Our church is having a Bible study during the summer called "The Human Heart", and we are dealing with different emotions we all experience as human beings. The first one we talked about was love. And here I want to reinforce some points and expand in other.
Sometimes, people assume that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament. Some will say these gods are indeed different beings, and others see this as if God has changed.
Both the Old and New Testaments present God as eternal, immutable and self-sufficient. In the Old Testament, we have God presenting himself as the Great I AM - I AM WHO I AM. The same message is found in Revelation 1:5, when John describes God as the One who is, who was and is to come.
He is the God of the past, present and future. He never changes. He is in control of history from the beginning to the end. His being is not contingent on anything that happened, is happening, or that will ever happen.
Now, people's issues seem not to be primarily with God's eternality but with God's love. The apparent change in people's minds is that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punitive, and the God of the New Testament and Jesus are all about love and forgiveness.
Many times, to explain this apparent contradiction, people take the route of trying to prove that Jesus was angry and punishing sometimes, too. But I don't think this is where we should begin exploring this question.
The first consideration we need to make here is that Jesus's love and compassion issues stem from a life lived in perfect harmony with the law of God. Jesus said in Matthew 5:17-20 that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it, or in other words, to accomplish all the righteous requirements of the law. In the same text, he invites his disciples to be doers and teachers of the law, not as a way to attain salvation (redemption) but as a way to achieve greatness in the Kingdom of God.
Also, when asked about which is the great commandment in the law, he answered "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands." (Matthew 22:37-40)
So, we learn here that the right understanding of the law of God is that every single commandment has at its foundation love for God and love for our neighbours. So, the way to be perfect in love is to live perfectly according to the law, as Jesus does.
So, there is no conflict between the law and the God of the Old Testament and the love of Jesus. Jesus is the incarnation of the God living in accordance to the law he give human beings. Which should also helps to understand that God does not demands from us - human beings - something he doesn't do himself. We were created in his image and likeness, and his purpose for us is that we would live accordingly.
Now, understand that God created you to be a lover, and the problem with sin is not that we cease to love but that we start loving what we shouldn't (evil) or that we love things in the wrong order or intensity. God is to be loved with all our heart, soul and minds - our entire being should be primarily devoted to loving God. And then we love our neighbours in the same measure we love ourselves - in its intensity and order. But we prefer to do things our own way.
We need to start seeing love not as disobedience to random rules but seeing sin as a failure to love the right things and a failure to love the lovable things adequately. Now, when the Bible talks about us being enslaved to sin, we need to see that this is the perfect slavery because we are enslaved by our loves, so it does not feel like slavery at all. When we do what we love, we think this is freedom - for many, indeed, this is the very definition of freedom.
So, sin by messing up with our "loves" traps us in this invisible cage, and the only way out is by having our hearts transformed. That's why the focus of God's concern throughout the Bible is the heart of man. And this is God's promise to his people: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26)
And God fulfils his promise by sending then Jesus, who, in his incomparable love, pays for our failure to love on the cross. And not only he pays the price for our sin, but he transforms our hearts giving us freedom to live a life of love, a life according to His law. And that's the great salvation we need; we need to be made true lovers.
You have two options before you: to pay the price for your failure to love by facing the loving and righteous wrath of God against sin. Or seek in God to be free from your deceiving heart, and by trusting Jesus Christ's sacrifice, receive forgiveness and freedom in the form of a new heart of flesh.
Nino Marques
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