Holiness Is The Context of Wrath

There is a word used by Chambers in this entry which is at the heart of the issue he has pursued the last three days.  The word is more comfortably used to refer to our standing before the Creator and Master of all things.  But when applied to the One who defines it, it becomes terrible even more than it becomes logically necessary.  The truth is that my Master is Holy.  And this is a frightening thing when compared to my profane life inside and out.  Moses spoke with God face to face, and yet could not gaze on His glory, but had to be hidden, seeing only the trailing final tendrils of it. 

The Holiness of God obliterates the existence of all that is not as pure as it is.  That is why it is so frightening; “For no man has seen me and lives (Exodus 33:20).”  This holiness takes the “otherness” of God to the extreme that is logically necessary for One who has Created this cosmos.  There truly could not be imagined a way for us to reach through the otherness of such a One.  What I discover is that for this One to reach out to His created beings requires a concession on His part.  This concession is required to bridge the gap between the magnitude of the holiness of such vast power and such limited frail ones such as me.

To stand in the presence of God with anything that is not what He has designed is to be in contempt of the One who made me, and all creation.  The nature of my sin is that I want to be my own master and my own god (my pastor reminded me of that Thursday – Thanks Pastor Rod!).  Such a nature stands in contempt of the One who truly is Master and God of all, not just me.  How can I exist in His presence with such a nature?  If Moses could not as the friend of God, how can I?  There is no fix available that I can produce or provide that will enable me to stand in the crushing weight and furnace fire that is the Holy Presence.

The glory of my Master is something I have seen in a vision, toned down to fit into my tiny head.  To enter from a dark hallway, I had to pass through a membrane that filtered out all my impurities.  I arrived in dirty tattered clothes and Jesus gave me a new robe to wear.  Even with my new robe, the pain in passing through the membrane was enormous.  It was like I left more than half of myself behind in the dark hallway.  But after the pain I stood in the brilliant presence of my Master.  I could not see His face, only such light that would blind me as the sun, and yet I could look anyway.  That “membrane” and the One giving me the new Robe, they are the same.

The Creator and Holder of unimaginable power, even though I am profane to my very core nature, still desired that “light” He imparted to every human.  He still wanted communion with those He made but who rebelled against Him; and continue in their rebellion.  He wants me as I am a member of this vast rabble of shameful rebels.  And His desire cannot be denied, even by Himself.  He moved to make it possible for the requirements of His holiness to be met on my behalf.  The wrath is now located in the context of the holiness of my Master.  It is a characteristic of such glorious otherness.  And it is pacified only in  the work of Jesus.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 21

Wrath and Grace

The technical term is propitiation, but the sound of it suggests little of the devastating meaning it contains.  Jesus propitiated the wrath of God in His death on the cross.  The word brings with it both the terrifying wrath of the Creator and appeasement of that wrath.  I have heard people say that the God of the Old Testament is wrathful and the God of the New Testament loves.  Such a statement demeans what was accomplished by my Master on the cross.  The love of my Master is understood best when His wrath is laid alongside.

Just my sin incurred the wrath of my Master.  Sure I was born with it, but I also earned it.  It’s not reasonable to blame my Master for being penalized for the way I was made, I ensured the sin I was born in rightly applied by my own activity.  When I read that my Master died for the sin of the cosmos, I am immediately struck by an unimaginable enormity of what He took upon Himself in that act.  More than that though, it says literally that God put on Him the sin of the world, so that He was killed for that magnitude of sin.  And that is the essence of wrath; it is the high price paid to balance justice.

I remember feeling the shame for my addiction and it crushing me.  In a sense I needed to feel that, but in the sense of my guilt before my Master, not by succumbing to the crushing weight on myself.  He bore that crushing weight on Himself, and to take it back is ridiculous, and shows a lack of faith and understanding.  I was supposed to be aware of my guilt before the Creator of the cosmos, and therefore, His amazing love showed toward His human creatures through the sacrifice of my Master in our place.  In taking on more than that, I continued in my pattern of stacking more onto the wrath poured out on my Master.

Love and grace are best embraced in the face of wrath and justice.  I think sometimes I become so accustomed to the love and grace of my Master, I forget and take for granted the stark contrasting wrath and justice that makes them so glorious and powerful.  The closest I come to understanding what my Master has done on the cross is when I allow the conviction of my contribution His wrath to expand to include as much of humanity as I can imagine, and then extend that back into history and beyond.  There are realities of this life that I easily miss and so trivialize my relationship with my Master.  It’s a forest-trees thing.

The wrath of the Creator on His creation was laid on His Son, who obediently took it upon Himself.  A stunning truth which is then followed by another: the Resurrection.  It’s impossible to encompass the enormity of what Jesus did on the cross.  But when I extend that into the resurrection I find that the grace and love of my Master was not satisfied with removing the crushing weight of the wrath of God.  He also extended eternal life to that same rabble whose weight He bore.  I still can’t get there to wrap my mind around the enormity.  I can’t get my emotions to engage with it; it’s so huge I lose the sense of it permeating all life on earth (all life on earth is difficult at best to imagine all on its own).  I’m so overwhelmed I’m numb and easily fall into apathy.  I need to strain at the limits of my ability to imagine and describe this unimaginable indescribable reality in which I live.  That is my life’s work.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 19

Why Is God So Interested in Blood?

The entry for today is based out of 1 John 2:2, and it relies on a word which most people in this day do not understand.  Even reading the definition doesn’t bring home the significance of it.  The word is propitiation, and it is important because of that often overlooked part of the life with the Master of the universe, His wrath.

The Greek word is only used twice, and only in 1 John.  It is related to a word used for the “Mercy Seat” in the Hebrew Temple.  That relation is where the trail of blood is typically lost.  The Mercy Seat was where the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled to atone for the sins of the nation of Israel.  It took blood, and it had to be repeated every year. 

That practice of blood on the Mercy Seat was what Jesus overly fulfilled in His death on the cross.  In that event, the blood of a perfect sacrifice was used, God provided it, and it was not just for the nation of Israel, but for the whole world (actually for the entire created order, cosmos).  In other words, God, Creator of matter and energy, had to be appeased.  Appeasement implies a threat, and the great threat of the Universal Master is His wrath.  This is not a comfortable place for believers to hang out.

Unfortunately, not hanging out in that truth means it isn’t communicated to this world, and much of the world then falls into the wrath of God.  It’s like standing in the middle of the street hoping that if the speeding bus is ignored it won’t hit me.  Reality is quite different.  The good news is that the terror of the wrath of God is met and removed in the work of Jesus’ blood.  He Himself is the blood sacrifice that appeased the wrath on our failures to measure up, and not ours alone but also the whole created order.

This is one of those areas where I have had to wrestle with and offer up the ideas of what I want my god to be like, and accept in its place what the God of the Universe describes Himself to be.  Just because my Master has revealed Himself as the Son and the Spirit, does not take away the consistent truth that there is a Father.  But even in the descriptions of Jesus in Revelation is fairly terrifying.  He rides a white horse, and His robe is dipped in blood.  He leads an army into battle and the destruction of that war rearranges the entire created order.

I am a knight of the realm, servant to the King, and my King wields a mighty sword.  His wrath is impossible for His creatures to appease on their own, so He made the sacrifice Himself.  I serve a powerful King, a Destroyer King, but also a Creator King.  He has created the means to survive His coming destruction; but it is coming.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, October 15