It seems that almost every true thing about the Christian faith rides on a teeter-totter, a see-saw. The Bible is full of paradoxes: we are saved not by works but by grace alone, but saved people must work; we are called to hate sin, but we must love the sinner; the kingdom of God has come, but it is not yet fully here; Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father, but He lives in every true believer. Each of those pairings is true; the Bible says so.
To be truly balanced on the see-saw of God’s Word, one must
stand directly over the center with one foot on either side. Plunk down on
either the right or the left, and what was true slides down toward error. The
Word of God is our primary source of revelation about who God is and what He
desires of His people. Yet, if we are not careful, we can become so focused on
the Scripture that we forget its purpose is to increase our knowledge of God,
not to make us biblical scholars. As Sue
Schlesman said on Crosswalk, “Spiritual growth depends on the quest
for intimacy with God, not the quest for information about God.”
Strange as it may seem, too much attention to the text of
Scripture may prevent us from seeing the God Who inspired the Scripture. There
are many examples of this, some can be found in the Bible itself. Listen to the
Roman argument about God’s grace: if our sin brings God’s grace, let’s sin
more so we get more grace. That may be a correct calculation, but it directly
contradicts the message Paul was trying to teach. If we really know God and
understand His grace, we will avoid anything that offends the God of grace.
Paul makes the same argument with the Corinthians about
spiritual gifts. The church got so wrapped up in the wonder of the miraculous
gifts that they forgot
God gave gifts for the benefit of the whole church and not for the glory of
the individual. If they really knew God, they would realize that while He cares
for each person of faith, His goal for each person is that they would
strengthen Christ’s body bringing it to maturity. In God’s economy, the needs
of the individual are secondary to the needs of the church. If there is any
glory to be had, it must go to God not His people – especially not to an
individual steeped in pride.
There is another example of elevating the text and ignoring
the God who inspired it prevalent in the church today. Prosperity preachers
read the Old Testament promises of physical blessing and make two serious
interpretive errors. First, they miss the fact that God’s
purpose in blessing Abraham physically was to build a nation. In the church
age, we are no longer called to build a physical nation. We
are to build a spiritual nation, a royal priesthood in a spiritual temple: the
church. Second, they miss the fact that the New Testament reveals a God who
is more concerned with our character than our comfort. Our greatest riches are
not found in material things; they are found in knowing
God and Jesus Christ whom He sent to save us.
Christians today who are trying to make a special case for
the nation of Israel are making a similar mistake. It is true that the text of
the Old Testament does promise certain blessings to Israel forever (if they
remained faithful.) Those who truly know God see that His redemptive plan flowing
through the entire sweep of His revelation was never meant to be ethnically
centered. Yes, He singled out the nation of Israel as His training ground – His
demonstration to all nations of who He is and what He desires of His people. But
as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans, God’s favor was never toward a
blood line. God favored Abraham because he believed God – a God he knew very
well.
We get glimpses of God’s broader interest in scenes such as
Jonah’s mission to Ninevah: God cared about the innocents in a gentile
population. God allowed the Canaanite woman, Rahab, to be saved, even going as
far as including her in the lineage of the Messiah. Ruth, also in Christ’s
ancestry, was from Moab, a nation that was Israel’s enemy. Elijah brought God’s
blessing to a woman of Zarephath – a gentile. Jesus gave the good news to a
Samaritan woman, eventually wining the whole town to His cause. Paul told the
Athenian philosophers that God was working with all nations throughout all
time.
The message of the entire Bible is that God honors people of
faith. A man once proud of his strict Jewish heritage, the Apostle Paul, was
tapped by God to be sent to the Gentiles. Even Peter eventually came around and
convinced the “home church” in Jerusalem that Gentiles had equal footing with
Jews in Christ’s church. We can still pray of the peace of Jerusalem, of course,
in the same way we pray for peace in Ukraine, the Congo, and even Iran. The
most important prayer for Jerusalem – for all Jews – is that they would come to
faith in their Messiah.
I might be wrong about God’s future plans for the nation of
Israel, but I don’t see why God would give them special consideration after
they totally rejected the Messiah God sent to redeem them. If He does favor
Jews at some future time, I will acknowledge that His ways are higher than mine
even when I try to understand. Here is the point. If we love our position on
the see-saw of God’s Word more than we love the God of the Word, we have
created an idol. Many of the errors the church has fallen into over the
centuries were the result of failing to find balance.
We can generally find that balance in God’s character. He is
the all-powerful Creator, yet He knows when a sparrow falls. He is so big He
can hold the universe in His hand, yet He promises to dwell within the heart of
every believer. He loved the world so much that He gave His only Son to save
all who believe, yet the Son is coming back to judge the world for its
unbelief. He is entirely self-sufficient, yet He desires our worship. He is
inscrutable beyond imagination, yet He asks us to get to know Him. And as the
old song says, to know Him is to love Him.
And the good news is that He is not hard to get to know.
Listen to A.W. Tozer: “Always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal
Himself to us, to communicate with us! We have within us the ability to know
Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and
love and practice.”[1]
Once you begin to see God for who He is, He will reward you for what you
saw: that’s God’s see~saw.
[1]
A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with
Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers,
2015), 186.
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