God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [74]
“Your God is just too good to be true,” one person said.
“Yeah, this is a God of your own invention!” another exclaimed.
That day the religion class unanimously concluded that although I had presented a kind, loving, and forgiving Father, there was no way that such a God could exist. They said I had ignored the other half of the Father’s treatment of Christians—the angry God who needed justice.
I absorbed the comments and said nothing in response. I didn’t even direct them to the endnotes with all the verses. I guess I lacked the confidence to confront them with what I had found in Scripture. But I knew what I had presented was true, even though the religion class rejected it.
God Is Nice
That’s the irony of God without religion: when we drop all our human notions about God the Father and look to Scripture for what is actually true of him, we end up with a God who is “unbelievable” and “too good to be true” in the eyes of the religious world. Nevertheless, this is our Father—a loving, forgiving, and patient God.
“But those are all ancient ‘Bible words,’ and it’s just hard for those words to penetrate my heart to where they’re life changing,” some might think. Fair enough. So how about we try some other words?
God is friendly to me.
God is nice to me.
God is encouraging to me.
God is supportive of me.
God is already in my corner, every single time.
So do any of these help? “Well, yeah, but that’s not really what the Bible says, so how do I know it’s true?” some might say. I can appreciate your desire for accuracy, but wouldn’t you agree with 1 John 4:8 that “God is love”? And from Scripture, God’s own definition of love is this:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Cor. 13:4–8)
If God is love, then God is kind, not rude. He is also always looking to trust you and to protect you, and he never fails you. In other words, he’s in your corner every single time! Although these words may help us believe our God is good to us all the time, the reality is that there are actually no words strong enough to capture the goodness of God toward us. God’s love for us surpasses knowledge!
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, 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. (Eph. 3:17–19)
How is this kind of relentless love made possible? The Father divinely arranged for all his righteous anger and all of his justice to fall on Jesus at the cross. In the work of the Son, we see the heart of a Father who accepts us with no strings attached. His affection toward us is stronger than we can possibly imagine.
Daddy’s New Way
We all want to know the love of God. We may plead and beg to know it. We may look up into the sky, clench our fists, and scream out to God that we want to feel his love. But God’s love is experienced through Jesus. And the new covenant inaugurated in Jesus’s blood is the clearest way God has ever demonstrated his love for us:
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:8)
See how God demonstrated his love? We will have an incredibly difficult time grasping the love of God without a clear understanding of the new covenant. In fact, the new covenant is the only message the church is qualified to share today:
He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Cor. 3:6)
The new covenant is