Is Jesus Our Umbrella?

God did not create the world, as some say He did, in order to have for Himself some outlet for His creativity. How do we know? Because that would be a self-serving reason to create, and in Christianity, God is not self-serving; He is the opposite. God is love. Neither did God create the world in order to have some form of self-expression. That, too, would be self-seeking. Again the Christian teaching has it the other way around: God expresses Himself, says such things as, “Let there be light,” in order to create the world. He gives being to the world, to you and me, because He loves us, and already loved us before He brought us from non-being into being.

The situation concerning God’s Law is similar. That is, He doesn’t command this or that because it is some perfect expression of Himself. (The perfect expression of Himself is Jesus Christ.) God doesn’t even set forth His precepts because the perfect law is an imperfect expression of Himself. It is that, but His reason for giving us the law is something different, something the very opposite of self-serving. His reason, as always, is love. He reveals to us His principles because they are good for us, because without their guidance (and even with them) we fall headlong into behaviors that tend to ruin our lives and our societies and our civilizations. He gives us His commandments, in other words, for the same reason He created us, for the same reason He does anything in relation to us: because He loves us.

This means that when we violate God’s commandments, we do no harm to God! It’s not as though the commandments existed for His sake. They, like the Sabbath, exist for our sake, and when we sin, we harm ourselves and our fellow man and our world.

This is why God is not literally angry with us: His honor has not suffered, His glory remains intact. You and I are simply far too small to have any effect upon the high and holy God. He knew before He created us everything we would do, yet still loved us, still gave us life, and still became Man and died for us, “while we were yet sinners.”

Yes, God chastises (corrects) whom He loves. And yes, we may be working at cross-purposes with God, and if so, we shall eventually find Him on the winning side, which means we are the big losers unless we've switched sides. But that isn’t because God is angry with us. It's because He is putting a stop to the harm we are inflicting on ourselves and others and the creation. He’s doing an intervention. He foils the plots of the crafty and brings to nothing the plans of the wicked.

There is no such thing as a God who is literally angry with us, but this doesn’t mean there is no such thing as Divine Wrath. There is, but it is directed at our enemies for our sake, instead of at us for His sake. Our God does nothing from self-interest. Rather, God's wrath is directed against our greed and sloth and lust and pride and so forth, the things that prevent us from becoming fully human, the things that drag us down to a level below the animals. God’s Wrath is exercised on our behalf against all the things that destroy us as bearers of His own Image. (Of course, if God were to destroy my pride, it might indeed feel as though God were against me, but in reality, He would have liberated me.)

And the exercise of God’s Wrath involves not punishment (which is totally useless!) but correction. He is not pleased when sins are avenged, but when they cease. God exercises His Wrath by destroying evil, displacing it and replacing with the corresponding good. Thus, when He reveals Himself to us and teaches us His ways, He is indulging His fury against ignorance. When He leads us in the paths of lovingkindness, He is pouring out His anger against hatred. When He rises from the tomb, He is displaying His Wrath against death. And so forth.

Now all of this is only a prelude to what I really want to say. The point I’m getting at is that there is this idea in non-Orthodox theologizing that Jesus Christ shields us from God’s Wrath. The truth, of course, is that in Christianity, Christ is God. Thus, if He shields you, so does God the Father and so does the Holy Spirit. Or if God the Father were angry with you, so would God the Son be, and so would Jesus Christ, the Man, whose will is always conformed to His Father’s.

Jesus Christ is indeed our Shield, our Umbrella. But what we all need protection from is not God’s Wrath, but the devil’s. He is the angry one, the furious, the envious one, the one from whom we need rescuing.

God and the devil are NEVER on the same side.

And they don't switch sides or from time to time swap roles, either.

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, "He is my refuge and my fortress;
My God, in Him I will trust."

Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler
And from the perilous pestilence.
He shall cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you shall take refuge;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler.
You shall not be afraid of the terror by night,
Nor of the arrow that flies by day,
Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness,
Nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
And ten thousand at your right hand;
But it shall not come near you.
(from Psalm 91)

Always remember that our God is “holy, harmless, undefiled”. (Hebrews 7:26)

Getting Back into the Swing of Things

At long last, I've had enough pause in our adventures to write about them, and have scheduled them as about 6 posts over the next 3 days.

I've also had time to visit one or two of your blogs, and if you haven't already, please read Fr. Stephens posts on the justice of God here and here, together with the many comments. Worth the time!

Seems this topic stirs up more hornets' nests than any other. As he points out, there is a certain lust for "justice" that can become very cruel indeed, and very dangerous, both physically and spiritually. God doesn't have any such lust!

God's Wrath

This is from Fr. Stephen's blog and it has already been reprinted in Christopher Orr's blog as well, but it is so important I'm also reprinting it here, just in case any of my readers have deprived themselves of these other two blogs

By Fr. Stephen Freeman

What shall we make of the wrath of God?

We have this quote from the Gospel of St. Luke:

And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of (Luke 9:51-55).

In this passage, sending down fire from heaven, in the pattern of Elijah is rebuked as somehow belonging to “another spirit.”

Fans of New Testament wrath are quick to point out the passage in Acts concerning Ananias and Sapphira:

But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, And kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him. And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out. Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband. And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as heard these things (Acts 5:1-11)

For accuracies’ sake, it must be noted that we are nowhere told that Ananias and Sapphira died as the result of the action of God. We are told that they fell down dead. This is not unimportant.

Of course the New Testament makes reference to the wrath of God. Indeed there are 45 verses which make reference to the wrath. It is little wonder that interpreters should want to make a theological point out of so common a reference. Of course many of those verses refer to our own wrath and tell us to put it away from us.

But of the wrath of God we read a typical passage:

Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience (Colossians 3:5-6).

A legitimate question has to be: has the Spirit “of which we are” changed between Luke 9 and Colossians 3? Or is there a deeper understanding at work?

With this I offer an Orthodox answer. First, Christ Himself is the definitive revelation of God and that revelation is not corrected by either an Old Testament reading (for “these are they which testify of me”) nor by an Epistle, for Christ as witnessed to in the gospels is the definitive revelation for interpreting even the Epistles. Of course my citation of Luke 9 is often countered with, “What about the moneychangers in the Temple?” To which I can only say that He “drove them out with a whip” which is not the same thing as saying that Christ beat them, nor did He call down fire from heaven to consume them.

For various reasons, some people are determined to make the economy of salvation to be linked with the Wrath of God. If you do not repent, then God will do thus and such… I have always considered this representation of the gospel to be coercive and contrary to the love of God. I have heard convoluted ways in which this wrath is interpreted to be “the loving thing to do” but I do not buy it.

The common witness within Orthodox Tradition is that the wrath of God is a theological term which describes not God Himself, but a state of being in which are opposed to God. Thus the work of Kalomiros, The River of Fire, makes ample citation of the fathers in this matter. We may place ourselves in such a position that even the love of God seems to us as fire or wrath.

But it is essential in our witness to the God Who Is, to always relate the fact that He is a loving God, not willing that any should perish. He is not against us but for us. This is utterly essential to the correct proclamation of the Gospel. Those who insist on exalting His wrath as a threat, inevitably misportray God and use anthropormorphism as a substitute for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Intricate theories of the atonement which involve the assuaging of the wrath of God are not worthy of the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I can say it no plainer. Those who persist in such theological accounts do not know “what Spirit they are of.” It is not ever appropriate to exalt a Biblical system over the plain sense communicated to us in the Gospel. No matter the chain of verses and the rational explanations attached - we cannot portray God as other than as He has shown Himself to us in Jesus Christ. To do so makes the Bible greater than Christ.

It is very difficult in our culture, where the wrathful God has been such an important part of the gospel story, to turn away from such portrayals - and yet it is necessary - both for faithfulness to the Scripture, the Fathers, and the revelation of God in Christ.

I commend the referenced work, the River of Fire, for its compliation of Patristic sources. I also beg other Christians to be done with their imagery of the wrathful God. They do not know the God of Whom they speak. Forgive me.

One Cause of "Atheism"

Please read this by Fr. Stephen Freeman. The comments are also edifying.

God of Perfect Love = God of Perfect Justice

God's absolutely perfect morality stems from and is the expression of His perfect love.

Listening again to Matthew Gallatin's podcasts, I thought this one in particular (#6 in the series, "Sola Scriptura and the Philosophical Church") was so important that I took the time this morning to transcribe the whole podcast for you.

Last time, I characterized the fundamental difference between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity like this:

For the Christian East, God is most essentially a God of absolute, self-denying love. For the Christian West, God is most essentially a God of absolute order, most especially absolute moral order. This understanding of God in the West is a legacy it inherits from Augustine of Hippo, who began to develop this picture of God as he began to marry platonic philosophy with Christian theology. That legacy has been carried on by men who stand as his successors, like St. Anselm or even St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the Reformers carry on this same, platonically influenced view of God in their various theologies. When I closed, I said that Christians in the various Western traditions are by and large very unaware of how this view of God impacts their faith. They don’t know how significantly this view alters the apostolic understanding of who God is and what He is like and the role that we human beings play in His life. As I say, this goes back to Augustine, and let’s investigate that a little bit.

First of all, Augustine’s God is not one who is by nature selfless and other-directed. Instead, he is very much like the “Ultimate Reality” of the Greeks, like the already- mentioned ”Good” of Plato or Plotinus’ “One” or even Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”. The God the Christian West inherits from Augustine is one who ultimately is focused upon Himself, upon His own perfection. And everything He does is motivated by His need to preserve the absolute order that His perfect nature demands. This understanding of God permeates Western Christian life. I found it exemplified on an Evangelical Christian website that I visited just earlier today. In his teaching about the nature of God, this particular minister proclaimed, “Above all things, God is jealous of his own holiness.” Now if you’re paying attention here, you’ll notice that I’m equating holiness with perfect order here. But in truth, that is exactly how the West has come to understand God's holiness. What makes God holy is the impeccable moral order of His being, his absolute moral perfection.

As we shall see shortly, this view of holiness has powerful implications for the Christian West’s basic understanding of salvation and of the believer’s relationship with God. And I think that again our investigation here of these implications may be helped by first having a look at the contrasting Eastern Christian understanding of divine holiness.

Now certainly, Eastern Christians know that God is absolutely morally perfect. That is an aspect of His being not just that we understand, but it is an aspect of His being that we experience in our ascetic and sacramental embracing of God. We often literally tremble in the presence of His perfection. But our experience also teaches us that His moral perfection flows from His self-denying, self-forgetting, other-directed love. It is this love which is the Source of His perfect moral virtue, of His truth, His absolute goodness, His ultimate righteousness.

Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels that perfect morality flows from perfect selfless love. As He says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart all your soul and all your mind This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:37-40) You see, the Lord tells us plainly here that one who loves fulfills all of God’s moral commandments. Why? Because such a person is like God – completely selfless. I mean, if I love God with all of my heart and all of my soul, and with my entire mind, there is not a smidgeon of me left to focus on myself. I become wholly other-directed, just like my morally perfect Creator. The selfish desires of my own will, which are the source of all my moral imperfections, disappear. The fulfillment of the second command, to love my neighbor as myself, naturally follows.

When I became Orthodox, I discovered that I had spent much of my life misinterpreting this commandment of Christ. Like so many others, I’d taken Jesus to mean that I should love my neighbor with the same fervor and to the same degree that I loved myself — and I love myself a lot. But what Jesus is really saying is that I should be so selfless that I live only for my neighbor. In my neighbor’s presence, I recognize only one existence: his or hers. All my concerns are for him. I keep none for myself. When I empty myself of me, I become my neighbor. God commands us to love Him and our neighbor like this because this is the way He loves us. We are everything to Him.

Certainly, we are creatures who have dishonored Him by our sinfulness. We have willfully chosen separation from Him and willfully embraced the death that comes as a result and we can never measure up to God’s flawless morality. But that doesn’t make God stand aloof from us in disdain. He does not retreat from us, hotly displeased by the way we have marred His perfect universe. Instead, he responds just like the Good Samaritan, who brings healing love to a wounded Jew, a Jew, who just like the rest of his people, hates Samaritans, as we can read in Luke 10:25-37. By the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, the Holy Trinity selflessly reaches out to heal us of our great disease of death and sin, restoring us to intimate communion with the godhead and with each other.

I’ve heard Western critics of Orthodoxy say that Orthodox Christians do not recognize the holiness of God. They say that in our Orthodox focus on God’s love we forget about God’s justice. But that’s not the case. It’s just that, for us, God’s holiness IS His selfless love – which is ultimately concerned with healing and redeeming us. As for justice, well, justice is a devotion to setting matters right, restoring things to their proper state and their proper relationship. In our Eastern perspective when God unselfishly empties Himself for our salvation, that’s just what He is doing: He makes it possible for us to be right again, to return to the mystical union with God that we were created to experience. Of course, the reason Western critics accuse the Orthodox of not paying enough attention to God’s holiness and justice is that they have a much different view of both, holiness and justice, an outlook that comes from Augustine and his successors. The West interprets God’s holiness as his unapproachable moral perfection, and what’s more, God is first and foremost concerned about preserving His moral perfection and protecting it from all infringements. As for justice, well, the Western understanding of that also comes from the Greek philosophers. To the Western mind, God's chief goal is not the healing of broken human creatures. Instead, it is the re-establishment of the moral order which He conferred upon the creation in the beginning, an order which Adam and Eve messed up.

Let me once again make the contrast plain and clear before we continue. In the Christian East we find a God of perfectly selfless love whose supreme objective is to heal humankind and restore it to intimacy with him. In the West, we discover a self-concerned God who is above all things protective of His own righteousness. When it comes to humanity, His main concern is righting the wrong human beings have done to Him. True, even in this Western view, God’s saving of His own honor results in the salvation of at least some human beings. But their salvation is secondary to healing the wound they have given God. This understanding of God and the nature of salvation is evident in the teaching of Augustine, and we’ll begin to examine that next time.

St. Cyril of Alexandria on the Parable of the Prodigal Son

What then is the object of the parable? Let us examine the occasion which led to it; for so we shall learn the truth. The blessed Luke therefore had himself said a little before of Christ the Saviour of us all, "And all the publicans and sinners drew near unto Him to hear Him. And the Pharisees and Scribes murmured saying, This man receives sinners and eats " with them." As therefore the Pharisees and Scribes made this outcry at His gentleness and love to man, and wickedly and impiously blamed Him for receiving and teaching men whose lives were impure, Christ very necessarily set before them the present parable, to show them clearly this very thing, that the God of all requires even him who is thoroughly steadfast, and firm, and who knows how to live holily, and has attained to the highest praise for sobriety of conduct, to be earnest in following His will, so that when any are called unto repentance, even if they be men highly blameable, he must rejoice rather, and not give way to an unloving vexation on their account.

For we also sometimes experience something of this sort. For some there are who live a perfectly honourable and consistent life, practising every kind of virtuous action, and abstaining from every thing disapproved by the law of God, and crowning themselves with perfect praises in the sight of God and of men: while another is perhaps weak and trodden down, and humbled unto every kind of wickedness, guilty of base deeds, loving impurity, given to covetousness, and stained with all evil. And yet such a one often in old age turns unto God, and asks the forgiveness of his former offences: he prays for mercy, and putting away from him his readiness to fall into sin, sets his affection on virtuous deeds. Or even perhaps when about to close his mortal life, he is admitted to divine baptism, and puts away his offences, God being merciful unto him. And perhaps sometimes persons are indignant at this, and even say, 'This man, who has been guilty of such and such actions, and has spoken such and such words, has not paid unto the judge the retribution of his conduct, but has been counted worthy of a grace thus noble and admirable: he has been inscribed among the sons of God, and honoured with the glory of the saints.' Such complaints men sometimes give utterance too from an empty narrowness of mind, not conforming to the purpose of the universal Father. For He greatly rejoices when He sees those who were lost obtaining salvation, and raises them up again to that which they were in the beginning, giving them the dress of freedom, and adorning them with the chief robe, and putting a ring upon their hand, even the orderly behaviour which is pleasing to God and suitable to the free.

It is our duty, therefore, to conform ourselves to that which God wills: for He heals those who are sick; He raises those who are fallen; He gives a helping hand to those who have stumbled; He brings back him who has wandered; He forms anew unto a praiseworthy and blameless life those who were wallowing in the mire of sin; He seeks those who were lost; He raises as from the dead those who had suffered the spiritual death. Let us also rejoice: let us, in company with the holy angels, praise Him as being good, and loving unto men; as gentle, and not remembering evil. For if such is our state of mind, Christ will receive us, by Whom and with Whom, to God the Father be praise and dominion with the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever, Amen.

St. Cyril of Alexander, Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, Sermon CVII.

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Some people still cannot accept the thought of God not punishing all sinners, even repentant ones, at least vicariously in Christ (and again, directly, in hell, if they do not repent; apparently the torment and death Christ bore are still not sufficient in those cases). They are the ones who will tell you, "But this parable isn't the whole story." No, but the Father's disposition toward sinners is the main point of the story.

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God’s Wrath vs. Satan’s Wrath

People routinely confuse the two, which is alarming in its implications. It’s a very serious thing, I mean, if we can’t distinguish God from the devil. So how do we tell the difference between divine wrath and diabolical wrath? It’s actually easy. God’s Wrath is always benevolent and satan’s isn’t. God always works for our wholeness, sanctification, glorification, and deification. Satan always tries to destroy us in every conceivable way. God’s holy, good, righteous wrath works for us; satan’s works against us.

Let’s say I am jealous of a co-worker and tell lies about him, hoping he will be fired, but I am caught in my own lies. What has happened? What rôle has each played: God, the devil, and I?

*The devil, in his own, insatiable envy, provoked the evil in me.

*I consented to it.

*Then, because a bargain with the devil is never an honest bargain, satan duped me and I lost my job.

*God let it happen.

*God protected my co-worker from my evil designs.

*God also, in His infinite kindness, turned the evil to good for me by using the fleshly misfortune to teach me not to do that, to bring me to repentance, all for my spiritual and eternal profit.

So who showed wrath?

Satan worked his wrath against me, personally. Satan’s wrath would have destroyed me. God showed His wrath against the evil plot. God’s wrath saved both me (ultimately) and my colleague.

See what I mean? God’s wrath is our champion against evil. We do not want it appeased! We want it to continue until every last vestige of evil is wiped from the face of the earth.

Let’s apply the same sort of analysis to what happened in Eden. What part did each actor in this drama play?

*God allowed the serpent to be in the Garden, giving Adam and Eve a challenge to help them mature spiritually. (For they were spiritual infants.) They had only one commandment to keep, so the test was an easy one, a first, baby step toward deification.

*The serpent provoked Eve to sin, and through her, Adam.

*Adam and Eve consented to the evil, thereby renouncing the God of Life and selling themselves into the service and power of the murderous serpent.

*The serpent immediately made them afraid of God and ashamed to be naked. He double-crossed them, as always happens, for the difference between good and evil was a piece of knowledge they didn’t need anyway at that stage of their existence, but now they had acquired this knowledge in a disastrous way: by committing the evil! By committing suicide, that is, much to the devil’s delight.

*God, in His wrath, curses the serpent, chastises Adam and Eve, and promises to deliver them some day. (Genesis 3:15)

*God, in His wrath, drives them from the Garden before they can multiply the tragedy by eating from the Tree of Life, rendering themselves immortal sinners, making sin live forever in their bodies.

*God allows them to die and be separated from slavery to their bodies, intending eventually to raise them in their bodies, but glorified bodies. Take that, serpent!

*God, in His wrath against satan, slows down the death process, else Adam and Eve would have dropped dead –childless! – on the spot. This way, at least their souls will survive in Hades until the Savior comes, in due course.

*God, in His wrath against the serpent, makes Adam and Eve some decent clothing to cover the nakedness of which they are now ashamed.

Again we see the pattern: satan’s wrath destroys, God’s wrath destroys him and his works and rescues us. Toward us, in fact, His wrath is indistinguishable from His mercy.

Now let’s have a look at the Cross in this same manner.

*Satan, in His wrath, provokes the leaders of the synagogue to put Jesus to death.

*They obey satan’s promptings; according to St. Peter, Christ was crucified by “wicked hands.”

*God lets it happen. He has delivered Christ to these people precisely that He might enter this arena of combat and emerge the Victor.

*Christ, exercising His wrath against satan doesn’t give an inch or a millimeter. He endures His fearsome ordeal without making a single concession to the devil. He never gives up His faith. He never compromises the truth. He never stops loving and forgiving. He never curses God. He never descends from the cross or summons those legions of angels to His aid; He is determined to die to rescue us from death. And every moment He remains steadfast, He, in His wrath, is rubbing satan’s nose in the muck. NO, serpent, I will not give in to you!

*Death, in its wrath, swallows a man, but with the man, in the same person, God enters Hades.

*And there, in His wrath, Christ shines His Glory where the devil wanted only darkness, shines His love where satan wanted only hatred. Then He preaches to the satan’s subjects, and then, smashing hell’s gates in His wrath, He leads all of satan’s captives out by the hand.

Did all of the subjects of Hades like being removed from there, prefer the Light to the darkness? Did they all want, were they all even able, to participate in any love-fest? Possibly not. Possibly some had internalized satan’s wrath.

And possibly the same thing may happen to others of us on the Last Day, when we are all brought to stand before the Glory of God. It may be that some will find it sickening, unbearable, excruciating.

But if so, it will be because of their own wrath; it will be because they have internalized satan’s wrath, which cannot tolerate proximity to God. His Presence will torment them. God Himself, however, the unchanging One, will remain kind, compassionate, loving and good to them, forever and ever.

Alexandre Kalomiros explained their mind-boggling perversity, I think, very well in his lecture, "The River of Fire":

Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God’s love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father’s estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father’s love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother’s return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father’s house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father?

This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one’s heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God’s Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God’s New Creation, nor hide from God’s tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures.

As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says,

In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance: time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy. (On the Soul and the Resurrection). (46)46

In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!

Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting inner fire of hatred,’ saith the Lord, because I was thirsty for your love and you did not give it to Me, I was hungry for your blessedness and you did not offer it to Me, I was imprisoned in My human nature and you did not come to visit Me in My church; you are free to go where your wicked desire wishes, away from Me, in the torturing hatred of your hearts which is foreign to My loving heart which knows no hatred for anyone. Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate, unknown and foreign to Me and to those who are with Me, but prepared by freedom for the devil, from the days I created My free, rational creatures. But wherever you go in the darkness of your hating hearts, My love will follow you like a river of fire, because no matter what your heart has chosen, you are and you will eternally continue to be, My children.'

"If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [art there]." (Psalm 139:8)

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Well, now, isn't that INTERESTING!

In working on one of the upcoming posts in the series, “Why Did Jesus Die?” I was starting to write something about the death penalty for sin prescribed by the Law [of Moses] when suddenly, I realized I didn’t know where to find this in Scripture.

Guess what? It doesn't appear to be there. Or if it is, I can't find it. Can you?

The Law prescribes death as the penalty for certain, particular sins, yes, but not for every sin. Also, for rejecting the Lord and His Law altogether there are abundant threats and curses, ranging from incurable itches to being taken into slavery but no one will even buy you. Several of these horrible fates will end in death. But these are for the nation, should it abandon God’s Law. It’s not for people who try and fail.

Moreover, those things which the Israelites could only understand as curses we, after the coming of Christ and “bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,” (2 Corinthians 10:5) ought to understand as warnings. For we know that whoever rejects or abandons God removes himself from any special protection of God, inviting disaster, and also that God chastises whom He loves.

In short, so far as I can discover, there just is no death penalty for each and every sin anybody ever commits!

At least, there’s no legal death penalty for any and all sin. That’s only important when theologizing. Practically speaking, there may as well be, because any and all sin separates us from God Who Is our only Life, meaning sin already is death.

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Sin and Immortality, Part 2

Sin is Suicide

Once we understand that our life, very literally, consists of communion in God’s own Life, then we are in a position to understand that death is being outside of communion in God’s Life. The soul, separate from God, is like a fish out of water, or a cut flower: not quite dead yet, but already dying. Eventually the dying soul separates from its body and the body, too, dies.

That is why every form of rejecting God is labeled, “sin.” To reject God is not sinful because His feelings are hurt; it isn’t as though His pride were wounded or His dignity insulted; God is far above all such self-serving concerns. Instead, to reject God is sinful because to reject God is to reject Life, His Life, the only Life there is or ever was. Sin is self-destruction. Sin is the destruction of God's handiwork.

To say “sin causes death” is a bit like saying headache causes pain. A headache is pain. Sin is death. Every sin is some form of rebellion, alienation, separation from God. And separation from God is the very definition of death. To sin is to cut your lifeline, to unplug your life support system, to trash your relationship with God, Who is your Life.

Sin, like jumping off a skyscraper, kills us all by itself, even if we don’t actually die until a bit later, when we hit the ground. Sin is self-punishing, destroying us body and soul, although often we do not notice the self-inflicted damage until it becomes full-blown death: how hardened our hearts are becoming; how eroded, our character; how false, our whole being. We do notice how lonely we are, how alienated and empty, but we fail to connect the dots and see how we are punishing ourselves. It is the lack of this insight that allows people to suppose there is some need for God to add yet more misery to our already miserable state, or to kill the already dying.

Death is not a response by God to sin, but is an aspect of sin itself. God, the Author of Life, did not institute death as a punishment. The murderer of mankind is and always was satan, not God. (John 8:44) He kills us by inducing us to kill ourselves; that is, to sin. Sin is suicide, unassisted suicide. Or at least it is unassisted by God.

It’s true that when God wanted to reveal to His people that there is a connection between sin and death, He put it into legal terms, offense and punishment. But we believe He did this in great and gracious condescension to stiff-necked and hard-hearted Israel. He put the matter in terms they could understand, who were not very spiritual-minded but were all too familiar with the concept of revenge. It was impossible, at that stage of spiritual development, for people to understand that sin in and of itself is lethal, before we even get around to considering God’s response to it. Yet that fact existed from the beginning, before the Mosaic Law. As St. Paul points out in Romans 5, during the time between Adam and Moses, there was no transgression similar to Adam’s (no transgression of any direct commandment), yet sin still killed everyone. And sin killed everyone, he says, even though sin was not being imputed. This means something else was going on, not God killing people as punishment. It means sin kills us unilaterally, without any help from God.

We do not worship some beastly deity who retaliates against sinners by killing them. Instead, sin kills automatically because to sin is to make oneself incompatible with God. The only way God could make sin non-lethal would be by making His own Life compatible with wickedness. Never going to happen! He remains holy and good; He remains the only Immortality; and if we would not die, we must tap into His Life, must be in communion with Him. It is not God who kills, but precisely the opposite: the lack of God. (God but determines the timing of our dying, according to what is best.)

The wages of sin is death
but the gift of God [is] eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Romans 6:23)

Sin pays us death; God, by contrast, gives us eternal life.

Sin pays us wages we earned; God gives us eternal life we did not earn.

This is the revelation we have in Christ.

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Sin and Immortality, Part 1

Adam & Eve and Immortality

The Orthodox believe that immortality is strictly a divine attribute, just like knowing everything or being everywhere at once. God alone has it. “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6) and “I am Resurrection and Life” (John 11:25) and “In Him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:14) and “Who only hath immortality.” (I Timothy 6:16)

We hold that Adam and Eve were not created with this divine attribute. The Life they had was specifically God’s Life, shared with them. Their Life, we can say, was derivative, was borrowed, was God’s Life breathed into their inanimate clay. No, God does not have lungs or gills, has no need of oxygen, and does not literally breathe, but the idea is that Life is His, and He shares His Life with Adam and Eve (in a unique way not granted to animals) for as long as they will have Him. It’s as if He were the Fountain of Immortality, and they were merely dipping their straws into it.

Of course the Life they had, being God’s Life, was indeed immortal life, but their hold on it was not yet firmly established, for they were, as St. Irenaeus is fond of telling us, but spiritual infants. Because they were not yet perfect, they were still capable of falling into slavery to the devil. Because they were not yet wise, they were still able to pull their straws out of the Fountain and throw them away.

Had they remained in obedient communion with God, eventually that communion would have matured into something permanent, immune from assaults by the devil, at which point they would have been sealed with immortality. In more mythological terms, God would have allowed them to eat of the Tree of Life (and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!) when they were mature enough to handle these. As it happened, though, He drove them out of the Garden specifically lest they eat of the Tree of Life and sin dwell forever and ever in their immortal bodies.

But notice carefully: they had not yet eaten from the Tree of Life (Christ). They were not yet confirmed in immortality.

Thus we say that Adam and Eve were created neither immortal nor mortal, but instead, with the capacity to become either.

This is very important because it is part of what underlies a horrible Western error with grave implications concerning who God is. I mean this: if one believes Adam and Eve were created mortal, then God is the Author of death. But also, if one believes Adam and Eve were created immortal, then by definition nothing and nobody can cause them to die – except almighty God. Thus, one will be forced to conclude that, literally, God killed them as punishment for their sin. And of course, a god who creates death or who literally would kill us for revenge or retaliation is not the true and living God we Orthodox know, not the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. I will have more to say on that in the next post.

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God is Always Gracious -- to Everybody

Here is an interesting blog post about whether grace is imputed or imparted.

Thing is, God does not need to do any legal manipulations by which He can manage to regard us as righteous, before He can treat us well. He doesn't have to bestow a new legal status upon us before being good to us, as good as He is to the greatest saint. He doesn’t first have to kid Himself about who we are. He doesn’t need any justification to do whatever He pleases with His servants, including His unwilling ones. He is allowed to be merciful to whom He will be merciful.

In His ultimate self-revelation (in this life) He shows Himself the “Friend of sinners.” (Mark 11:19, Luke 7:34) He sends His sunshine and His rain upon the just and the unjust, alike. He loves those who hate Him; He is good to those who curse Him. (Matthew 5:44-45) “He is kind to the unthankful and to the evil.” (Luke 6:35) All these are Christ's own words, not mine.

And the Law? Has not God obliged Himself to be very much the opposite of all that to sinners? The New Covenant is not legally based. Christ fulfilled that Covenant and closed it out. God’s new covenant with mankind is a covenant of eternal, unbounded love. See more in an upcoming post.

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God's Perfect Freedom

In Titus 1:2, we read that “God…cannot lie”.

Many people have supposed that there are certain restrictions upon God’s freedom, imposed by His own nature, and that this verse is an example of one such restriction. God, they suppose, is limited by His very nature as to what He can and cannot do. God is Truth; therefore, He cannot lie. God is love, therefore, He cannot do anything unloving, etc. God is just, therefore we imagine He conforms to our brutal and bloody notions of "justice".

But the idea that God’s freedom is restricted by His nature is very far from true Christian teaching. In fact, it is of huge importance to maintain that God’s freedom is absolute. There are no restrictions upon it, period. God is not dictated to by His nature. Whatever He does, He does strictly because He freely wills to do it.

Unlike created beings, God does not just “come with” a given nature. Nothing and nobody endows God with His nature or decides for Him what His Being is. We have to say either that He Himself determines His own Being, or else that His Being is indeterminate. I’m not sure which is correct (I currently lean toward the latter), but in either case, God remains radically free.

And it is precisely because this freedom is perfect, unrestricted by anything at all, that we can be assured He will never lie, never break His word, never do anything evil.

When we lie or do any other kind of evil, it is for self-protection or self-gain. But God needs no protection and He to Whom everything belongs has nothing to gain – or lose – in any case. He has no motive but love unalloyed.

Put another way, to do evil is to become, in some degree, a slave to that evil (John 8:34), a slave to self-interest. God has no self-interest. Moreover, because it is perfect, God's freedom does not descend, as our imperfect freedom sometimes does, to slavery or to compromise. God is never a slave at all, in any degree, to anything, not even to His own nature. “God cannot be tempted with evil” (James 1:13) – not because His freedom is limited, but precisely because it is not.

P.S.) God cannot endow human beings with true freedom, either, if He Himself doesn't have it.

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God's Law Never Killed Anyone

Yet again, this morning, I have read the assertion that the Law of God kills. Where does this notion come from? It isn’t Christian. It isn’t biblical. The biblical doctrine is that sin kills.

What the Law does is to make sin more clearly known to us. People already knew they were sinning, but they sometimes knew it only vaguely. The Law makes it clear.

Another effect of the Law is to render certain behaviors “forbidden fruit.” Then, because of our perversity, we lust after them even more than before they were forbidden. But the fault is in us, not in God’s perfect, holy, and good Law.

I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, "You shall not covet." But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead. I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died. And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not! But sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. (Romans 7:7-13)

(St. John Chrysostom’s very helpful commentary upon this passage is here.)

So please, can we have done with talk about the Law of God killing us? It's a slander of God's good, holy, Law, and it's especially disturbing coming from seminaries.

That is not the kind of God we Christians worship.

What kills us -- with or without the Law (Romans 5:13-14) -- is sin.

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What God's Love for Sinners Does Not Mean

You can google, “Does God Hate Sinners” and find hundreds of writings by people, mostly very ignorant people and many quite hostile people, who believe He does. Reading some of these, it occurred to me that a very good paradigm for us in thinking about the subject is alcoholism (or any other form of addiction). This is because most of us are able to see in alcoholism a multi-dimensional problem. Most of us realize it is not a purely moral problem, but primarily a disease. On the other hand, alcoholism is not merely a disease, either, and to fail to see its moral aspect is to take too shallow a view of it. Well, the same things are true of sin in general. The disease model is the best, most accurate one, yet it alone is insufficient, for sin does also have a moral dimension.

I once had a co-worker who confided to me that she was a binge drinker who attended AA “every night but Tuesday.” She met a very nice man there and they got married and had a daughter. So far as I know, they have been living happily ever after.

But let’s do a thought experiment and say they didn’t. Let’s suppose she fell back into drinking heavily. She failed as a mother and failed as a wife. Her husband divorced her and got custody of the child. She lost her job. Eventually, she landed on the street, homeless, most likely prostituting herself in order to eat and to support her addiction.

Suppose this woman is your sister, with whom you have always been close. Suppose further that you are mature person and a Christian. What will your attitude toward her be?

You will hate her drinking. You will hate the smell of alcohol on her breath. You will hate the way she slurs her words when drunk, and loathe the sight of her staggering. You will hate that she has become a drunk, a street person and a prostitute. And yes, you will be angry with her for having let all this happen, and for continuing to drink, and not having the fortitude to stop.

But note, all your displeasure and anger will arise from the fact that you love her! If she were a nobody to you, just another anonymous whore, you wouldn’t have these feelings. You might feel pity, you might feel compassion, but if she weren’t anybody you cared about, you wouldn’t be angry. (Unless, of course, you were simply a hostile person, showing it in the form of moral indignation.)

It’s like that with God. If He hates our sin and He hates what we have done to ourselves and He is angry with us, all these are not contradictions to His infinite love, but expressions of it.

So what does it mean that God loves you always, no matter what? And what does it not mean?

1.) It doesn’t mean you get a free ride. Yes, God will be patient with you, will treat you with unfailing kindness, will cherish you, in whom, after all, He still sees His own image, however disfigured. But all sin is like alcoholism or drug addiction: it ruins you. All by itself, without any help from God, it destroys you. Other forms of sin may do so more subtly than alcoholism, less visibly, but just as surely. That’s the very reason God hates it. Sin is self-punishing, in other words. You don’t get a pass.

2.) It doesn’t mean God is pleased with you. But it does mean He sympathizes, empathizes, has most tender compassion. When He took upon Himself our fallen human nature, yet without sinning, He took all of our frailties upon Himself, as well, as if He had been an alcoholic, yet without ever losing His sobriety. He has been tempted in all points the same as we have been, although without sin. He knows what it is like. He knows our frailty. He understands not from the outside, but from the inside, what being human is like.

3.) It doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be saved. Yes, He will save every alcoholic in the sense that eventually He will bring each one to a “place” beyond the grave where there is no alcohol, but whether any given alcoholic will be grateful for that or be tortured by it remains to be seen. He will bring you and me to where there is no sin, but whether we feel delivered or deprived, indeed destroyed, depends upon us.

4.) Does God love you so much as to accept you as you are? Well, let’s put it this way: He loves you as you are. But a person who truly loves a drunk will never be content to see that person stay as he or she is. If you really love an alcoholic, you do not give him a drink no matter how he begs, or weeps, or curses. Yes, God loves you as you are, but He also loves you too much to leave you as you are. He always wants better for you.

5.) His unconditional love for you doesn’t mean God winks at evil. He corrects evil. But correcting evil does not mean being hateful about it, being spiteful, vengeful, retaliatory. Sin itself, like alcoholism, already heaps misery upon misery on us; there is no need for God to add yet more. Correcting evil means changing it into good. You correct illiteracy not by not by beating a person, but by teaching him to read and write. Alcoholism is corrected not by jailing the drunk, but by, for example, his learning to follow the Twelve Steps.

6.) God’s eternal, unfailing love means His is always on your side. Now an alcoholic who begs you for a drink may not think you are on his side when you refuse to give him one. He may be unable to see it that way. But it is still so. That God is always on your side does not mean He is not actively opposing all you do. Being on your side means working in your true best interest. Even if God sees fit to shorten your life because of your sin, it is because He knows this is for the best, not only for those you are harming, but also even for you. You will have less to regret forever and ever.

7.) God’s infinite, unchangeable love does mean He is always and forever good to you. Not necessarily gentle, but always good, even when, for your benefit, it’s a harsh goodness. He will never mistreat you. Even if you are in hell, it will be not because He is retaliating against you, but because you are incapable of heaven, incapable of returning His boundless, unfathomable love which is heaven.

I think many people misunderstand one or more of these points about God's love, and those misunderstandings are one factor in their belief that God hates some people some of the time. They think if He didn't, He would be unjust. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

God is love.

God is light.

In Him is no darkness at all.

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Does God Hate Sinners?

Tragically, many people think He does.

Pastor Snyder teaches that God hates sinners.

He can cite some passages of Scripture to “prove” it, too, such as Psalm 5:5 and Jeremiah 12:8.

Just today I had an exchange with someone who seems very, very nice, but listen to who He believes God is.

He wrote, "The Father loves us on account of Christ and always listens to His Son’s pleas for His people."

I replied, “But surely the Father always loved us, before Christ came, from the foundation of the world, eternally even, which is why He sent Christ in the first place. Yes?”

He answered, “…He loved the world in such a way that He sent His Son Christ to take care of what would actually cause the Father to hate us all... sin.”


Dear pastors, and everybody else, I have excellent news for you, wonderful, joyous news for you: God can be perfectly just (and is!) without hating anybody, ever.

To show how this can be, I’d like to remind you of three basic principles upon which, I expect, we can all agree.

1.) Christ is the Light of the World (John 8:12, 9:5, 14:6)

He is the perfect, definitive, ultimate revelation of God. Therefore, we interpret absolutely every thing in life in His light. That includes the Old Testament. “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” We must understand the Father first and foremost in terms of Jesus Christ, not first and foremost by the comparatively feeble light of the Old Testament.

Not that the Old Testament is a feeble light, either! I said, “comparatively,” compared to the revelation in Christ. Yet, another thing we must always remember is that, according to the Fathers, it is always Christ who speaks in both Testaments. Therefore, if God in the Old Testament says He hates us, it is Christ speaking.

So what do we learn from the Jesus, the Word Incarnate, about God’s attitude toward sinners?

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48; see also Luke 6:27-36.)

God blesses the good and the evil alike with rain and sunshine. We are to imitate His goodness, loving our enemies as He loves His. We are to love your enemies, bless those who curse us, do good to those who hate us, precisely for the sake of being like our Father in heaven.

2.) God is Immutable

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." (James 1:17)

That God is immutable means He never changes. It doesn’t mean He cannot vary His actions toward us, in response to innumerable changes of circumstance. But it does mean He does not change His disposition toward us, His attitude toward us. He is not fickle, but constant and true. “His mercy endures forever” is a phrase that occurs 41 times in Holy Scripture. “God is love,” and nothing we do could ever change almighty God, even in the slightest, and it is downright presumptuous to suppose we could.

St. Anthony wrote:

God is good, dispassionate, and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well ask how, in that case, it is possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good and showing mercy to those who honor Him, and as turning away from the wicked and being angry with sinners. To this it must be answered that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions; nor is He won over by the gifts of those who honor Him, for that would mean He is swayed by pleasure. It is not right that the Divinity feel pleasure or displeasure from human conditions. (Philokalia, Chapter 150, St. Anthony the Great)

It is not possible for God to feel wrathful toward us at one time and compassionate another. There’s no such thing as, “It’s time to have compassion,” if that implies there was ever a time for not having compassion. God does not change!

Some people teach that unless God changed, we would be consumed, but Scripture tells us the very opposite: it is because He never changes that we are not consumed. “[It is of] the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.” (Lamentations 3:22) “For I [am] the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” (Malachi 3:6.)

Of old You laid the foundation of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of Your hands.
They will perish, but You will endure;
Yes, they will all grow old like a garment;
Like a cloak You will change them,
And they will be changed.
But You are the same,
And Your years will have no end.
(Psalm 102:25-27; Hebrews 1:10-12)

3.) God’s love is infinite

There is no such thing as a border on God’s love. There is no boundary we can cross, such that God will cease loving us and hate us instead. God is infinite. And God is love.

Infinity also implies there is nothing else, nothing that is not love, countering or balancing or modifying God’s love. He does not love us and hate us at the same time. He is not schizoid. There is no polarity, no tension between opposites. “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (I John 1:5)


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So what are we to make of such verses as Psalm 5:5, which says, “The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity.” Or how about Jeremiah 12:8? “My heritage has become to me like a lion in a forest. She has given forth her voice against me – therefore I hated her.”

First, we are to remember that we must see all things by the Light of Christ, “For the law was given by Moses, [but] grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17) Christ Himself is the context for all Scripture. When we look by the light of Christ, we see a Father who no more “hates” than He has hands or feet or eyes or a mouth, all of which Holy Scripture also speaks of His having.

Yet Scripture speaks truth, even if not literal truth, in describing God in all these ways. For example, when we speak of God’s eyes, we mean He knows everything. When we speak of His hands, we mean His power. His face denotes His presence, and so forth. His “hatred” refers to two things. One is that He does chastise sinners, and the other is that He does act to limit sin or to put a stop to it. These two facts, combined, give an appearance of hatred.

But, to take chastisement first, what do we see about it in the light of Christ?

"My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord,
Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him;
For whom the Lord loves He chastens,
And scourges every son whom He receives."

If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:5-11)

We don’t even have to go to the New Testament for part of this; verses five and six quote Proverbs 31:11-12. (See also Deuteronomy 8:3) But here, in Hebrews, we get an exposition of the Proverb. And the exposition here tells us that God’s chastisement does not stand in contradiction to His love, but is actually a function of that very love. It is “for our profit.”

The other factor that makes hatred an apt metaphor for God’s response to sin is that He always works at cross-purposes to the schemes of sinners. He defeats their wicked plans. He thwarts their enterprises. “The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He makes the plans of the peoples of no effect.” (Psalm 33:10)

Again, He does this for the ultimate good of all concerned. This is true even when He employs violence to do it. He delivers the oppressed from the tyrants. He gives an example to the survivors (for fear is edifying). He cuts short the careers of the wicked, who would otherwise have to appear before Him at the final judgment with even more sins on their hands, even more crimes to torment them forever. For all concerned, then, He is loving them in the ways appropriate to each.

He frustrates the devices of the crafty,
So that their hands cannot carry out their plans.
He catches the wise in their own craftiness,
And the counsel of the cunning comes quickly upon them.
They meet with darkness in the daytime,
And grope at noontime as in the night.
But He saves the needy from the sword,
From the mouth of the mighty,
And from their hand.
So the poor have hope,
And injustice shuts her mouth.
(Job 5:12-16)

In fact, this is what we mean when we pray, each day during Holy Week, “Bring more evils upon them, O Lord, bring more evils upon them that are glorious upon the earth.”

Now if we go back to Jeremiah and read all of Chapter 12, we can see that Jeremiah is praying the same prayer, in different words, and receiving an answer. Both these factors, chastisement and putting a stop to evil, are what is really going on there, under the term, “hate.” David is praying a similar prayer in Psalm 5, too.



God doesn’t love you because Jesus causes Him to. God doesn’t just love you for Jesus’ sake (as if there were some discrepancy between the feelings of Father and Son!) but for His own. “I, [even] I, [am] he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.” (Isaiah 43:25)


For My name's sake I will defer My anger,
And for My praise I will restrain it from you,
So that I do not cut you off.
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.
For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it;
For how should My name be profaned?
And I will not give My glory to another.
(Isaiah 48:9-11)

God loves you with an infinite, unchanging, unconditional, perfect love. He always has, He still does, and He always will. The love you see in Jesus not only reflects but literally IS the love of the Father as well, for "He who has seen Me has seen the Father."

“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever." (Hebrews 13:8)


UPDATE: Fr. Stephen has a discussion on his blog with more about interpreting Holy Scripture by and through Jesus Christ.

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Fr. Schmemann on Death

Hat tip: mamajuliana at Abide and Endeavor

–The Church is the entrance into the risen life of Christ; it is communion in life eternal, “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” And it is the expectation of the “day without evening” of the Kingdom; not of any “other world,” but of the fulfillment of all things and all life in Christ. In Him death itself has become an act of life, for He has filled it with Himself, with His love and light. In Him “all things are yours; whether…the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s (1 Cor 3:21-23). And if I make this new life mine, mine this hunger and thirst for the Kingdom, mine is this expectation of Christ, mine the certaintude that Christ is Life, then my very death will be an act of communion with Life. For neither life nor death can separate us from the love of Christ. I do not know when all things will be comsummated in Christ. I know nothing about the “whens” and “hows.” But I do know that in Christ this great Passage, the Pascha of the world has begun, that the light of the “world to come” comes to us in the joy and peace of the Holy Spirit, for Christ is risen and Life reigneth.

– from For the Life of the World

Thanks to mamajuliana also for her beautiful follow-up reflection:

…Sometimes it is difficult to understand this but it is truth…that I believe.

Amen.

On Romans 8:23

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:

Comment of St. John Chrysostom

So it is as if any one were to see in the street a vile woman of the baser sort being beaten, and were to say he was her son, when he was the king’s, and so to get her free from those who ill treated her. And this He really did, in that He confessed that He was the Son of Man, and stood by it (i.e. the flesh), and condemned the sin. However … He smote it with the blow of His death, but in this very act it was not the smitten flesh which was condemned and perished, but the sin which had been smiting. And this is the greatest possible marvel. For if it were not in the flesh that the victory took place, it would not be so astonishing, since this the Law also wrought. But the wonder is, that it was with the flesh (μετα σαρκoς) that His trophy was raised, and that what had been overthrown numberless times by sin, did itself get a glorious victory over it. For behold what strange things there were that took place! One was, that sin did not conquer the flesh; another, that sin was conquered, and conquered by it [flesh] too. For it is not the same thing not to get conquered, and to conquer that which was continually overthrowing us. A third is, that it [flesh] not only conquered it [sin], but even chastised it. For by not sinning it [Christ’s flesh] kept from being conquered, but by dying also, He overcame and condemned it [sin], having made the flesh, that before was so readily made a mock of by it, a plain object of fear to it. In this way then, He at once unnerved its power, and abolished the death by it introduced. For so long as it [sin] took hold of sinners, it with justice kept pressing to its end. But after finding a sinless body, when it [sin] had given it [Christ’s body] up to death, it was condemned as having acted unjustly. Do you observe, how many proofs of victory there are? The flesh not being conquered by sin, Its even conquering and condemning it, Its not condemning it [sin] barely, but condemning it as having sinned. For after having convicted it of injustice, he proceeds to condemn it, and that not by power and might barely, but even by the rules of justice. For this is what he means by saying, “for sin condemned sin in the flesh.”

What is lacking in this interpretation? Any mention of vicarious punishment.

He Who Knew no Sin Became Sin For Us

Why did Jesus have to die? Because at that moment, bearing your sin and mine, he deserved to die. Was the Father unjust by slaying an innocent man? No. Jesus had to die because on the cross He became the vilest sinner on earth. “He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).”

(This is another quote from the same blog I mentioned in my previous post, and the same post, "Lent for Dummies".)

The Orthodox understand this verse as metaphorical. Now metaphorical does not mean unreal! It means one reality is expressed as if it were another; or as Merriam-Webster says, “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money).” A person “drowning in money” isn’t literally drowning; isn’t necessarily even in the water. But the reality expressed by the metaphor is that the person has so much money that if it were water instead of money, the water would be enough for a person to drown in.

Similarly, with 2 Cor. 5:21. In Jesus, “who knew no sin”, God makes sin concretely visible to us in its full ugliness and horror: the Son of God is crucified. The Crucifixion is the ultimate icon of sin: in the most horrific crime in history, God incarnate is judged and not merely put to death, but executed as if He had been a criminal, although He was innocent and perfect and all-holy and never deserved to die.

This death is portrayed everywhere in the New Testament as illegal and immoral: “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain,” St. Peter tells the crowds on Pentecost. There was nothing just about it; in fact, Jesus’ death is the supreme injustice.

Still less would there be anything just about it if we were to take this verse literally, supposing a person could literally morph into a thing, and an abstract thing, at that: not “a sinner” but “sin”. Besides being impossible, it is a truly scandalous thought to suppose Christ could ever turn into a sinner literally, which is not what the verse says, much less the vilest sinner on earth, still less into sin itself, literally. But even if this were possible (and not blasphemous), then for God to blame the only innocent One for every sin that had ever been committed in the whole world would be the very opposite of anything that could be considered justice or legality or morality.

Notice, too, what St. Peter tells us God did: delivered Jesus into the hands of the wicked, by His pre-determined counsel. He does not say God the Father killed Him. God the Father did not. He is not the culprit.

(But if He were, then, since the Holy Trinity always works as with one will, one purpose, one mind, one power, we would have to say God the Holy Spirit also did it and God the Son also killed Himself to appease His own wrath. Else we would be pitting at least One of the Holy Trinity against at least One Other, in a manner not permitted by basic Trinitarian theology.)

In fact, Christ our God laid down His own life. That is, it was not being crucified that killed Him, not the bleeding nor the suffocation nor anything else man could do. Instead, He died by His own free will, at the moment of His choosing, with all His strength intact, as shown by the fact that the moment before His death, He cried out with a very loud, strong voice. Jesus had earlier taught: "I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father." (John 10:17-18)

Death is the legal penalty for sin, and Jesus died, suffering that penalty just as if He had sinned, although, because He had not, death for Him did not literally mean He was being punished. Instead, He took upon Himself the same death which for anyone else would be punishment, but for a different purpose: in order to annihilate death by His encounter with it, just as a bright light in a dark room scatters the darkness by its very presence. That is how he “became sin for us.”

On God's Favor

It is part of our fallen nature that we want to reduce the demands of God’s law, to soften it. Why? To make it seem like we can attain God’s favor on our own - even if we still give lip service to sin and grace.

I found these words on another blog, where you can read the entire post, entitled, "Lent for Dummies". Several things in that short post I thought called for comment. Not wishing to abuse the hospitality of that more or less official, denominational blog by posting Orthodox viewpoints on it, however, I've decided to do it here, and I am only going to comment on three of several things that leapt out at me, each in its own post here. The first is about attaining God's favor.

There are several reasons God’s favor cannot be attained on our own, meaning by works, or in any way at all. One is that we are hard put to perform even one truly good, purely motivated deed. Another is that we could never do enough of them to merit anything from God. He who has labored mightily for our salvation, on a cosmic scale, from the beginning, is hardly impressed by our late and paltry efforts!

But the main reason we cannot attain God's favor on our own is that it already is ours, already was yours and mine, from all eternity. God created us knowing ahead of time we would sin, and loved us still. The proof of it is, He sent His Son to die for us “while we were yet sinners.”

That we already have God’s favor doesn’t mean God approves of our sin. How could He, when He sees it destroying us, who are the sheep of His pasture, and the work of His hands?

Nor does already having God’s favor mean He will bless our misbehavior or overlook it. On the contrary, He will combat it in countless ways. He will thwart our wicked designs, will chastise us as severely as may profit us, will give our conscience no rest, will protect others from us even at our material expense, will ever sweetly seek to convert us and patiently await our return to Him – all the while still loving us, no matter what. Our status, our standing with Him, is always, “beloved.” He is always gracious toward us, kind, compassionate, and good, sending the blessings of His rain and His sunshine on the just and the unjust alike.

All of this is another way of saying God in immutable, unchangeable. His purpose for us, His love for us, His kindness toward us, are constant and true, with no shadow of turning, no fickleness. They are unconditional. We may not assert of God that He is angry with us one day and favorable toward us the next. "I am God; I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed."

For obtaining God’s favor, then, works are perfectly, utterly useless. We already have His favor in abundance, in full.

But if another issue for us is how to change the relationship with God in which we find Him as our constant Opponent, then the obvious answer is, stop opposing Him! Stop kicking against the goads! “Repent”, which means stop living at cross-purposes with Him, and “believe the Good News”, because until you do, you cannot live according to His purpose, which is to glorify and deify you. And there, in repentance and faith, works do come into play. Because repentance and faith, although gifts from God, are also themselves works. Moreover, they together form the matrix of every act we do henceforth, except when we sin by operating out of another matrix.

But meanwhile, even while we take the side of the evil which God implacably opposes, He loves us with an equally implacable and infinite and unconditional and mighty Love.

God is Good!

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Fr. Stephen nails it yet again, in his post on how hard it is, sometimes, really, truly, deeply, to believe God is good toward us, infinitely good, always, only, purely good, good to one and to all, eternally good. "In Him is no darkness AT ALL." Why is this so very hard to accept? How could Jesus possibly have made it any plainer?

There is no, "Yes, but..." There just isn't.