Friday, February 1, 2019

Ps 103 9He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
10  he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.

To love oneself is to be blessed by forgiveness. To hate oneself is to be cursed because we cannot accept forgiveness from God. So God does not give a full salvation and take something back. But the problem is that God cannot send mixed messages to us. The law of God is the law of love. He says those who love me obey me. If God demands obedience in order to show love then He must not set the law aside in how He treats us. He must treat us according to the law of love. We must understand that the Psalmist applies the words of salvation when he is complaining, praising and petitioning God. So all of the attributes of the Psalmist are holistic according to the law, covenants, curses, statutes , decrees and promises. These axioms are given to show that God is always, faithful, loving, long suffering, patient and kind toward His elect.

But the problem is that if God has given us a complete salvation then why are we still in danger to the curse and the threats of the wicked? Think about this. You have a relationship with someone and you are trying to show how much you love them. But there are weakness in the relationship because we all are corrupted and sinful. But God is very simple. He does exactly what He says. He does not have guilt, fear, worry and shame to deal with. He is relating to a person who is susceptible to sin and the curse. So God is so good that in our lack of  ability to understand His intentions we attribute evil motives. If we cannot be as good as God then we are not only guilty of offending Him but we do not even have the strength to believe how good He is. So God had to give us language in the form of pronouncements.  God has given us a language that reverses all of power of the opposition. So now sin, corruption and the nagging sorrow of the curse is actually profits us in some way.

In this way God could have piled on and killed us with His goodness. But instead He gave us the ability to be more valuable by being more weak. In other words if someone had the same goodness of God and complained that God was treating them in an angry way then it would be an unacceptable charge. But if the person was sinful and sorrowful then God would be moved to pity that object. So God in His goodness actually responds when we describe our struggles with our opposition in the same way that God treats them. So the when the Psalmist complains about the wicked cursing the righteous , he uses the curses of the law in complaining to God that they are cursing him.  So the Psalmist uses the words that describe the enmity that God has with the wicked to argue that this God who is bound to His law, covenants, curses etc is treating him like the wicked. So we see that God is very concerned about showing us trust in our communication with a God who is other.

So God actually is drawn to us when we use the words like curse, anger, sorrow, guilt and pain as a  description of our weakness as we are pointing at the wicked that moves God to respond. The Psalmist has learned to use the negative attributes in relating to God for his own advantage.  The point is that God already knows how much we are gonna sin and how bad we can be. The entire relationship is built for us to feel free to be honest with God. The more we struggle the more honest we are and the more we use the corruption to get Gods mercy and grace. The more we use the offenseive things to motivate us to seek Gods goodness the more we are gonna enjoy that goodness so that it consumes our desire to sin. Anger is always put in the context of the Psalmist struggle with the curse.  

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