The Ways of GodVoorbeeld

God’s Ways Are Biblical

To know what God is like, there is only one authoritative place to look: the Bible. We live in an age where opinions are prized and feelings are supreme. But our reasoning and emotions do not dictate what God is like. God is God. God has provided everything we need to know about Him and His ways in one repository: the Bible.

The Bible tells us everything we need to know to properly relate to God. It tells us that God never changes, and the way God related to people as revealed in the Bible is the same way He will relate to you.

A fundamental characteristic of God is love (1 John 4:16). Because God’s nature is love, He will not act any other way but lovingly toward people. It would contradict His character to do so. God is not loving and gracious in the New Testament but holy and wrathful in the Old Testament. God’s love and wrath are two sides of the same coin. He is equally loving (and holy) on every page of the Bible.

In one of the most intimate and glorious personal revelations of God in Scripture, He disclosed that His nature is compassionate and gracious, abounding in faithful love. Exodus 33:18 tells us that Moses asked to see God’s glory. God told Moses he could not look upon His glory and live. Nevertheless, God agreed to pass by in physical form while He protected Moses in the cleft of a rock. Here God’s loving-kindness is expressed, not in the New Testament but in the heart of the Old Testament books of the Law.

Some argue that in the Old Testament, God loved His chosen people, such as Abraham, Moses, David, and the Israelites, but expressed wrath toward others, such as the Canaanites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. God expects all people to worship and obey Him, and He expresses wrath on those who reject him. However, Scripture provides numerous examples where God demonstrated His love toward those who were not His followers.

In New Testament times, God continued to express His love for all people, and throughout the New Testament, God’s love is continually highlighted.

God’s love serves as an example to demonstrate that the Bible reveals God as loving both in the Old and New Testaments. Now you might ask, “But if God is loving, why does He command Joshua to kill Achan and his family, or why does God smite Ananias and Saphira?” Good question. The simple answer is that God is not one-dimensional. He does not merely act in love. He also acts in holiness. But His holiness does not diminish the fact that He always acts in love.