Here is the extract.
The current popular view in Western culture [CBK: In North America.] is G-O-D. If you have that, then you’ve got the distant God who needs to be appeased, which sounds like the Old Testament Baal or anybody else. JMF: Or the volcano.
WPY: Or the volcano god or whoever that has to be appeased, and so he is going to have this sense of separation.
When you deal with wrath, is that God acting in retribution? But if you put wrath inside of this relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, does God do anything that is not motivated by love? Anything? The answer is no, because love is the nature of God’s being. Love, light, spirit. Everything God does is motivated by love, which would include wrath. Now you have the wrath of God couched in an absolutely different framework.
I have a friend whose oldest son was a methamphetamine addict. My friend would have died for him. In loving his son, if he had the power, he’d have gone after every piece of that addiction that was damaging, hurting and keeping his son from being free, keeping his son from experiencing life, keeping his son from being authentic. If you were a father, you would go after that. You would want to be this fire that would burn out every piece of that. I believe that that is the fire of God’s love, that wrath is an expression of love, not this retribution, this distant volcano god that requires certain sacrifices in order to be appeased.
CBK: This is a quote from George MacDonald again – it figures into the basic perspective Paul and I are talking about. He says “Therefore [given who God really is, and the character of God as Father, Son and Spirit and their love for us, therefore, because that’s who they are], all that is not beautiful in the beloved [that’s us – we are the beloved], all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.”
That destruction is not the destruction of our being – it’s the destruction of the darkness in which we’re participating in, and it’s not fun. It’s not fun now, and it’s not fun for however long it has to happen. All that is not of love, all that is not of love’s kind, all that comes between us (that is, the Father’s heart in us) has to be removed. That to me is what judgment is. It’s redemptive.
WPY: If you know God loves you…. If I know that, I will run and say, “Please, do what you need to do to get the crap out of me. Because I don’t want it. I don’t want how I hurt people because of it. I don’t want what it does to me. I don’t like what it does to this world. So please, do what you need to do, because I want to be free. I want to be whole.” I’m saying, “Come on.”
CBK: The Lord will never be satisfied with anything less than that from us. He’s not satisfied by legal satisfaction of some law. He is satisfied by having us full participants because we are sons and daughters of God. We must become that in our experience, and that’s what he’s talking about.
JMF: It’s something like going to the physician for cancer, isn’t it, a little bit? Let’s pretend you’re going to the best cancer physician in the world. You want to get rid of the cancer. You want to be free of it.
CBK: Because you know it’s going to kill you, and you’re not going to get to participate in life anymore if this is not excised and discerned – the fundamental meaning of judgment is to discern, to see into, to divide.
JMF: The process may be difficult.
WPY: It can be hell.
JMF: But it’s better than the end product. Of course, it’s a physical analogy.
John
NZ
