But because of the flesh we all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. Note to those who believe otherwise, sin is not an occurrence in God but us. We are in His image and likeness.....not the other way around. It is our nature to sin and fall short not His. I can't emphasis this truth enough, God is Divine, never changing, ever. He cannot change. We can and will. He cannot be tempted, we can. He cannot sin, we will.
Clear enough?
Then let me query this......why do we believe that He somehow has our personality traits and falls under the same comparisons?
The point:
God is love, right? But God is also holiness, righteousness, judgement, and truth. Right? So which is He more? Is His Love greater than His judgement? Holiness greater than His righteousness? Again the answer is He is not in our image and likeness we are in His. And we are to be conformed to His image and likeness as we follow Jesus, decreasing so He may increase, and dying to self so He can live through us. We are being conformed to His image and likeness. So we are lower (baser) than He but He is working a work in us to change us to His image and likeness to Glorify Himself in all the work.
So what character is greater? Love, Holiness, righteousness, or judgement? None of the above is greater. In His divinity they all have the same level of importance. His Love will never override His judgement, nothing will ever change with God, only our thinking sets up a "priority scale". The Love of God was shown through the coming of Christ (His promise), to show His absolute Holiness (sin can't stand before Him), to set the bar of His righteousness (we couldn't approach His throne), and to eliminate His judgement by the blood of Christ. God is Divine without fault and with no level of participation more important than the rest of the levels.
So what is the problem?
Us + sin!
We (man) has the odd ability to take perfect Divinity and drag it down to the level we ourselves are on. We are a needy people and our greatest need is not judgement, holiness, or righteousness, it's Love. All of the woes of man can be laid to rest by Love......especially Divine love. So Love becomes the blanket to cover all our blinding to the whole message of the Gospel. Now don't get me wrong, the Gospel is God's greatest show of Love to all mankind over all time but it is not the only thing that God has revealed of His character. We focus on this because it gives us leave to ignore the rest of His Word and the warnings therein. Jesus is Love incarnate, but even He talked and warned more about Hell than He did heaven. He preached the message of Gods Love and redemption but He also warned about damnation and eternal torment, "where their worms never die and their flames never go out." So here we have Love and Damnation with damnation on a greater scale coming from He who is Love.
What does Gods Love save us from and put us in relationship with? Judgement, righteousness, and Holiness. All at once just as He has all these applications at the same time. But because His judgement, righteousness, and Holiness scares us (though it is slow (on our part) to keep us from sinning, we have to focus on the only thing that we want God to hold us accountable to and that's His Love. Many use Love (Christ) to leverage God when we continue to sin. Is there forgiveness for continued sin? Yes. But sin is easier to continue in when we say Love is greater than judgement, righteousness and Holiness. Even though Christ has settled all these issues with His blood we focus on God's Love as the only proprietary condition. We can better understand God's Love toward us if we better understood what real judgement, righteousness, and Holiness is. What we really deserve and what Jesus's blood saved us from. How He leveled the playing field between Divinity for Humanity and gave us the right to stand before and supplicate a Divine God.
So then seeing this we can "as through a glass darkly" begin to see "face to face" and gain a full appreciation of who our Father in Heaven is and why His love is so unconditional and incomprehensible. We were created in His image and likeness but now we are being conformed to His image and likeness now.
He is in the heavens and we are on the earth. He is Divine and we are carnal. He is the Redeemer of all things and we are what needs to be redeemed. Christ brings us into His presence and the Holy Spirit works in our lives to conform us to His image and likeness the way we were before sin entered in so we can walk and talk with Him as in the beginning. He is the Master Potter we are the clay of His making. We have confidence in judgement because we have Christ and His sacrifice as our mediator. Christ is both our righteousness and Holiness.
This should change our thinking on how we perceive our God and give Him His rightful place in our hearts and minds.
He doesn't have our weaknesses, He doesn't have our failures, He doesn't have our needs, He is the answer to all these human afflictions.
Maybe this will help with our present dilemma of who God is and who we are so we can worship the King in love and truth.
Love
J&E in Tn
"Be ye doers of the word and not just hearers." We need to do more than read the Scriptures, we need to live them. That's God's design for His word. You cannot live them without faith. "Without faith you cannot please God." Read, believe, live and Glorify your Father in Heaven. This blog will contain both the Scriptural insight and application in both teaching and example of "living the Word of God". May it challenge you as it does me in our daily journey.
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