6/21/19 Victor (see conversation HERE)
Should we relate to God as our heavenly Judge or our
heavenly Father? After all, is He not
both? How should that play out in our
day to day relationship with God?
A passing cyclist at the park, Victor, kindly stopped on his
way home from work and agreed to have a conversation about his religious
beliefs. He told how, after growing up
Catholic, he began to visit a protestant church and was very encouraged by all
the ways the Bible related to his everyday life and problems, until he began to
realize that it also made him feel guilty for his sins. He stopped attending church at that point,
and really hasn’t looked back.
I think maybe at first he was encouraged by the possibility
of relating to God as his heavenly Father, until he also realized God is also
our Judge. What to do? As far as I could tell, he decided to
distance himself from both.
As I see it, the problem comes when we view our relationship
with God as something to be evaluated at a final judgement – a “court date” if
you will – with our conduct in this life all leading up to that one big moment
when our eternal future will be determined.
With that court date hanging over our heads, it would be pretty hard to
relate to God as our heavenly Father.
Yet Jesus teaches us to do just that. Just after teaching his followers to pray to
their “Father in Heaven”, he said “Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a
fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a
scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to
those who ask him!” (Luke 11)
Jesus taught about the love of the Father, but he also went
on to teach about what it means to have a healthy fear of God: “I will show you
whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has
authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12)
So how can we have a right relationship with God that
includes both the fear of our Judge and the love of our Father? The answer, I believe, is to “settle out of
court”. Instead of waiting in fear for
our formal trial where all eternity hangs in the balance, in Christ we are
given the opportunity to informally settle out of court here and now, to enter
into peace with God long before that fateful Day.
Paul, writing to the believers in Rome, describes it like
this: “Therefore, since we have been
justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now
stand.” (Romans 5)
This “grace in which we now stand” Paul wrote of is the
Amazing Grace that the song speaks of, the grace and peace with God which we
can walk in and live the rest of our lives in once we have “settled out of
court” with our heavenly Judge. This is
the same grace that turns our Judge into our heavenly Father, who will kindly “give
the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
And it is by His Spirit that we can live a life in which the fear of the
Judge is cast out by the love of the Father, because, as we read in 1 John 4, “…perfect
love drives out fear.”
So my prayer for Victor and others like him is that he can
enter into that peace with God that Jesus makes possible, and live a life
filled with the love for the Father that God intends to replace the fear of the
Judge.
Thanks, Victor, for allowing me to record our
conversation! It’s HERE at
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