory. God really can’t mean that, otherwise God can’t be love. So God said you aren’t going to put Me in a box and label it with a name, and thus think you can define ME. I Am. I am bigger and more wonderful than that. I am unsearchable. I am unknowable. I am a mystery. I’ll tell you what I am, you won’t define what I am.
You see, if we don’t have the right understanding of the holiness of God, then we can’t really understand the grievance of our sin. And if we don’t have the proper understanding of how grievous our sin is, then we can’t really appreciate all that God has done to forgive us from our sin. And if we can’t appreciate how much it cost God to save us from our sin, then we will more than likely not worry too much when we continue in our sin. We end up with a cheap view of grace. To understand grace we need to understand God’s justice. Grace may be a free gift from a loving God, but we need to understand how costly that grace was that was purchased.
Yes, God is love. But God is also holy. And a permissive God is not a loving, holy God. So our sin had to be accounted for. And God counted our sins to Jesus. The payment for our redemption was paid for in blood by the substitution of God Himself in human form. And justice and mercy joined hands at the cross.
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