Recently, my husband read Neil Anderson’s Victory Over the Darkness. It’s about our identity in Christ, and it’s been an extremely influential book for him.
I read it a few years ago, and somewhere — I think at our former church — I picked up a bookmark that lists the various lies we believe about who we are, each one paired with the Scriptural passage that counteracts it. It’s a great resource that gathers so much truth in one place. Tozer wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” It’s at least partly because how we see ourselves is deeply interwoven with our view of God.
To me, George MacDonald offers a wonderful picture of fallen, yet redeemable, human nature in “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer” (from Unspoken Sermons). It’s an antidote to the stew pot of doctrinal influences and deep hopelessness that can drain the vitality from my ability to dwell by faith in my true spiritual identity before God:
Certainly no evil is, or ever could be, of the essential being and nature of the creature God made! The thing that is not good, however associated with our being, is against that being, not of it — is its enemy, on which we need to be avenged.
Here, MacDonald is following up a discussion of prayers for revenge. I’ve heard the Psalmist’s invocation of God’s vengeance on enemies discussed as an example of honesty before God, but beyond that I don’t remember hearing anyone who really knows what to do with it. MacDonald plunges in:
God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin, as if men knew what they were doing. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ he says: with a right understanding of it, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for his forgiveness; that vengeance is, to destroy the sin — to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less. The man himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else will do, then hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation, is God’s payment.
Friends, if any prayers are offered against us; if the vengeance of God be cried out for, because of some wrong you or I have done, God grant us his vengeance!
Even the vengeance of God is holy, and for our good. Unlike human anger that lashes out and destroys, the vengeance of God is as precise as a scalpel in the skilled hand of divine love. It targets sin; rather than destroy, it frees and invigorates life.
This morning I thought about how different this view is than Jonathon Edwards’ notion of “sinners in the hands of an angry God“! For Edwards, it’s not sin, but the people God himself has created, that
are now the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell. And the reason why they do not go down to hell at each moment, is not because God, in whose power they are, is not then very angry with them; as he is with many miserable creatures now tormented in hell, who there feel and bear the fierceness of his wrath. Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell.
Some who like this sermon say that God’s grace is its dominant theme. I don’t see it — not here, and not later, when Edwards paints this vivid picture:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.
Why would a God given over to rage like this redeem the world?
We may not talk in these terms, but I think vestiges of this view are deeply rooted in our collective consciousness. They show up in bumper stickers like, “I’m not perfect, I’m just forgiven.” They show up in the cliche that we are “sinners saved by grace.” In fact, the New Testament refers to believers saved by grace as saints, not sinners. As Neil Anderson puts it, once we put our faith in Christ, “Our relationship with sin is over.”
I not only vastly prefer MacDonald’s view of the relationship between God and fallen human nature. I think it’s more deeply true, biblically. And I would ask God to remove all vestiges of an unworthy and defeating view of him, who Jesus said “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” May he give me grace to learn how to pray
together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
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