By Colleen Tinker
It happened. The dreaded card arrived in our mailbox: I was to report for jury duty at the Superior Court in San Bernardino, California, on April 16 at 8:00 AM. Dread—OK, a little resentment, too, if I’m honest—shadowed the morning. It did seem unfair that this was the second time in as many years that I had to appear in court when others close to me haven’t had to go in over a decade! I did not wish this service to be placed on them, but I did feel sorry for myself.
While I waited in the Jury Room to be assigned to a jury pool and given further orders, I privately admitted that I did love having a few hours to read without interruption. I pulled The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D. A. Carson out of my purse.
Carson did not disappoint.
The first chapter of this slim book is entitled “On Distorting the Love of God”, and Carson addresses the fact that today, especially in the western world, most people say that God is loving. Of course, the term is not generally defined, and people who say God is loving often do not define who God is, either.
In fact, today many people who define “God” as being “loving” do not refer to the biblical God at all; rather, they perceive a naturalistic, wise, benevolent “intelligence” as God. Many imagine a pantheistic presence, or even a vaguely super-human being who is tolerant, nonjudgmental, accepting, and affirming without demands.
Carson describes our modern misconceptions of God this way: “We live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if 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—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.”
In other words, he said, “Today most people seem to have little difficulty believing in the love of God; they have far more difficulty believing in the justice of God, the wrath of God, and the non-contradictory truthfulness of an omniscient God.”
Adventism unmasked
There it was. Carson’s description of the “sentimental, syncretistic, and often pluralistic” ideas about God’s love today includes the core of Adventism’s God. As an Adventist, I was taught that the God Christianity has known for centuries is a false god. The reasoning would go something like this: “The God I serve would never torture people for eternity in hell, nor would he taunt anyone by allowing their dead relatives to be conscious in heaven where they could watch their loved ones sin. Only a cruel God would treat His children that way!” (Of course, the assumption that the dead have any access to or knowledge of earth is unfounded!)
Underlying this refusal to believe what Jesus Himself taught about hell, death, and eternal life, is Adventism’s belief that God does not actually have “wrath”. For example, I heard a radio broadcast of the La Sierra Adventist Church one Saturday shortly after Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion Of the Christ was released in 2004. The senior pastor mentioned in his sermon that he and four other Adventist pastor friends had gone together to see the movie and had discussed it afterwards. The La Sierra pastor said that they had all agreed the movie was good, but there was one glaring error: Jesus did not receive nor experience the wrath of God, because God does not have wrath.
The Adventist pastors’ analysis reflects true Adventism. God, they argue, is a good God. He would never sentence someone to eternal punishment. He would never ordain a tragedy to befall anyone—tragedies and disasters are acts of Satan which their “good God” must allow in order to honor Satan’s free will. Death and suffering come from Satan, and they are the result of mankind’s refusal to keep the law.
Jesus’s death, furthermore, was primarily the demonstration of man’s cruelty to man, and Jesus willingly went to the cross in order to reveal that true love will tolerate suffering and violence without fighting back. In other words, Jesus’ suffering and death were revelations of how loving and forgiving God is.
Jesus, Adventism emphasizes, came to reveal the Father, and that revelation was of a good deity who loved sinners so much He took their cruelty and showed us how to be tolerant and forgiving in the face of injustice.
God is love, they say, and He forgives us because Jesus died to uphold the law without complaint and to make it possible for us to please God just like Jesus did.
Reality
The fact is, Adventist’s God doesn’t reflect the God revealed in Scripture. As Carson alluded in the quote above, the God of Scripture demonstrates the attributes of sovereignty, holiness, wrath, providence, and personhood, and His love cannot be separated from nor described apart from those attributes.
When Adventists insist that God is love, they do not embrace what that love looks like packaged in a sovereign, holy Being who expresses wrath toward sin and even toward unrepentant sinners, who is sovereign over life and death and who absolutely is responsible for all of creation and the things that happen in it—who is sovereign even over evil.
Furthermore, Carson points out, the Bible speaks about God’s love in different ways. He identifies five on pages 16–19:
- The peculiar love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father (Jn. 5:20).
- God’s providential love over all that He has made (Gen. 1, Mt. 6).
- God’s salvific stance toward His fallen world (Jn. 3:16, 1 Jn. 2:2).
- God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward His elect (Deut. 7:77–8, Mal. 1:2–3, Eph. 5:25).
- God’s love is sometimes said to be directed toward His own people in a provisional or conditional way—conditioned, that is on obedience (Jude 21, Jn. 15:9–10).
Because the Bible repeatedly describes God’s care and love toward the world and toward His people in various ways, we have to accept that all of these things are true about Him and His love. In fact, they are all true all the time, not sequentially or randomly.
In other words, God’s love cannot be simplified to be sentimental or stripped of its power or might. In fact, if people like one aspect of God’s love more than the others, they misrepresent Him, and they actually create a mental “graven image”. They begin to worship a false god defined by a heresy—a partial truth that doesn’t admit the full reality God has revealed.
Adventism’s God is just this sort of god—one who is stripped of God’s utter sovereignty, power, authority, wrath, compassion, and foreknowledge.
In the Jury Room
Sitting in my faux leather seat in a room with at least 300 chairs facing ceiling-mounted video screens announcing our fates for the day, I became convicted. I had arrived resentful, upset that I was losing a day of work, but as I read Carson’s book, I realized I was reacting as if my Lord was not in control of circumstances.
Hebrews 12:5 described my attitude: “and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him’.”
My driving to the courthouse to sit in that jury room seemed opposed to everything God had given me to do: writing, editing, even cleaning the kitchen. Yet Hebrews reminded me that I could fairly say my having to sit there, unable to do what I wanted to do, was the Lord’s discipline, or teaching, and I was not to be overwhelmed by what this setback to my time might mean. I was to trust Him to redeem what seemed intrusive.
Hebrews 12:6, in fact, drives home this point: “For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.”
I am not trying to equate my jury service to scourging discipline, but it was a significant intrusion into my time. Pondering Hebrews and reading Carson’s explanation of how skewed our worship and beliefs become when we ignore the complexity of God’s love, I began to realize I was ignoring something true: my assignment to jury duty today was permitted by God. It was not a surprise to Him.
Moreover, I realized I had to thank Him for this morning. Because I had been prevented from carrying on my normal life, I actually received a great gift: time to read without interruption, as ironic as that is!
At 10:15 AM, the news came: my jury pool was dismissed. The case to which we would have been assigned had settled without a trial. We were free to go; we had fulfilled our jury duty!
I was home well before noon, and I still had time to work and to reflect as I wrote. God has released me from the inside-out great controversy worldview, but He hasn’t settled just for taking me out of bondage. He continues to discipline me and to confront me with Himself. He continues to press His word home to me and to teach me that He is far bigger, far more powerful, far more complex than my sinful flesh can comprehend. I must trust Him.
God is sovereign over my life, and even when I grumble and resist, He neither punishes me nor gives in. He teaches me that I am His true daughter, an eternal heir of all that is mine in Christ. He redeems the things I dread—not always quickly nor even completely—but He reminds me that He is sustaining me for His glory, and He blesses me.
In fact, I’m thankful for this morning’s jury room assignment. I’m thankful for Hebrews; I’m thankful for the Lord’s faithfulness, and I’m thankful that I still have half of Carson’s wonderful book to enjoy! †
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