For Christmas this year my wife bought for me D.A Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. I joke that she did this because she thinks that I am too harsh and cold with people and so a book on love might lighten me up, but in all honesty this is an excellent (quick) read. In punch per pages this is probably the most theologically dense book I have read all year (maybe save Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers by John Owen). If you have $15 and 2 hours it is a wonderful investment.
As is my habit, I highlighted some of the thoughts and comments that I found most provoking in this book. One in particular that caught my mind was the following:
Our passions change our direction and priorities, domesticating our will, controlling our misery and our happiness, surprising and destroying or establishing our commitments. But God’s “passions,” like everything else in God, are displayed in conjunction with the fullness of all his other perfections. [The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, pp.60-61]
Now, I don’t know if this is what you get on the first reading, or if it is what Carson intended when he wrote it, but the first thought that enetered my head upon finishing that passage was that this flies in the face of the culturally relative theology of many moderns and postmoderns. It seems that every break with tradition these days, if not argued from a “Well, the Bible’s just wrong” angle, is argued from a “Society has changed so ipso facto God’s commands have changed.” This is common particularly among those who claim to “uphold” biblical authority.
However, if you take what Carson says at face value, or if you read the book and follow his argument to his above conclusion, it is abundantly clear that God is not swayed by our changing cultural perceptions. If what God has commanded, what he loves and what he abhors, “are displayed in conjunction with the fullness of all his other perfections,” then we must wonder how God’s perfection in one age could be his error in another? If women having authority over men or homosexual sexual activity or getting drunk or divorce were an abhorrance to God in the Bible, and at no time did he speak to abridge this, then how can we justify a change in God? What most people will say is “But God is love!,” but how can we say that in light of what’s been said?
God is not swayed by the passions of the time or the ways of the world, though in our fallenness this is where we walk (Ephesians 2.1-3). It is a further indictment of our condition, of our making God in the form of man, that we see no incongruency here. Never was it claimed that following the God of the Bible would be easy (the opposite is claimed actually, John 15.19) but it is our charge to do so in obedience and thanksgiving for the price paid for us (Hebrews 13.13). We are afraid of this, and so instead we try and change the rules, though we should know better (Deuteronomy 4.2, “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you“).
God is love (1 John 4.8), but that doesn’t mean we define ‘love’ and then put God in that little box of our own machinations. If God is controlled by love, and not love by God, then what type of god is he after all?
