Reconciling the Divine: Understanding God's Perfect Emotion | WR
"God's responses are perfect, but He has emotion. He has anger, love, grief... But His responses are perfect in those moments."
A Journey of Faith
So much of my show is now driven by my Bible readings and my heart. The time I spend in prayer has God working on me in profound ways. It's been an interesting journey.
I often plan episodes, record them, and then something doesn't feel quite right. That's why I've shifted to these more free-flowing episodes—it feels like God is leading me to share specific things.
This dynamic is entirely new to me. God has been present in my life forever, but I just didn't recognize it. It wasn't until recently that I've taken my faith seriously.
Getting baptized and reading the Bible has truly been life-changing. I never anticipated what this would do to me, and I now understand why they say the Bible is a living word and that God truly lives within it. What an incredible blessing.
Yet we as Christians often don't take time to sit with the Bible. For years, I was afraid of it—afraid to read it, afraid to engage with it. I think a lot of that came from being afraid of God Himself.
I was afraid of a relationship with Him, afraid of truly allowing Jesus into my heart and life, because I knew it would require me to change.
What I'm realizing is that many people call themselves Christians. They love the notion of being saved—saving their eternal souls. When we accept Christ as our Savior, that does away with our sins and gives us passage into heaven to stand before our Heavenly Father because of what Jesus has done. But I think many people's faith stops right there. It becomes a self-serving notion.
I've been struggling with this. I've been thinking deeply about Jesus, his life, and the Bible—this beautiful story that leads up to Jesus and then chronicles the life he lived.
In the Christian community, I see people struggling with the Old Testament—with God's anger, with the violence, and they can't seem to reconcile Jesus with the Old Testament.
This is such a profound topic. The life of Jesus is incredibly deep. Our relationship with God is so deep. It's something we reflect on for our entire lives.
God's Perfect Emotion
My wife and I often discuss these things in the evenings after putting our daughter to bed. We spend that time talking about our journey through the Bible and what God is teaching us. It's changing both of us.
Last night, something really struck me. I had been reading an article on Substack where the author expressed struggling with the violence in the Old Testament and how he's trying to read the Bible through Jesus's perspective. I think for many people, Jesus did change things when he came.
There are many moments where he pivots from how things had been handled before—the story of the adulteress being one prime example, where Jesus tells everyone, "Whoever is without sin, let them cast the first stone." No one does, because no one is without sin. It's a beautiful lesson.
We can get caught in a mode of anger and judgment, and we might use God's anger and the violence in the Old Testament to justify certain things. But when I read about God's anger, about Him being furious—all that fire He has—I understand it. God created us, and look at what we do.
My wife said something profound last night: "God's responses are perfect, but He has emotion. He has anger, love, grief. The Bible speaks of all these feelings. But His responses are perfect in those moments."
That really struck me.
Yes, God is perfect, and His emotions are the perfect response to each scenario, each person, each situation. It's beautiful. So when I read about God's fire and anger in the Bible, it feels justified. I mean, is He not supposed to respond at all?
It feels like this modern notion of "gentle parenting" where parents aren't supposed to get angry at all—as if the emotion of anger isn't allowed to be part of our human experience.
I think people's discomfort with divine anger has to do with their own struggles—their struggles with anger, with the fire within.
Our God has passion, fire, and immense love. He's the creator of the universe. We cannot fathom the depth of His feeling and emotion. I think about it every day and pray on it.
Understanding the Crucifixion
When we think about Jesus and the crucifixion, many believe God wanted a sacrifice—that He wanted blood. To me, that's not what it is at all. When I contemplate the story of Jesus and his crucifixion, I see an example of God's incredible mercy.
Because of Jesus's courage and love to overcome that moment—being crucified, mocked, brutally beaten, and murdered—his response was love: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Jesus was asking on our behalf for our Creator to forgive us. He was asking God to love us anyway, to let his life be that sacrifice. I view it not as some pagan sacrifice, but as the ultimate act of love.
God even says in the Bible that He doesn't want our sacrifices—He wants our hearts.
In this pivotal moment, Jesus gave his life with such incredible love. Being sinless and having lived a perfect life, Jesus conquered the sins of humanity—past, present, and future—because of this incredible act of love.
And God, in His love for both us and Jesus, accepted Jesus's life as repentance for humanity's sin.
These crimes had gone unpunished, and because Jesus—God's son—lived an incredible, sinless life and was being murdered by God's own creation, God accepted Jesus's plea for our forgiveness.
Because Jesus showed such love, God accepted this as payment for humanity's sins.
I don't believe God wanted blood or sacrifice. Rather, Jesus was the pinnacle of humanity, and God recognized the immense love pouring out of him in that terrible moment as he was being killed.
Jesus asked for the forgiveness of humanity, and God accepted that request. It was an incredible act of love.
Reconciling the Old and New Testaments
So this idea that the God of the Old Testament is just some violent, angry deity is preposterous to me.
How do we reconcile all this? To me, it's clear that we have been created, that God is real, and it's a calamity to deny His existence. With the level of arrogance and audacity in our world, with all our theories about why we're here and what we're doing—at some point, don't consequences happen? It seems inevitable to me.
The same righteous anger we see in the Old Testament will emerge again at some point.
When Jesus came, God sent him as the Prince of Peace, and he taught us to live in love, even to love our enemies. But loving our enemies doesn't mean agreeing with them.
This modern idea of "acceptance and tolerance" is absurd. We can love people without accepting all their ways. Jesus loved people, but he didn't just accept everyone as they were.
To the adulteress, after saving her from stoning, he said, "Go forth and sin no more." He didn't say, "Keep being who you are. You go, girl. Do whatever you want." That's nonsense.
Against Watered-Down Christianity
I'm tired of people watering down what Jesus did and who He was. Jesus was a champion who gave his life for us, and God accepted that because of how incredible Jesus is—and is, because he lives on.
I'm tired of people trying to water down the Bible and water down God because they're uncomfortable with anger and violence. The Bible teaches us about these things because we live in a fallen world—a violent world.
At one point, nature lived in harmony, the animals lived in harmony, we had peace on earth. But then we fell because we decided to buy into materiality, to listen to the deceiver rather than trust God. This is where we are now. It's not surprising that the world is in chaos; it's a fallen world.
So much of this comes down to Jesus and his incredible life, and the Bible with its incredible story arc that we're part of. God has been with us since the beginning, and it's a beautiful journey. He's still with us as we continue that story.
The Bible is incredibly powerful. Jesus is the way to heaven, but when we look at him only as a means to get there, thinking "I'm accepting him as my savior so I can save myself," that's not living true to what Jesus taught.
That's not following him. Jesus asks us to pick up our cross and follow him. That means we're going to suffer.
I think suffering as Christians is inevitable, part of our journey. The Bible is full of suffering individuals—faith-oriented, God-loving, God-serving people suffer throughout the Bible.
Not because God is making them suffer, but because we live in a fallen world. We are God's people in a world that's been taken over by a rebellious angel and his followers.
We can't be surprised by this. The Bible teaches us we will suffer, be ridiculed, be mocked. Look at what happened to Jesus, the greatest to ever live. He was perfect—God's literal son sent to us—and look what we did to him. So what will happen to the rest of us? We have to embrace this reality.
Jesus: The Loving Warrior
That's why the loving warrior spirit is so critical. Jesus was a lover who cared deeply for people, but he was also a warrior. I'm tired of people trying to whitewash that. There was no braver, more courageous spirit than Jesus himself.
Christ faced incredible challenges with incredible love, but he was a warrior. He challenged this world to its core, and he still does. People still wrestle with these things because his life was so extraordinary.
To me, it's God's incredible nuance—a beautiful, lifelong journey that we embrace. We must embrace Christ and be serious about following him. It's not just about accepting him as our savior and thinking, "I'm good now, I get into heaven."
If you want to do the bare minimum and live a self-serving life, sure, that's one way. But to me, that's not an honest, honorable way to honor Jesus.
Too many people use their Christian identity to justify all kinds of nonsense in the world, and I can't stand it.
I'm glad I'm new to all this. I'm glad I'm seeing it with fresh eyes, because I wasn't raised in the church or grew up reading the Bible. There's a clarity I have with all this, and I'm thankful.
I'm so thankful for God, for Jesus, and for the Holy Spirit, because they lead us every day of our lives.
The Bible teaches us we are blessed, but we need all three elements—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can't pick and choose. Without all three pieces, we don't function at the level God intended for us.
If we love and believe in Christ, then we owe it to him to truly follow him, to do what he calls us to do, to commit our lives to him. He is the greatest to ever live, the savior of humanity, and for him, I'm deeply grateful and forever want to show that gratitude.
A Prayer for Understanding
Let us pray that God will show His love for humanity, that the world will come to know the power, glory, and beauty of Jesus and his life, and that people will understand what it means to follow him and pick up their cross.
Let us commit our hearts to following Christ and his ways, invite him into our lives, and allow him to lead and teach us. May the Holy Spirit always guide us, so we can use this holy trinity to lead and serve in the world, being instruments of God's love and law with pure intention and wholehearted service.
I pray that God will show us the way, always be with us, and help the world come to know Him—that the world will come to know Christ, that the Holy Spirit will pour out in everyone, and that we will celebrate and honor God's glory in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I really love talking about God and hope you're enjoying it too. This journey has been life-changing, fulfilling, personal, and intimate.
Don't let anyone stand between you and God, between you and Christ, between you and the Holy Spirit.
Don't let anyone take that relationship away from you. Pray for them, call them into your heart, and it will transform your life.
About Order Within
This is a Written Reflection based on Order Within Podcast Episode 120. To listen to the full audio episode, visit Order Within Podcast.
50% of all earnings from this Substack are donated to charitable causes. Once we reach a certain threshold, all remaining earnings will go to donation.
If this content has blessed you, please consider supporting our ministry and outreach by becoming a paid subscriber.