It's quite interesting that the Bible says that: "O taste and see that the Lord is good." Ps. 34:8. It also says that "the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?" Rom 2:4. But it's quite interesting that even though the Bible says that God is good, quite a lot of people, including me, came to Christ after being "threatened" by God's wrath. We were asked to repent or face damnation if we did not turn our lives over to Christ.
Even Jesus testified about about the goodness of God. Someone walked up to Jesus and called Him good. Jesus asked why the man was calling him good and that there was none good except God! That's quite interesting. Even Jesus the sinless sacrifice acknowledged that only God was good. Then where did we get the idea that God was some angry being out for us?
I think there is a lot of truth in the statement that quite a lot of us had father's that we felt were not good or loving enough and we projected those angry and ambivalent feelings that we had toward our earthly fathers at God. For some of us who grew up in Orthodox churches, this is especially true. And the people who revealed God and Christ to us also had this same problem. Which is why we have never fully understood the topic of God's grace. We have been vaccilating between grace and the law because we just couldn't believe in a God who loved us so much and yet there was nothing we could do to earn his love. Many of us knew our father's and some of us know the things we did or tried to do in other to please our fathers. And in the end, we were always dissappointed when we came up short because we just couldn't match up to their expectation of us.
God is not like us. There is nothing we can do to win his love. He loved us even before we came to him and he will continue to love us, no matter what we do. That is a hard concept for us to grasp. In future posts, I hope to share what I have discovered about the grace of God and his love for us.
(JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO out now from WestBow Press. (http://www.westbowpress.com/). You can follow him on Twitter at @Cruz_JCReal)
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