How Do God’s Love and God’s Wrath Relate?

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D.A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL

“One evangelical cliché has it that God hates the sin but loves the sinner.

There is a small element of truth in these words: God has nothing but hate for the sin, but this cannot be said with respect to how God sees the sinner.

Nevertheless the cliché is false on the face of it, and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty psalms alone, the psalmists state that God hates the sinner, that His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible the wrath of God rests on both the sin (Rom. 1:18–23) and the sinner (1:24–32; 2:5; John 3:36).

Our problem in part is that in human experience wrath and love normally abide in mutually exclusive compartments. Love drives wrath out, or wrath drives love out. We come closest to bringing them together, perhaps, in our responses to a wayward act by one of our children, but normally we do not think that a wrathful person is loving.

But this is not the way it is with God. God’s wrath is not an implacable blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against His holiness. At the same time His love wells up amidst His perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at once. God in His perfections must be wrathful against His rebel image-bearers, for they have offended Him; God in His perfections must be loving toward His rebel image-bearers, for He is that kind of God. . . .

The reality is that the Old Testament displays the grace and love of God in experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the New Testament. Similarly, the Old Testament displays the righteous wrath of God in experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the New Testament. In other words both God’s love and God’s wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax in the Cross.

Do you wish to see God’s love? Look at the Cross.

Do you wish to see God’s wrath? Look at the Cross.”

– D.A. Carson, “God’s Love and God’s Wrath,” Bibliotheca Sacra 156 (1999): 388–390.

HT: Tony Reinke

A Thirst For Hermeneutics

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We would be horrified to hear of a surgeon who had just two weeks of training operating on someone’s brain. As important as brain surgery is, I believe the job of the Gospel preacher is far more important. Eternal souls hang in the balance, healthy and accurate. A teacher of the Bible needs rigorous training in the science of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). But that’s not just true for the preacher; everyone of us needs to know how to gain an accurate knowledge of the Word of God.

Some people think that if God wants you to know something about the Bible, He will just reveal it to you supernaturally. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of cults get started. 1 Tim 5:17 says, “Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine.” Correct interpretation requires work; sometimes, a great deal of hard work.

We are also told to “be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim. 2:15). Without diligent study, it is easy to wrongly divide the word; to believe and to teach error. The main way this takes place is because we draw illegitimate inferences from the text – when we read into the text things that are not actually said by the text, and draw out of the text things that are actually not there (known as eisegesis). Sadly, this happens all too frequently.

Though there may be many applications of a text or passage of Scripture, there is only ONE correct interpretation. In other words, it doesn’t mean one thing and the exact opposite thing at the same time. Scripture is consistent. Scripture was written down by men, but in reality, there is only one Author, God Himself. God does not contradict Himself; He is not the author of confusion. Though, at times, we may be confused about what a passage means, God is never confused, and it is precisely because the Bible has a God inspired consistency that we can study it to find out what it means.

Because Scripture has only one correct interpretation, we can learn to be consistent in our interpretation of biblical texts by following some basic rules. These include reading any text in its context, finding out the meaning of the original words and grammar, and following the basic rules of English – verbs always stay as verbs, nouns as nouns, etc,.

Let us dispense with our traditions whenever we encounter them. What matters is not what we have assumed that a text says, but what it actually says. When the plain meaning of the text says something that challenges our traditional assumptions, we have a choice. We can say “it can’t mean that because of” (and we immediately take refuge in our traditional assumptions about what Scripture says), or we can be willing to bow the knee to God and His Word. Obviously, we should do the latter. The Word of God is right, when our traditional assumptions about it are wrong.

The law in this country gives us the right to interpret the Bible anyway we want to, without fear of prosecution. Thank God that we don’t have to go to jail or be burnt at the stake if our interpretation is wrong (as in former eras). Yet we should always remember that God never gives us the right to interpret His word incorrectly.

We must allow the Word of God to sit in judgment on us, rather than for us to sit in judgment on the Word of God. When the Judge comes into the courtroom, don’t be found sitting in his chair!

You are required to believe, to preach, and to teach what the Bible says is true, not what you want the Bible to say is true. – Dr. R. C. Sproul, Chosen by God, p. 12.

The Song of Solomon (2)

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After reading my brief overview posted someone wrote to me just now with this question:

Interesting… so if Song of Songs is “not a book about Christ” why is it in the Bible? The way I understand the Old Testament and, it seems, the way Christ understood it, is that it is ALL about Christ. The book of Hebrews rather liberally applies the temple, sacrificial system, and priesthood to Christ… why not the Song?

My Response: It is a huge oversimplification to say that ALL the Old Testament is about Christ. Of course, much of it does point to Christ. Jesus was able to reveal much of this to the two who walked with Him on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:44 – “Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”

“Everything written about me” is not the same thing as saying “everything written is about me.”

There are countless things, people, places, etc, which simply are people, places and things.. and have no typological fulfillment in Christ. e.g. just at random, here’s a passage in Judges 1:33 Naphtali did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh, or the inhabitants of Beth-anath, so they lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh and of Beth-anath became subject to forced labor for them.

34 The Amorites pressed the people of Dan back into the hill country, for they did not allow them to come down to the plain. 35 The Amorites persisted in dwelling in Mount Heres, in Aijalon, and in Shaalbim, but the hand of the house of Joseph rested heavily on them, and they became subject to forced labor. 36 And the border of the Amorites ran from the ascent of Akrabbim, from Sela and upward.

Its important to stay within biblical parameters in our hermeneutics (Bible interpretation). The Amorites here are the Amorites… Mount Heres is Mount Heres… Akrabbim is Akkrabim.. etc., etc. It would be grossly incorrect to seek to force the text to make these people and places refer to “Christ” in some way.

The Song of Solomon is in the Bible because it is a wonderful God inspired love story and a reflection of God’s own love for His people. That a whole book of the Bible would be devoted to such a thing is breathtaking, and so far removed from the Greek concept that all fleshly activity of the body is sinful. (Sadly Greek thinking has had a huge influence on the Church through the centuries).

It is also true to say that the fact that an entire book of the Bible is devoted to the theme of romance, eroticism and sexual pleasure between a man and a woman in marriage shows us very clearly that God does not hate these things. He actually rejoices in them, being their Divine Author.

Think about the profound ramifications of this for a moment. He could have said to couples, “just mix substance A with substance B, put it in a pot and leave it overnight and whammo – you will have a child.” That was an option. Instead, God gave the human race sex with all that goes with it. God is certainly no killjoy, though He is quite clear regading the biblical boundaries for sexual enjoyment and pleasure, namely marriage (between a man and a woman).

The Song of Solomon also teaches us that God has a wonderful purpose for marriage in and of itself. This is a wonderful encouragement for precious couples who for some reason are not able to produce children.

The hyper-allegorical school of thought has brought much confusion and harm to the Body of Christ (and society and culture at large) through the centuries – none more so than in the arena of marriage. If properly understood (without all the allegorical trimmings) this book would have been a huge corrective in Church history when many leaders in the Church promoted the idea that all sex was sinful and that marital sex was only ever to be engaged for the purpose of procreation. The Song of Solomon clearly teaches us otherwise.

Why could these gifted leaders of the Church not see what is obvious to us?

That is a question that is actually fairly simple to answer: because they saw the Song of Solomon through the lens of the allegorical method of interpretation and therefore saw it as being ALL about Christ and His Church, rather than what it actually is, a book about romantic love.

The Hebrew people never viewed this book as an allegory of God’s love for Israel. As I pointed out before, that is why boys were not allowed to read it until they were considered adults in society. All understood what the book was truly about.

It is a rich and deep book and worthy of our study.