Wednesday with Michael Spencer
The Face of the Gracious God
As always, dedicated to Fr. Robert Capon, a light for me upon the gracious face of God.
Religion #1:
God is mean, angry and easily provoked. From day 1, we’ve all been a disappointment, and God is–justly–planning to punish us forever. At the last minute, thanks to Jesus stepping in to calm him down, he decides to be gracious.
But don’t do anything to mess that up. Peace is fragile around here.
Religion #2
God is gracious, loving, kind, generous and open-hearted. He rejoices in us as his creations, and is grieved that our sins have made us his enemies and caused so much brokenness and pain. In Jesus, he shows us what kind of God he is and restores the joy that should belong to the children of such a Father. True to his promises, he will bless all people in Jesus, and restore the world by his resurrection victory.
You can’t do anything to mess this up. God’s got his heart set on a universe wide celebration.
The New Testament puts it this way:
5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. … 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
The Gospel is the good news of a gracious God. It tells us again the story of the God who loves us, the God we have grieved and abandoned and the God who has taken our judgment and suffered it himself.
We have far too many people selling religion #1. Like the Pharisees, they are the authorized representatives of the grumpy, ticked off, hacked off, very, very angry God who MIGHT….maybe, MIGHT let you off the hook….MAYBE…..IF–and it’s a very big IF–you manage to believe enough, obey enough, get the theology questions right enough, find your way to the right church, follow the right script and get the details right, down to the last “amen.”
We have too many people who have heard that there is good news about God, and then discovered that the good news was covered in 25 pages of fine print explaining why God is actually quite miserable and its your fault. If you fulfill the conditions of the contract–See “Faith is obedience, perfect surrender and a good witness,” pages 203-298–then you have a reasonable hope of avoiding God’s end-of-the-word temper tantrum.
We have far too few Christians who are overwhelmed at the news that God has fired the bookkeepers, sent home the bean counters, dismissed the religion cops and bought party hats for the grumpy old people. The big announcement is this: In Jesus, we discover that God is just sloppy with his amazing grace and completely beyond common sense when it comes to his love. Just to enhance his reputation as the God who know how to throw a party, he’s inviting all of us back home, no tickets necessary, no dress code, for a party that will last, literally, forever. With open bar, and all on him. (Oh calm down Baptists. You can go to another room.)
In the story of the man who gave cash to his servants and said, “Invest it,” the loser had this speech to justify his failure to risk a cent: “I know what you’re like. You’re a power-hungry bully with no respect for people. You’re mean and I wasn’t going to have you blaming me that you lost a dollar. Here’s your cash.”
This wasn’t the right answer. The master had been generous. Gracious. But this fellow–trained in all the right seminaries and thoroughly read up in all the right books–blew it.
In the story of the prodigal son, neither son really knows what a soft-hearted, gracious, forgiving man they have for a dad. The younger boy treats dad like he’s already dead and doesn’t matter while he’s alive. The older son has dad signed on to a system where he logs in the required amount of being a good son and he gets a pay off.
Delightful kids. I wonder where Jesus came up with those characters? Hmmm?
Then the younger son tries his version of “get a deal with dad.” Thankfully, the Father decides to ignore the religion of these two boneheads, and throws the Gospel party, courtesy of the calf that made up the meal.
The Father will have his party. Even for the undeserving kid who doesn’t quite get it. Even for the Pharisee-wannabe who is horrified that dad’s not cooperating with the system.
God will be gracious. God will be good. God will be overflowing in love. God will be good to the world. God will bless the nations. God will put his lamb and his Spirit and his loving face at the center of a universe made over in the image of the greatest wedding bash/banquet you could ever imagine.
God will not be pointing at you and saying, “He wins!” or “They were right! Sorry!” Start dealing with the shock now folks. It’s not going to happen.
Your ticket to this event will most certainly NOT have a denominational name on it. Nor will your seat at the table be determined by your church or your theological team. The grace and goodness of God is going to erase all the lines, boxes, definitions, fences, dictionaries, sermons, announcements and pronouncements ever made. Your Biblical interpretations won’t amount to a hill of beans. God himself, and his good grace, will be the star of the show.
I don’t care how many times you tell us what God has to do, God is going to exactly what he wants to make Jesus the center of history. And all signals in the advance copies of the programs are that there is going to be one shock and surprise after another.
You may even have to sit by a Lutheran. I know….but what are you going to do about it?
What’s that you’re saying? Your dad was a Christian and he was mean and angry? So God is too, because he’s “our Father?”
No.
What’s that? Your preacher says that God is about to drop things on your car and punish you with his wrath when you make bad choices because we all have to live in the constant fear of the Lord? So God has to be like that, because your preacher is waving a Bible around when he says that?
No.
What’s that? A Christian at your small group says that God punishes us for everything we do wrong, and that God will discipline us with pain and suffering until we start living righteous lives that show we’re serious about Jesus. And God must be that way, because your friend has been a Christian a lot longer than you?
No.
It’s a sad fact that what God has revealed about himself in Jesus doesn’t exactly have a huge audience. But say that God is angry, mean and about to show us just how much with a few displays of wrath and suffering? You’ll fill a stadium.
You see, the grace of God just doesn’t fit in our box. How can God really–I mean c’mon!–how can God be gracious to (fill in the blank with Hollywood celebrities, famous politicians, loudmouth pundits, your jerky boss, that teacher who failed you unfairly, your ex-whatever, people with guns and bombs, and so on)?
God’s gracious face makes our religion fall apart. It takes away all our soapboxes. It shuts our mouths, because none of us deserve it and all of us can have it. God’s love and grace are so far beyond our ideas of what they ought to be that none of our ideas about God can survive the good news that comes in Jesus. Jesus is a salvation, grace, goodness, God revolution.
Titus 2 puts it so well: “11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people…” That’s what has appeared in Jesus. He did not come to condemn, but to save. In him, there is no condemnation. In Jesus, the Father shows his gracious face to all of us, for everything.
In Mark 3: 1-6, Jesus is in church and the religious leaders want to bust him for healing on the Sabbath. They had decided that God was the kind of mean and trivial dictator that cared more about the order of service than a human being’s suffering. So Jesus heals this man, but Mark describes something utterly unique and stunning: “5 And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.†He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.”
The image of Jesus healing in righteous anger at the religious bean counters–who were about to start the process of killing him–is for one simple reason: They sat in synagogue representing God as more interested in a stupid rule than in proclaiming and enjoying his gracious face of compassion for a hurting person.
So Jesus heals that man, put he’s pretty ticked off. If he was the God these guys believed in, he’d have turned them all into Alpacas. Which would have been pretty cool….but you get the point.
Let’s stop it. Let’s stop hiding the face of a gracious God. Let’s show it, sing it, worship in its light, live as if we know that gracious, glorious God as the one the Bible proclaims and who comes to us in Jesus.
Let’s enjoy the face of a gracious God. Now and forever.
The Internet Monk Archives 
Not even GOD WILLS IT (It’s Prophesied, It’s Prophesied)?
This is another corollary of Fundagelicanism’s Gospel of Personal Salvation and ONLY Personal Salvation. It results in a very Selfish Gospel. I’m SAVED and It’s All Gonna Burn Anyway.
And Late Great Planet Earth linked Inevitable Global Thermonuclear War (as in Launch Everything) with Revelation’s “History Written In Advance”/’It’s All Gonna Burn” (“IT’S PROPHESIED! IT’S PROPHESIED!”)
Add in the Rapture Bet (analogous to the Death Bet), where I’ll be gone before it can happen to me:
“I’ll be gone,
Yes, I’ll be gone
In the twinkling of an eye…”
And the Type 1 God of Wrath, constantly pissed off by Sin:
“FOR GOD HATES SIN WITH SUCH A PERFECT HATRED…”
— some tract (The Calvary Road?) that messed me up when in-country
“GOD’S PUNISHMENT FOR AMERICA’S SINS SITS READY AND WAITING IN THE NUCLEAR MISSILE SILOS OF THE SOVIET UNION!!!!!”
— radio preacher from that period
And (in the words of some guy IMonk banned back in 2005):
“I will be laughing as the world burns.”
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Thanks. It was a very disturbing dream for a 10 year old.
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Didn’t mean to place an interpretation on that syrup but I did without thinking. The progression from panic to resignation and finally death just followed naturally in my mind.
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Thank you CM,
I needed to be reminded.
Susan
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A hearty amen.
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Once a grifter, always a grifter.
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That sounds like one of those ‘bigger than you and your life experience’ dreams out of the collective unconscious. A dream that was placed, not stumbled upon. The sequence of sounds culminating in a death rattle was probably more than you had seen at a young age. It sounds like a big dream.
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Hahaha 🙂 perhaps you will be”just another turd-beetle” but at least you will be a golden, well-loved turd beetle (as will we all)!
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When I was a boy growing up in Washington DC during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I had a dream whose sharpness and clarity has haunted with me for nearly sixty years now. We children were shepherded out of our school, crossing an enormous concrete expanse into a large hangar-like building where an enormous metal door clanged shut behind us.
I was stationed near the door and told to report on any sounds I heard from the other side. At first there were screams and hammering on the door, later, scratching and moaning. Later still, it was an odd gurgling noise, like syrup escaping from a jug but much louder. Finally, nothing.
The door ground open, but I didn’t want to leave. I knew I was no match for whatever had survived out there.
Sorry to trigger you, but I don’t understand how any Boomer who went through the Civil Defense public service films of the Atomic Café era could possibly consider inflicting nuclear war for any reason.
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Now it’s Lori Bakker (new wife). I live not far from their ‘compound’ and have driven past the entrance. During my morning exercises their show comes on after the news. I usually catch the intro and first couple of minutes before turning it. They hawk survival stuff (and not good survival stuff either) without shame, using fear to ramp up sales. It’s all about sales – they don’t even pretend that it’s to ‘support the ministry’. They also always have on ‘prophets’ and ‘experts’ telling about how bad things are going to get (so you’ll buy more stuff from Jim) and how the president is God’s anointed, constantly under satanic attack from ‘the left’, blah, blah, blah. Apparently it’s working out well for them. They have a huge place down in the Ozark mountains southwest of Branson. And, gullible people still send him money, apparently lots of it.
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for some reason, Tammy, when she cried, was to me a beloved figure, though I don’t know why exactly, but she was
I felt bad for her when she got sick and died. I figured if someone as judgemental as myself thought she was lovable in her way, then God must think so very much more of her and have taken her home where she won’t have to cry anymore.
No, I never sent the Bakkers’ ‘ministry’ any money, but my Catholic godmother, of blessed memory, and her husband paid for a vacation place (time share?) from the Bakker’s and went to stay there for a vacation once. My innocent godmother sent money to ALL the charlatans, as she never saw the bad in anyone, and she loved Tammy too.
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LOL, oh Burro,
your last sentence reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s character in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’, Julian’s mother, who comments about ‘the others’, this:
” They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
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P.S. Many years ago, I actually knew a gamer whose “thing” was how what was happening in today’s headlines could kick off Global Thermonuclear War. He would phone me just to describe the coming chain of events leading to WW3 in great detail. This did not help my sanity. Fortunately, I have not had contact from him in years.
Being a Weirdness Magnet has its downside.
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And this morning’s headlines re Iran are triggering that PTSD (so far at a low level).
According to The Gospel According to Hal Lindsay, “God’s end-of-the-world temper tantrum” and Punishment for America’s Sins was Global Thermonuclear War. It’s why I call the corollary of that Gospel(TM) “Christians For Nuclear War”, and you still see remnants of it (like Four-Blood-Moons Hagee and moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem).
Do I need to tell anyone just how dangerous “Inevitable Global Thermonuclear War with a Rapture Escape Hatch just before anything bad personally happens to you” is?
When the prophets spoke of “That Great and TERRIBLE Day”, I don’t think they meant a Spectator Sport with catered box seats right on the 50-yard line.
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Me neither. Tammy struck me as another victim of Jim’s, a not-too-bright passive individual from a culture where a wife was supposed to “stand by her man”. (In retrospect, an ideal Widdle Wifey for someone like Jim Bakker; I wonder if he chose her because she was easy for him to control?)
But whatever, her name remains associated with Jim because of the PTL scandal.
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Tammy made a comeback? From the grave?
____________
The reality? I can’t laugh at Tammy. The world bullied the hell out of her.
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“Grace is wildly irreligious stuff. It’s more than enough to get God kicked out of the God union that the theologians have formed to keep him on his divine toes so he won’t let the riffraff off scot-free. Sensible people, of course, should only need about thirty seconds of careful thought to realize that getting off scot-free is the only way any of us is going to get off at all.”
— Robert Farrar Capon, The Romance of the Word
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THAT describes my time in-country.
With one addition ramping it up: That was The Seventies, the Age of Hal Lindsay, and “God’s end-of-the-world temper tantrum” was Any Minute Now.
Getting pulled out of that by Dungeons & Dragons probably saved my life, though the low-end PTSD is still there.
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And here’s the latest clause in those 25 pages of fine print – between Anti-Vaxx and YEC, in the person of Jim of Jim & Tammy:
https://thewayofimprovement.com/2020/01/07/jim-bakker-connects-eternal-salvation-with-the-support-of-donald-trump/
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“So Jesus heals that man, put he’s pretty ticked off. If he was the God these guys believed in, he’d have turned them all into Alpacas. Which would have been pretty cool….but you get the point.”
If He *was* the God they believed in, He would have backed them up in their nitpickery. But He wasn’t. He was the God who Is, not the God they imagined. And they chose their image over the reality. Which is scary.
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Thirty plus years in religion #1 (SBC). This statement is quite fitting, and how I lived my life all those years:
“We have too many people who have heard that there is good news about God, and then discovered that the good news was covered in 25 pages of fine print explaining why God is actually quite miserable and its your fault. If you fulfill the conditions of the contract–See “Faith is obedience, perfect surrender and a good witness,” pages 203-298–then you have a reasonable hope of avoiding God’s end-of-the-word temper tantrum.”
it is as a former pastor used to say ‘God gives you a mulligan’. In that religion, he was right. You get one free do-over then it’s the fine print. And it turned me into a Pharisee as well.
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For the past six months, the idea has been growing in me that forgiveness, deep forgiveness, on my part will be necessary to enjoy Paradise. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilan Omar will be there. Mike Pompeo and Betsy DeVos will be there. Nadia Bolz-Weber and John MacArthur will be there. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Steve Bannon will be there. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ismail Haniyeh will be there. Qasem Soleimani and Donald Trump will be there. Slaves and slaveholders will be there. Inmates and jailers will be there.
I’ll be just another turd-beetle there, but I’ll literally be damned if I allow their company to contaminate my enjoyment of God in Christ.
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