The Holiness and Love of God

I will be preaching in July, officially for the first time and I have been reading up on the holiness of God. The only book I have that touches on the topic is DA Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, one of my all-time favourite book. But also one I have yet to understand completely, though this would be my third read.

Why would the doctrine of the love of God be judged difficult? Carson has several reasons:

1.When informed Christian talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture and neither side may perceive that that is the case.

2. The love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. It is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God.

3. The impact of contemporary sentimentalized versions of love causes the widespread inability to think through the fundamental questions that alone enable us to maintain a doctrine of God in biblical proportion and balance.

4. It is sometimes portrayed within Christian circles as much easier and more obvious than really is, and that is achieved by overlooking some of the distinctions the Bible itself introduces when it depicts the love of God.

Maeghan
posting from Cameron Highlands

Picture shows the view taken from our training room.