In this lesson, we will discuss God as a balanced being. You must remember that although God is loving, merciful, and faithful, at the same time the Bible reveals Him as just, holy, and righteous.
Many Christians today have a lopsided view of God. Some overemphasize His love and forget that He is just and holy at the same time. Now, it is the love of God that allows God to forgive sin and to show mercy to a repentant sinner, but it is the holiness and justice of God that demands that sin must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death.” We read that every transgression in the Old Testament received a “just recompense of reward.”
We must get a balanced view of God. The emotions that show up in man are small, depraved counterfeits, or counterparts, of the original nature that is perfect and holy and righteous. The liberal and the atheist, of course, have trouble with this because they figure this way (figuring from the depths of their depraved natures): “Well, surely God is better than man, so if man hates, God wouldn’t hold a grudge against anybody. God can’t hate anybody.” They figure, “Well, if man can forgive an enemy, then certainly, God can forgive a man anything.” This, of course, is a perverted view of the majesty of God. Every attribute of man is magnified a thousand times in the Lord. God, to be a balanced God, has to have a balanced nature; God Almighty has to be a perfect being. His jealousy has to be perfect. His love has to be perfect. His righteousness has to be perfect. If God were a human being, He would be completely frustrated. God is not like a human being. God is God and His holiness is perfect. His righteousness is perfect. His justice is perfect.
God Is Holy
All right, first of all, God is holy. You can’t imagine a God who can be anything but perfect and holy. If He is not perfectly holy, then He’s not God. To be holy, of course, means to be free from all defilement—to be pure. God is absolutely pure. The Bible says in 1 John 1:5, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Habakkuk 1:13 says, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.” In Exodus 15:11, we read, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord...glorious in holiness.” In 1 Samuel 2:2, “There is none holy as the Lord: for there is none beside thee.” In Isaiah 6:3, the seraphims are crying, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts.” Simon Peter says in 1 Peter 1:16, “Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.” This holiness of God separates Him from man.
“Ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ,” Ephesians 2:13. The only way that man can approach a holy God is through shedding of blood, for “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” and God is life, and God gave life to man. There is not a heathen in the darkest parts of Africa or Asia who doesn’t know that “without shedding of blood is no remission” of sins (Heb. 9:22). You have to go to college to unlearn that basic, universal truth. God is holy in the Bible. The God of the Bible hates sin. His holy wrath will punish sin. And this explains Isaiah 53:10 where the Bible says, “Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him,” (Jesus Christ). Isaiah 53:5 says, “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” God is holy. The God of the Bible is not the god of Buddhism and Hinduism. The God of the Bible is holy and does not tolerate sin. The God of the Bible does not call evil “good” and good “evil.” The God of the Bible never speaks about “values clarification” and “relative situation ethics.” That is the work of the Christ-rejecting, hell-bound, fallen, Adamic nature as it seeks to set up its own standards to replace God’s standards because God’s standards are too high. God is holy. You say, “Well, how in the world can I become holy like God?” You can not apart from a sinless Saviour who died in your place. (Like they say out in the world, “No way, man, no way.”)
God Is Love
All right, secondly, God is love. We read in 1 John 4:8, “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” This is not only a verb that says God loves, but it is also a noun—“for God is love.” If God lives in a person’s heart by conversion, then they must love Him, for He is indwelt by love. John said in 1 John 4:7, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God.”
Love is a desire for, and a delight in, the welfare of the one on whom the love is bestowed. Love is giving. True love is even love for your enemy—Matthew 5:46, “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?” A hippie who loves the hippie, groupie, moonie and the communees and the communists, and hates “the establishment” is a rascal. Christ said, “Love your enemies...pray for them which despitefully use you,” Matthew 5:44, “bless, and curse not,” Romans 12:14. If all you can love are the folks that are in agreement with you, you “ain’t worth shooting.”
The love of God is manifested toward the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and believers in particular. The Bible says of the unbeliever in John 3:36, “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” The Bible says about the religious man, that is counting on his religion and his sacraments to save him, that he is alone in the world, “dead in trespasses and sins,” without hope, “without God,” and that he is by nature, by birth, a child of wrath, read Ephesians 2.
The Bible says in John 16:27, “For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” “For God so loved the world” (past tense) “that he gave his only begotten Son” (past tense). This caused God to work out a plan of salvation to give men an opportunity to escape wrath and damnation. God is a loving Father and manifests His love to the Christian by chastening. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth,” Hebrews 12:6. Then love, in the Bible, is defined as giving. “For God so loved the world, that he gave....” It is very possible for you to give without loving, but, you cannot love without giving. In every love affair on the face of this earth, there is an element of selfishness on the part of one or both parties. You haven’t got one love affair on the face of this earth where somebody isn’t trying to get something for themselves. And this means simply this: If you’ve missed the love of the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour, you have missed the greatest love on the face of this earth. Christ loved you enough to die for your sins, and you have no other friend who would love you like that.
God Is Faithful
“God is faithful.” “God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord,” 1 Corinthians 1:9. Deuteronomy 7:9 says, “Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God.” This word “faithful” means somebody who can be safely trusted, who is reliable and dependable. God is faithful, for He is honest and never changes. His “faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds,” says Psalm 36:5. “All his works are done in truth,” David says in Psalm 33:4. God’s faithfulness is manifested in His keeping of His promises and in His fulfilling every word that He has spoken. God is unchangeable, for as Balaam said back in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” Yes, He will. God will keep every promise to protect, assist, and guide His child in need.
Some of the greatest promises in the word of God, held out to the believer, are so great that they are called “exceeding great and precious promises” by Simon Peter in 2 Peter 1:4. I will only quote a few of them, but you can see, by the checkbook that the Lord has given you to fill out, that a believer in Jesus Christ who has been born again has access to riches to which no unsaved man has access, no matter how high he is in his religiosity.
Check Number One—“But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus,” Philippians 4:19.
Check Number Two—“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,” Philippians 4:13.
Check Number Three—“He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ,” Philippians 1:6.
Check Number Four—The Lord is faithful, “So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me,” Hebrews 13:6.
Check Number Five—“And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work,” 2 Corinthians 9:8.
Check Number Six—“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8:38–39.
And finally, Check Number Seven—“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” Romans 8:28. “If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself,” 2 Timothy 2:13. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:13, “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”
God Is Merciful
Moses says in Deuteronomy 4:31, “(For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee.” A little bit later He did put Israel aside, but notice the statement is that He “will not forsake thee” in the sense of if you are willing to go by what He said, then He will keep His promise to you and will not forsake you and will show mercy. Notice that instead of inflicting pain and death every time as a punishment for sin, the Lord is merciful and spares the sinner and gives the sinner many blessings, health, comforts and earthly joys; these are given to both saved and lost.
And yet, in all His sparing and all His mercy, the Lord says in Proverbs 29:1, “He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.” Throughout all, God’s mercy is the constant warning that although God will put up with some things temporarily and be merciful to you, He won’t put up with it forever. His mercy “endures forever” in the sense that God keeps His word and God will spare the saved sinner, but His mercy ceases in hell, unless you can call a lake of fire a mercy for people who have rejected Jesus Christ.
God is sovereign and can choose to whom He desires to show His mercy. Romans 9:15 says, “For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” The mercy of God can be shown to the multitudes. Exodus 20:6 says, “And shewing mercy unto thousands of them [then here is His condition] that love me, and keep my commandments.” In this day and age, God has chosen to show His mercy to people who come to Jesus Christ and trust Him as their salvation. He may allow His mercy to extend generally to an unsaved man, but His mercy in eternity (eternal mercy, eternal heaven, eternal life, and eternal joy) only comes to the man who does what God told him to do. And what God told you to do is to quit trusting your own righteousness and trust His righteousness.
If your god only has one side to him—love and mercy—you haven’t got the God of the Bible. You have not got a holy god. You’ve got a pervert. Do you know why? Because if all he has is love and mercy, he has to love fornication, adultery, perversion, deviation, bestiality, blackmail, embezzlement, lying, killing, swearing, cheating, and extortion. He has to love them with the same degree that he loves honesty, purity, decency, courage and righteousness. There is that great, big, synthesized, integrated, passive, relative god. There he is. He’s a freak. That is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is not the God Who reveals Himself in the word of God. That is some other god. That is some other gospel. That has nothing to do with the revelation of God concerning Himself. That is a lost sinner trying to fashion God after the image in which man would like to create Him, so that God won’t interfere with his devilment.
Again, Psalm 32:10, “He that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.” Then we learn something. We learn that even an unsaved, Christ-rejecting, hell-bound sinner can experience the mercy of God in this life. God’s mercy is one of His communicable attributes which He can communicate to man. However, when it comes to eternal mercy (the mercy of the Lord from everlasting to everlasting), this only occurs at Calvary in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ who is “God...manifest in the flesh.” God is determined to show everlasting mercy upon the sinner who trusts His Son and receives His Son. When the penitent sinner comes to Jesus for forgiveness, he claims no merit, but he throws himself upon the mercy of the Lord. When the unsaved man comes to God for salvation, he doesn’t come for justice. He comes for mercy.
God is merciful. There is not a case where a man ever came to God in fear, trusting God’s righteousness and God’s goodness, that God ever turned a man down. And the Lord Jesus Christ held out his open invitation to sinners in John 6:37, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” For two thousand years, the Lord Jesus Christ has been standing at the crossroads of eternity inviting men to come to Him. He says in Matthew 11:28–30, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” He said to a certain group of self-righteous religious people, “And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life,” John 5:40. The last invitation in the Bible before the prayer for the Second Coming of Christ says, “the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely,” Revelation 22:17. God is merciful.
God Is Just
God is just. Moses said in Deuteronomy 32:4, “God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.” David said in Psalm 19:9, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” The God of the universe is just and righteous and will mete out just judgment to each individual. Abraham said in Genesis 18:25, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” He certainly will. If you want justice, you will get it. If you want God to square accounts with you and give you what you have coming to you, I’ll guarantee you He will do it. That Bible says that in the day of judgment “He shall reward every man according to his works” (Matt. 16:27). And He said in Romans 2:1, 5, 6, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things...But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; Who will render to every man according to his deeds.” Solomon said, “For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil,” Ecclesiastes 12:14. God will bring you into judgment—“whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”
God is just. He will make no mistakes. Isaiah 45:21, “there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour.” God, being just, righteous, and holy, must act in a manner that is just, righteous, upright, and holy; and He will. If your sins deserve hell, the Lord knows it. If pitting your puny self-righteousness against the righteousness of God is a crime worse than adultery or murder, I’ll tell you somebody who knows it, if your pastor doesn’t know it. God does! If your standing up and shaking your fist in the face of God Almighty and bragging about your Golden Rule and your Ten Commandments, while you were trying to prove that your righteousness was as good as the righteousness of Jesus Christ, so that you wouldn’t have to trust him merits a lake of fire, don’t worry, you will make it. First Samuel 2:3 says, “the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.” God’s nature of character leads Him to do that which is right at all times, and God, as the Just One, will be the final Judge of all things. Notice 1 Kings 8:32, “Then hear thou in heaven, and do, and judge thy servants, condemning the wicked, to bring his way upon his head; and justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness.” Notice also Revelation 20:12–15, “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
Conclusion
So we learn from our lesson on God as a balanced being that God is holy, God is love, God is faithful, God is merciful, God is just, and that “our God is a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24 and Heb. 12:29). How can God be loving and still demand holiness at the same time? How can He be merciful and at the same time take care of the guilty sinner? The answer can only be found at Calvary. It can not be found in any system of works on the face of this earth. The answer to the problem can only be found at Calvary. At Golgotha, we find expressed both the wrath of God against sin and the mercy of God toward the guilty sinner. So in speaking of God’s attributes, we learn several things at Calvary. We learn first of all that God loves sinners and wants to save them. We also learn that God desires to justify sinners, knowing that they cannot justify themselves. We learn that God wants to demonstrate toward sinners His absolute, perfect righteousness so that they can see what He requires. We learn that God Himself is willing to take man’s suffering, pain, temptation, sorrow, and sickness in Himself and bear the punishment of the guilty, although He, God Himself, is not guilty.
The Bible says in Romans 3:22–23, “There is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” And when it comes to sin, there is no more difference between a doctor and a lawyer than there is between a junkie, a pimp, a prostitute, and a bum. I know that some of you people who were deceived into thinking that your education and your money made you respectable don’t like that, but who cares what you like anyway? I mean, after all, when faced with the absolute truth of the word of God, to what does your opinion amount? Less than nothing. The Bible says that “there is no difference.” Now, if it says that, it means that. The fact that you think you are different because of your education, your money, your social image, or your religious standing is no concern of mine and the Lord is not going to regard it one way or another. The Bible says in Romans 2:11, “For there is no respect of persons with God.”
Calvary is common ground. It is ground which levels all men to sinners, and even includes God’s Son as a sinner. You read in your Bible in Isaiah 53:12 that Jesus Christ “was numbered with the transgressors.” When He came to the ministry of John the Baptist where sinners were being immersed and John tried to stop Him, Jesus said, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15). He took His place as a sinner in His baptism. He took His place as a sinner on Calvary. And God bless your soul, doctor, reverend, rabbi, father, lawyer (or whatever you call yourself), you will take your place there; or in eternity you will see the other side of God’s face, the side you didn’t believe was there. God is love, but not that kind of sentimental love that gushes over sin. The love of God is holy and just. God hates sin and God will not tolerate it. If you don’t believe it, just keep on like you are going, and you will find out.
Source: Theological Studies Vol I - God as a Balanced Being by Dr. Peter S. Ruckman
How to go to Heaven? Find out in the short video below
GOD's Simple Plan of Salvation
If you were to die today for any reason, are you 100% sure you will go to heaven?
This video explains the SIMPLE TRUTH according to the Scriptures. The only way to go to heaven is by:
(1) Admitting that you are a sinner
(2) Believing on the Lord Jesus Christ as your own personal Savior and Lord
(3) Repenting (meaning you are willing to turn away from your sins) of your sins then confessing your sins to God
Jesus Christ willingly sacrificed Himself and shed His precious blood on the cross as a substitute for you, so that you don't have to burn in hell for all eternity because of your sins, and have eternal life in heaven instead.
Watch the video to learn what Scripture says of God's great plan of salvation for you and how to receive His free gift. This is wonderful news. We pray you surrender to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and to know 100% for sure you will go to heaven when you die!
If you want to attend our local Church please see our address, phone numbers and social media below
Bible Believers Baptist Church International
2F Lakeview Manors Arcade, 11 Bagong Calzada St., Taguig City, 1634 Metro Manila
Globe: 09171926870 / Smart: 09201205400
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KJBTV
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KJBTV1611
“And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” (Luke 4:4)
Comments