Loving Studying God More than Loving God

A few days ago I posted a video that explored what it means to love loving God more than to love God for who he is. Today I ran across an article, by Carl Trueman, that warns against a similar phenomenon--loving knowing and studying God more than loving him. 

The greatest temptation of a theology student is to assume that what they are studying is the most important thing in the world. Now, I need to be uncharacteristically nuanced at this point: there is a sense, a very deep and true sense, in which theology is the most important thing in the world. It is, after all, reflection upon what God has chosen to reveal to his creatures; and it thus involves the very meaning of existence. In this sense, there is nothing more important than doing theology.

But this is not the whole story. One of the great problems with the study of theology is how quickly it can become the study of theology, rather than the study of theology, that becomes the point. We are all no doubt familiar with the secular mindset which repudiates any notion of certainty in thought; and one of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that intellectual inquiry is rather like trying to get a date with the attractive girl across the road with whom you have secretly fallen in love: the thrill comes more from the chase and the sense of anticipation than it does from actually finding the answer or eliciting agreement to go to the movies.

Read the rest here.

Our פֶּסַח Lamb, Slain

Lately I've been reading through a small, neat, and eminently useful and wise volume titled The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (Piper & Taylor, eds.). One of the contributors, pastor Voddie Baucham, Jr., has this to say about the stark, unchanging reality of Christ's sacrifice. It struck me.

In days gone by God had been passing over, or overlooking, sins. And some were thinking that this called into question the justice of God: God, how can you claim to be righteous and yet not crush Moses the murderer, or crush Abraham the liar, or crush David the adulterer? How, O God? But in the merciful providence of God there came a day when God the Father crushed and killed his one and only Son in our stead in order to satisfy his wrath, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26 ESV). Was that enough for the sins of Adam, Abraham, and Moses? Can you hear the rhetorical questions from Calvary? Was that enough for your sins? Was that enough for you to recognize the supremacy of Christ in truth as it relates to redemption? There was nothing else that could have been done that would have allowed God to be both just and justifier. But in the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ we find a resolution to the question, "How can what is wrong be made right?" . . .

How can what is wrong be made right? The spotless, sinless Lamb of God was crushed, rejected, and killed to pay a debt that he did not owe on behalf of sinners who could never pay him back.

We don't talk about the blood of that Lamb nearly enough, it seems to me. Not once in my many years of childhood Sunday school do I recall ever hearing about Jesus as a slain sacrificial lamb. Maybe that's because children would inevitably squirm at that image. Yet it is so essential to the character of our salvation that passing over it (forgive the unavoidable pun) for the sake of some kind of decency, or because, for adults, it sounds too metaphorical, is to fail utterly to understand just what was at stake and involved in the crucifixion. 

The form of our substitute was in reality paramount. The Lord knew that no amount of pure, white-fleeced animal sacrifices could ever atone for the sins of all mankind, from the first man to the last. Only the Christ could fulfill the role. Only the Anointed One could bear such a massive burden. Only he could achieve the victory. Only his blood could make us "white as snow." In the end, the Lamb of God had to be slain in order to satisfy the perfect, just wrath of God. And that is the reason for our hallelujahs, the reason we gather to worship, the reason there is a church--the center of everything, what holds everything together. I needed a good reminder.

Loving Loving God More than Loving God

Here Piper warns against the tendency (especially of "Reformed types") to idolize the loving of God rather than loving God himself. It's a crucial distinction to make, and one that I have not lived by with much dedication till now. A very valuable warning -- one that hits me with particular force in this season of life.