GraceLife Thoughts: Love and Wrath (Part 8)

Grace Thoughts

GraceLife Thoughts: Love and Wrath (Part 8)

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16

John 3:16 continues to be the world’s most popular Bible verse – and for good reason. They are the very Words of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The verse connects to every other part of the Bible (Old and New Testaments). For example –

And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel. Genesis 3:15

Those are the words God spoke to the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It was God’s promise that the Seed of the woman would bruise (destroy) the head of the seed of the serpent, even as the seed of the serpent would bruise the heel of the Seed of the woman. God promised to send His only begotten Son from Heaven to earth on a rescue mission to save those who would believe.

The ‘Everywhere’ Promise

I call this the ‘everywhere promise’ because you find it ‘everywhere’ in the Bible. After Jesus rose from the dead, He met with His disciples and opened their understanding about the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) –

Then He said to them, ‘These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.’ And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. Luke 24:44-45

That’s the ‘everywhere’ promise. Everywhere you read in the Old Testament – Law of Moses, Prophets, and Writings – you’ll find God’s promise of salvation through faith in His Son. That’s what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3.

As we’ve already demonstrated in previous parts of this series, God’s promise is a combination of His Character. He is love and He is angry. He is the One who forgives and He is the One who sentences to perish. Every person who is alive today is ‘by nature’ a child of ‘wrath.’ Every person who has ever lived was ‘by nature’ a ‘child of wrath.’ Every person who will be born in the future will be ‘by nature’ a ‘child of wrath’ (Ephesians 2:3).

The Apostle Paul included himself when he wrote –

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Ephesians 2:1-3

There is nothing ‘we’ can do about it. Adam sinned against God, angered God, and brought death into the world. It is the ‘everywhere’ promise of the Bible that we have hope in what would otherwise be a hopeless world –

‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.’ 1 Corinthians 15:22

Why? Why do we have that ‘everywhere’ promise throughout God’s Word? Why would an angry God save some who were by nature ‘children of wrath?’

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. Ephesians 2:4-9

God is ‘rich in mercy.’ Why? ‘because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses.’ God ‘made us alive together with Christ,’ and ‘raised us up together,’ and ‘made us sit together in the heavenly place in Christ Jesus.’ That connects directly to what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:16 –

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

It’s the ‘everywhere’ promise. Everywhere we look in the Bible we find God’s love, even as we also find His wrath.

Some people say they can see that in the New Testament, but not in the Old. One early ‘church heresy’ was that the God of the Old Testament was not the same God as the New Testament. Why? Because the God of the Old Testament was filled with wrath, while the God of the New Testament was loving and kind. Is that true? We’ll get into that in Part Nine of our study.