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The minute you think that God owes you mercy, a bell should go off in your brain that warns you and tells you that you're no longer thinking about mercy. For by definition, mercy is voluntary. God is never obligated to be merciful to a rebellious creature. He doesn't owe you mercy. A holy God is both just and merciful, never unjust.
During family worship, I read a passage from 2 Kings and the destruction of those who worshipped Baal. Naturally, the conversation led to a discussion of God's justice and the seeming severity of God's punishment. But as you just heard from R.C. Sproul, no one is owed mercy by God.
And today, Dr. Sproul will remind us why we shouldn't be surprised by God's judgment, and instead, we should be surprised by God's long-suffering. Welcome to the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.
This week, you're hearing messages from Dr. Sproul's classic series, The Holiness of God, as we give thanks to God and mark the 40th anniversary of when the landmark book, The Holiness of God, was first published. You can learn how you can request a special 40th anniversary edition of that book at renewingyourmind.org. But I'll be sure to tell you more about that after today's message.
Well, here's R.C. Sproul on God's mercy, His holiness, and His justice.
If we look at the 18th century in the American frontier, we notice that there was a recurring motif during the Great Awakening in the preaching that was found at that time, and there was a sort of a dual emphasis. On the one hand, the message of the preachers was that man is very bad. and that God is very, very mad.
In other words, there was such an emphasis on the sinfulness of man and the wrath of God that almost what some have called a scare theology that dominated that period. And then in the 19th century, we saw a dramatic reaction against that kind of accent in preaching. So that now the message was, well, man's not quite so bad and God's not really quite so mad.
And there the emphasis was upon the love of God and the goodness of man. Well, at the turn of this century, the beginning of the 20th century, there was a response to that reaction. on the continent in the world of theology with the advent of a theology called crisis theology. And it was called crisis theology because it borrowed the term from the Greek word krisis, which means judgment.
And these theologians on the continent said that if we're going to take seriously the biblical portrait of God, we must once again take seriously what the Bible says about the wrath of God.
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