Love's Mirror Image
Theme of the Week: Both Kind and Stern
Friday, August 29, 2008
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Key Bible Verse: "I am the Lord, I am the Lord, the merciful and gracious God. I am slow to anger and rich in unfailing love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6). Bonus Reading: Isaiah 59:15b-19
God has a temper. This isn't peevishness. It isn't gas near fire, easily combusted. It isn't [as today's Key Bible Verse attests] the hair trigger, quickly tripped. God's wrath is the emotional side of his justness. He can't abide many things—divorce, deceit, iniquity … God hates what hurts us. There's nothing he hates that we'd prefer he loved.
Not until I was grown up did my father, in an embarrassed aside, mumble, "I love you." Still, when I was 12 he did something that settled the question for me: He attacked my attacker. The neighborhood bully snatched my bike from under me as I rode past him one day. I picked myself up and tried to take my bike back. He started to pummel me; I fell beneath the sharp sting of his fists. Then I watched him, his face a tableau of terror and astonishment, rise bodily above me. My father lifted him skyward and hurled him earthward. The boy limped away yelping, never to bother me again. My heart sang—not so much because my enemy was vanquished, but because of what that event revealed: My father loved me. His wrath toward my enemy vouched for his love for me.
—Mark Buchanan in Discipleship Journal
My Response: If God hates what hurts me, that means …
Thought to Apply: The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation. —C.S. Lewis (British scholar & author)
Adapted from Discipleship Journal (3-4/07) by permission.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
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Deliver me, God, from an easy familiarity that fails to recognize Your overwhelming power and hatred of sin.
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