Greatness and Grace

God is love (1 John 4:8).  How thankful we can be that compassion is the way of God’s heart!  If it weren’t for this fact, all would be lost.  What a wonder that “God so loved the world…” (John 3:16).

But when it comes to what God “is,” love isn’t the whole story.  God also “is” light (1 John 1:5), spirit (John 4:24), and a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).  In our me-centered, self-absorbed age, we’re prone to say “God is love” and stop there.  After all, we’re very special and God ought to love us, right? (isn’t that his ‘job’?).  But we dishonor the Lord if we willfully ignore facets of his character.

Further, the love we so much want to emphasize becomes meaningless if our attention to God’s goodness isn’t matched by reverent respect for his greatness.  Or to put it differently, fixating on God’s love and mercy and grace makes no sense if we don’t spell out what we’re saved from, namely eternal condemnation.

We need the full truth about God and his intertwined attributes, especially how his love makes a way for his wrath to be satisfied without condemning us or compromising his justice.  God is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).  And that’s because Christ bore God’s wrath for us on the cross (3:25).  “Since we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God” (5:9).

When people bristle at the doctrine of hell, it’s often because they think too highly of themselves and too little of God (or both).  But such thinking badly distorts the Bible’s message.  You see, hell is just:  it is just for an infinitely glorious God to pass a sent­ence of infinite intensity upon unrepentant, treasonous enemies; the punishment is commensurate—it matches the crime.

So, pause and ponder the fullness of God’s being—he’s great and good, majestic and merciful, holy and just and loving.  And “shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).