Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hey, I am Brooklyn and you are listening to the in between podcast. I am so thrilled that you joined us and are listening along.
[00:00:10] This season. We are talking about the attributes of God and about how sometimes we put God into a box that fits in to our narrative or our lives when we just truly desire to know who he truly is at his core, who the Bible says he is, and then how he has shown that through story after story in the Bible and then through testimony from some people that we are interviewing this season. So, again, thank you for being here and I just love going on this journey with you today. You just get me, though. So there will be no guest, which is kind of hard because the topic that we're talking about today is a bit tricky.
[00:01:02] People love to talk, especially in Western culture, about the goodness of God and God's love and God's faithfulness. And all of those things are so true and so good and very much who makes God who He is. But there is another part that I think makes people uncomfortable and I don't want to skip it because like I said, I want us to know who he is and then maybe have like a better understanding of why we need that.
[00:01:33] And so we're gonna read from Exodus 34, 5 through 7 today. And it says, then the Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with him. And he's talking about standing there with moans. Moses, he says, and he called out his own name, Yahweh. The Lord passed in front of Moses, calling out, Yahweh, the Lord, the God of compassion and mercy. I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations.
[00:02:05] I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin, but I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren. The entire family is affected, even children in the third and fourth generations.
[00:02:19] And that, that, those verses. That's God describing himself. He's saying, I am Yahweh, the Lord, the God of compassion and mercy, slow to anger, filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. And on. But we see, what I want to focus on here today is there's parts that are probably the ones that we want to skip over. Like I said, we love that he is compassionate and slow to. Or compassionate and unfailing love and faithful and lavishes love upon a thousand generations.
[00:02:51] The parts that we have a hard time with is the. The slow to anger part, the anger part mostly. And then that he doesn't excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren. The entire family is affected, even children in the third and fourth generations. So those things, when we don't understand them, can make, make us feel maybe negatively, right?
[00:03:15] And so I want to, I want to kind of speak into them. So, so to the slow to anger says I am slow to anger and filled with unloving or unfailing love and faithfulness.
[00:03:29] We talk about that. We see that he's merciful, compassionate, filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. But he also says that he is slow to anger, which means two things. That he's first of all slow to anger. He doesn't jump to anger, but that he does get angry.
[00:03:45] And there's so many times, like I said, when we paint him as this meek, small version of himself who is all accepting, never angry and passive, just kind of like goes with the flow. You guys, do you. I love you no matter what. And granted, he does love us and he does forgive our sins through Jesus. He does get angry.
[00:04:10] And we can't just skip over that when we are trying to understand and know him and have a relationship with him.
[00:04:17] And in today's day and age, I think that's especially hard because I think that sometimes we think that love means tolerance. Love means just accepting somebody at face value, accepting that they can do what they want, whether the choices are aligning with God's will or not. That, that there's so many things like, you do, you, I'll just do my own thing, things like that. And that's not love. That's not true biblical love. Because if you think about your kids or your husband or maybe like a very good friend or even like your mom to you, when you're angry with them, most of the time it's because you want better for them. It's because you want to keep them safe.
[00:05:09] And the difference between our anger and God's anger is that we can be quick to anger. It says he is slow to anger. We usually are pretty quick to anger. We feel it in a snap, right?
[00:05:23] And his anger is not that way. His anger is deliberate and intentional and justified. And he is so, so patient with us. We see that all throughout the Old and New Testament. He is so patient with us. But, but, but he does get mad. And sometimes he gets really mad. And that makes us uncomfortable because of the anger that we have seen on earth, the quick to anger, the abusive relationship, the abusive parents or explosive father or resentful boss.
[00:06:01] And I want to clarify that difference again.
[00:06:05] John, Mark, comer says in his book God Has a Name. He says our anger almost always from a wounded ego.
[00:06:13] Somebody hurt us or didn't do what we wanted and it's inherently selfish and even narcissistic. How often do we see anger like that? How often do we see anger like that towards us and how often do we do anger like that towards others because something didn't go the way that we wanted or something was inconvenienced to, to us? A lot of times it is self serving, right? He goes on to say. He says Yahweh's anger is from a parent like love for his children.
[00:06:41] He's angry at a drug dealer for trying to sell dope to our children or at little Johnny for constantly running into the middle of the street.
[00:06:50] So essentially he's saying that our anger as humans is usually self serving and unjust. And God's anger is coming from a place of love.
[00:07:01] It's coming from a place of I want the best for you. And he gets angry when we sin. He hates evil. He hates it and it makes him angry. And we want that in our God. We don't want our God to not hate evil. We hate evil. And we actually crave discipline from an early childhood perspective.
[00:07:24] Early childhood education says, and there's studies done on it, that from a young age we want somebody to care about us enough to provide structure, to discipline us, that to care about us enough to want us to do the right thing for our good. And that is God.
[00:07:42] He hates evil and it makes him angry because it hurts us, it takes us further away from him, it hurts others around us. He did not want evil in this world and he hates it and it makes him mad and it should, and it should make us mad. And that is justified anger. That is the anger that God has. And sometimes the emotionally mature response to evil is anger. And so it isn't scary, it is good. Just like everything he does in John Mark Comer's book God Has a Name. He talks about different wrath, wraths from God, which wrath is kind of a scary word, right? But he talks about different kinds of anger from God, different kinds of judgments from God. And so he talks about present wrath and, and future wrath.
[00:08:33] And you'll see that they're not bad, they are good. Just like everything God does. If you haven't gotten that theme yet, but present wrath is when God deals with the anger of sin now like actively or passively. So actively, meaning in the Bible there was a few times. It doesn't happen as often as the others, but a few times when he will strike someone down immediately. Like somebody came to Jesus in the New Testament and lied to him and he immediately died. And then his wife came and did the same thing. She died. That is active wrath in the present and then passive wrath in the present means. And this is what we see most often throughout the Bible and then often throughout our own lives. I know, I see it all the time in my life.
[00:09:25] And it's when our sins basically take care of themselves, because sin takes us further from God. And there are consequences to that. And it's not God causing the consequences. It's the sin itself having consequences. Because sin hurts us, sin hurts others.
[00:09:45] And so usually, no matter what it is, there is fallout from choosing sin. And so that would be passive wrath. We're getting consequences that are kind of natural from what we've chosen. And then future wrath is what we all crave. It's what we all want. Future wrath is when he will wipe away all evil from the world, and the world will be made perfect without sin again. There will be no cancer, there will be no sex slavery. There will be no abductions, there will be no murder. There will be no, you know, the list goes on and on. All of those evil, evil things that we hate, God hates them too. And he wants to remove them, and he will remove them. There will be a day when his future wrath makes the world perfect again. And we want that. We don't want a passive, meek, it's all good kind of God. We want one that cares enough about us to do something, that loves us enough to discipline us, that wants us to be closer to him and lets us figure it out on our own. Sometimes, sometimes through sin, we learn the hard way that that is not the life we want.
[00:11:00] And then we get to go back to him and he does forgive us. And that's what I want to end on, is that throughout all of this, I hope that you know that God's baseline is.
[00:11:14] Is grace and mercy and compassionate. And he is slow to anger. He is patient with you and you, like the prodigal son, like, we are welcome back to Him. So even if we have turned away from him, even if we have sinned, and even if we. If he is angry about it, if he is angry at the sin, we can turn back to him and he will open his arms to you and you can crawl into your Father's lap and you can say, I'm sorry. And he will.
[00:11:47] He will have love and compassion and mercy for you.
[00:11:52] And so I guess this week I want to challenge us all to, for one, what is the head and head and heart knowledge that we've talked about? Like, do you believe that God does forgive you? Do you believe that you can go crawl into his lap even if you have sinned and that he will have mercy and compassion and lavish unfailing love on you? Is that a true heart belief? Do you believe that? Or are you scared of him? Are you scared that he is going to just strike you down? Because that's not what's going to happen. We've been forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ.
[00:12:31] And then the other thing that I really want us to think about is, is how is our anger?
[00:12:40] Like so is our anger like God's? And yes, I know that we are not God, I know that we are not perfect. But, but we want to be more like him. And so when we do get angry, I want us to notice it. This week. I know mine's going to be. A lot of times with my children, I spend the most time with them. So for example, when they're being very slow and sometimes it seems very deliberate, like pushing boundaries. Will my anger come from a loving place and like discipline. Will it come from a loving place or will it come from a selfish, inconvenienced, um, this is not working for me kind of place.
[00:13:21] And what's kind of weird about that in that situation? So say Quinn is literally being as slow as possible and we have to get somewhere and she needs to know that time is not expendable. We don't have an infinite amount of it. We have to be somewhere at a certain time.
[00:13:40] And I can get angry and there's two situations, right? Like I can get angry and one could be justified and one could be self serving. I could get angry in a justified way with love and discipline her with love if that is my heart posture towards it. And I can teach her that we do not have an expendable amount of time and that we do have to be somewhere or and I would say that that would be a lot slower to anger, right? Because I would pause, I would pray, I would breathe and then I would teach. Or then there's the other anger that is selfish and snappy and hurry up like we are going to be late and that is going to make me look bad and just all of the self serving things that this is inconvenient, this is so much work for me. Those things go through my head sometimes. And so I am challenging myself and you to notice when you're angry and then to kind of come at it with more of a godlike heart posture. With more of a heart posture of love instead of self serving. So let's do that this week. Thank you again for joining us and I will see you next time.
