daily java

Daily Java:

Our God approaches and he is not silent.
Fire devours everything in his way, and a great storm rages around him. (Psalm 50:2)

It is not always a good idea to go to the Psalms for your theology. They are poetry and as such take a lot of poetical license.

However, there are some pictures of God in the psalms that are very interesting.

Someone was telling me that God was a God of love. He would never do anything to harm and that he was a nice God. He was considerate and always kind. The one ho told me this did not know the God of the Universe.

God is a God of love, yes. And he is kind and compassionate. But he is not always nice, at least not as we count niceness. God is a God of power. And he is not afraid or slow to use it. He never has been and he never will be.

Hebrews tells us that God is a devouring fire (Hebrews 12:29). He is not a God who visits, who lives in us, who is very important in our lives. He is a God who overwhelms us. He consumes us. He fills us. He devours us.

If he does not do these things in our lives, the word says that he is not really part of us.

What people want is a nice old man who is extremely generous but otherwise just kind of leaves us along. Santa Claus as it were. Maybe one of the Greek gods on Mt Olympus that watches us and kind of takes care of us. If we need help, they will come and do good things for us. We can direct what they do and thank them for it.

But God is not like that. He is the One who made the universe appear at his command. He is the One who can change a personality radically. He is the One that can make light out of darkness.

And he is not a God to play around with. He makes it plain that he is holy, he is good, he is powerful. You can accept it or not accept it, but you cannot play with him. He is too other.
 Even though he made us in his image, he is not like we are. Even though we share many of the same attributes, we are not alike. He is eternal, he is infinite, he is never changing, he is holy to a degree that we cannot imagine.

This is a picture of God that many do not care for. It is too extreme for them. They like the idea of a god that they can manage, that they can handle, that they can manipulate for their own ends.

And they have one. it may be called America, or earth worship or veganism or civil rights or any other thing. But the God of the Universe, the Lord Almighty is none of these things. He is a God who is above these. He calls you to a better country, heaven. He gave us the earth he had created but he told us to use it.

He told us to be fair to each other but he also never condemned slavery or riches. He said in 1 Corinthians that if you can move from slavery, to do so. But otherwise just accept it. He told us riches were hard on people and that he loved the poor, but he told us to move from where we are if we can. He never condoned life-long poverty or exalting poor people as better.

He proclaimed sharing, but never socialism. He proclaimed love but never tolerance of sin. He proclaimed peace but was never anti-war.

He has never been who we have made him. Instead he is the dominant controlling force in our lives or he is not. He rules or he doesn’t. He never took middle grounds.

He consumes and devours. He is God.