A life worth living requires a vision bigger than yourself.
God’s wrath is also God’s blessing. When the Lord brings His Presence to bear on a human situation, some will feel His wrath, some will feel His loving mercy, and most will get a heavy dose of both. But the power of God is to cleanse away sin even while it empowers virtue. By sin I refer to moral injustice and all the results of it. Virtue is moral justice as defined by His character.
When Jesus did all those miracles, it was restoring the blessings of the Covenant. Those blessings did not come without the preaching of repentance. Starting with His cousin, John the Baptist, the message was, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” While Jesus surely knew many would misinterpret that message, it didn’t change the message.
You and I here at Kiln of the Soul are studying the character of God in the sense that we want to understand divine justice. Insofar as we can know Him, this is our only path in this life. This is how we bring Him glory, walk in His name, elevate His reputation and make Him famous — those are all the same thing. They all amount to restoring His divine justice. When we live by the moral Laws of God, things change. Creation itself is hard-wired to respond. What brings Him glory shines also upon us.
Your heart is then free to sense His Presence in His Creation. No two of us will have precisely the same experience. No two of us will express His mercy and justice identically because each of us has our own moral identity.
So if, in the midst of my bringing to other people His justice and mercy, some of them take unjust advantage of it, my part in it is unchanged. God will take care of that; it’s not my problem. My problem is me and my fleshly resistance to letting go and letting God. Compassion is my duty. The only time I pull back is when my heart tells me I must in order to preserve the reputation of God. Not His reputation as measured and noted by men, but His reputation in His own terms. His glory is what He says it it; He decides what His image will be among men. Their reception is their problem.
Don’t compartmentalize the vision; see the whole sweep of things. It’s not enough that we commune with nature alone, as if we could exclude fallen humans from that work of mercy. Nor can you exclude the rest of Creation simply because you are good with people. Dividing them is artificial in that sense. Turn on your heart and let God decide. You might well emphasize one thing over another by the calling on your life, but there remains a sense in which nothing is excluded. You cannot limit how God will work through your mission. Wherever you go, you carry the divine Presence, and Creation itself sings the song of redemption to see you bringing it. Some people will always notice and respond in one way or another. It will always be a mixture of wrath and blessing, but His children know that even His wrath is His love.
We look forward to His cleansing fire, and we are eager to share it.
