Finding it difficult to believe in a God who orders the destruction of human life is not a new phenomenon. Many have found it hard to square what the Bible says about God’s love with what it says about His violence.

But if we are intellectually honest, the question shouldn't be whether the God of the Bible conforms to our personal standards of right and wrong—but whether He is the real God. If He is true, the question of whether we "like" Him becomes secondary to the question of whether He is worthy of worship.

As it turns out, it is philosophically possible to believe in a God who is both loving and vengeful. Anger is often the only appropriate response when someone you love is hurt. In fact, we wouldn't want to worship a God who didn't respond to the injustices of this world with the determination to fix them.

The apex of this "two-sided" love and anger is the Cross. There, Jesus willingly absorbed the evil of a fallen world so that His Father’s wrath could lovingly cut it out forever.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.

To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep139.

Many biblical texts teach that Jesus gives his people “eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” But the Bible also warns Christians of the possibility of apostasy, encouraging followers of Jesus to stay on guard against an “evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”

How can it be true that Christians cannot fall away and also true that they can fall away? The key is to understand the difference between the Christian’s condition as elected by God, and the lived-in experience of the Christian’s faith life. Those who are elected by God from before the foundation of the world can never finally fall away, but are assured by God that the faith which he has granted is secure. However, there are people who at one point genuinely believe that Jesus died for them, but who later in life turn away and abandon their Savior. These ultimately have no assurance of salvation, in spite of their previous baptism and confession. These do not apostasize because they “lost” their faith, as though they were faithfully following Jesus and one day realized they didn’t believe in him anymore. Instead, they sadly made a decision to abandon him and live for themselves, either implicitly or explicitly.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.

To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep138.

Some Christians worry that their Christianity is only theirs because they grew up in a Christian home. But is this a weakness, or a strength? We’re used to thinking that an idea must be individually chosen to be legitimately one’s own, and this taps into a valuable scriptural assertion–that the human individual either does or doesn’t have a relationship with the God of the universe, and that individual has an individual, personal responsibility to this relationship.

But on the other hand, the pursuit of a relationship with God as an isolated individual, as though one could know God without any insight or direction from any other human being, is a false dream. None of us can know anything without others guiding us–either personally, through writing, YouTube videos, or the like. And this reflects an even deeper biblical truth: God has created us for community, for the body of Christ. And as such, there is no way of getting around a relationship with God that is tied up inextricably with relationships with other Christians.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.

To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep137.