SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
1/29/2013 8:58 AM
My Worship Time Focus: The Wicked
PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Studies in Proverbs
Message of the
verses: In Today’s Spiritual Diary
we will begin to look at what Proverbs has to say about the wicked. We have just spent three days looking at what
Proverbs had to say about the wise and so we change course and look at the
wicked beginning today.
We will begin this SD with an end note that Dr. Wiersbe
has written to help describe the wicked or the evil. “Some contemporary theology so emphasizes
God’s love that it loses sight of the fact that God also hates. God has no pleasure in sin (Ps. 5:4). Sin grieves the Father (Genesis 6:6), the Son
(Mark 3:5), and the Spirit (Eph. 4:30).
Love and hatred can exist in the same heart (see Psalm 97:10, Amos
5:14-15, Ps. 45:7, and Rom. 12:9). If
God’s people loved holiness more, they would hate sin more. God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), but He is also
light (1 John 1:5) and a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).” I will now put all of the verses that are
used in this end note in the order that they were used.
Psalm 5:4 “For You are not a God who takes pleasure in
wickedness; No evil dwells with You.”Genesis 6:6 “The LORD was sorry that He
had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” Mark 3:5 “After
looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said
to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And he stretched it out, and his
hand was restored.” Ephesians 4:30 “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by
whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” Psalm 97:10 “Hate evil, you
who love the LORD, Who preserves the souls of His godly ones; He delivers them
from the hand of the wicked.” Amos 5:14-15 “14
Seek good and not evil, that you may live; And thus may the LORD God of
hosts be with you, Just as you have said! 15
Hate evil, love good, And establish justice in the gate! Perhaps the
LORD God of hosts May be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.” Psalm 45:7 “You
have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; Therefore God, Your God, has
anointed You With the oil of joy above Your fellows.” Romans 12:9 “Let love be
without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good.”1John 4:8 &
16 “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 16 We have
come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and
the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” 1John 1:5 “This is the message we have heard
from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no
darkness at all.” Hebrews 12:29 “for our
God is a consuming fire.”
I have been reading another book by A. W. Tozer and this
one is entitled “The Attributes of God,” and it kind of goes along with the one
that I just finished by Tozer called “The Knowledge of the Holy. I began to read about the “Goodness of God”
last night before going to sleep and after reading the following paragraph I
had some questions that I could not get straight in my mind, but it seems that
the Lord has answered the question that I had by studying what Dr. Wiersbe had
to say about the wicked in his end note.
Tozer writes “The goodness of God means He cannot feel
indifferent about anything. People are
indifferent, but not God. God either
loves with boundless unremitting energy or He hates with consuming fire. It was said about the second Person of the
Trinity, ‘Thou has loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even
thy God hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows’ (Hebrews
1:9). The same Lord Jesus that loved
with boundless consuming love also hated with terrible consuming fire and will
continue to do so while the ages roll.
The goodness of God requires that God cannot love sin.” I truly believe this about God and yet it is
hard to get my arms around it to better understand it. However as I have looked at the verses above
that Dr. Wiersbe spoke of in his end note I better understand what Tozer is
writing about.
To better understand why Tozer wrote what he wrote I have
to go back to a statement that he made earlier in the book: “God is never partway anything!” Tozer
writes this because one of the attributes of God is that He is infinitude. The following is what Tozer writes about
infinitude: “God is infinite! That’s the hardest thought I will ask you to
grasp. You cannot understand what
infinite means, but don’t let it bother you—I don’t understand it and I’m
trying to explain it! ‘Infinite’ means
so much that nobody can grasp it, but reason nevertheless kneels and
acknowledges that God is infinite. We
mean by infinite that God knows no limits, no bounds and no end. What God is, He is without boundaries. All that God is, He is without bounds or
limits.” So when we say that God is
love, His love has no bounds, and when we say that God hates, He does that
without bounds. In my own mind I think
of hatred as getting even, but that is not the case with God for God is
perfectly just and does not judge people to get even with them. Tozer goes on to say this about God not being
boundless: “There is nothing boundless
but God and nothing infinite but God.
God is self-existent and absolute; everything else is contingent and
relative. There is nothing very big and
nothing very wise and nothing very wonderful.
It is all relatively so. It is
only God who knows no degrees.”
I realize that this SD is not going exactly where I
thought that it would go, but I believe that I have to be open to the leading
of the Spirit of God when I write on my Spiritual Diaries. To understand the wicked we have to
understand how God will and is dealing with them today and in the future. Remember that God is not vindictive, but just
and so He will perfectly deal with the wicked, for that is the only way that
God can do things for He is perfect.
I will end this Spiritual Diary by stating something that
Tozer has stated in the books that I have read by him and that is that the most
important thought that a person can have is what he things about God.
1/29/2013 10:15 AM
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