THE WORD OF GOD PART 3: REVEALING THE HEART OF GOD PASTOR CHARLES PRICE

As many of you are aware, we are going through a short series of studies looking at the Word of God and the Scripture. We began the year reading the Bible from Genesis right through to Revelation in one non-stop marathon. It took us eighty-two hours. And we want to talk about why it is that we read the Bible, why we study the Bible, and why it is so important that we spend time doing that. And tonight the title I want to give is, “Revealing the Heart of God;” the Bible reveals the heart of God. Let me first read to you a verse in the Book of Job. I’m going to use just this one verse as a springboard for what I want to share with you tonight. Job, Chapter 12, and verse 22. And if you’re familiar with the story of Job and the Book of Job, there are a number of people who speak in this book. A lot of them don’t speak sense. God at the end of the book says, “What you’ve said is nonsense.” But when Job speaks, he makes some very profound statements, and I want to take this one verse in Job 12, verse 22, where he says of God, “He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light.” What I want to do is try to bring some shadows into the light, which is what God, we trust, will enable us to do. Now, let me just set the context. We’re talking about the place of the Bible, and last time we talked about the inspiration and the authority of the Scripture. And basically we talked then about the Bible and the mind of God. I based it on a verse in Isaiah 55, which says, “ ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ ” So if God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, if God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, how will we know His thoughts? There’s only one possible way of knowing His thoughts: it’s the same way that you might know my thoughts. How do you know what I’m thinking? There’s only one way you’ll know what I’m thinking, and that’s if I tell you. There’s only one way we’ll know the thoughts of God, and that is if He tells us. And one of the vital aspects of Scripture is that God reveals His thoughts, reveals His mind. Now I talked about that last time, and on the way home after that session, my wife said to me in the car, “There’s something missing from your talk today. God is more than just mind. God is more than just intelligence. Knowing God is more than knowing information about God.” She said, “I’ll tell you what was missing. You never mentioned the heart of God.” And God has a heart, and Scripture reveals His heart. She said, “Why don’t you say something about that?” Well, as usual, my wife is right in these matters, and actually, I have been excited in the last days that that conversation has stimulated in me the question, “What is the heart of God in Scripture?”

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I want to talk tonight about the Bible and the heart of God. If last time it was the Bible and the mind of God, I want to understand the Bible and the heart of God. Because you see, the great danger in thinking that Scripture is primarily revealing God’s thoughts is that we begin to think that the highest response to God is found in the knowledge of His mind and in obedience to His will. But you know, that is not the highest response we make to God. Of course, to know His mind, to obey His will is essential but is actually not enough. There are those in Scripture and that was their objective: to understand the mind of God and to obey scrupulously the will of God, and they were known as Pharisees. Now when we talk about Pharisees, we tend to think about the hypocrisy, which Jesus exposed in many of them. For instance, in Matthew 23, He speaks about the Pharisees there, and He says, “You clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you’re full of greed and selfindulgence.” Externally you look good, that is; internally you’re rotten. “You’re like whitewashed tombs,” He said, “that on the outside look beautiful; on the inside you’re full of dead men’s bones.” He says, “You strain gnats;” you’re so meticulous about the little things, but “you swallow camels.” And that description of some of the Pharisees and the scribes in Matthew 23 has often left us with the idea that to be a Pharisee is by definition to be a hypocrite. But not all Pharisees were that way. You see, Paul was a Pharisee, and he tells us there was no hypocrisy in his Pharisaism. In fact, he boasted to the Philippians, “If I wanted to boast to you, I could tell you this, that I had real integrity as I sought a rigid adherence to the will of God,” and he tells us there in Philippians that as far as regard to the law was concerned, “I was a Pharisee.” What that meant, by the way, was that the Pharisees were so careful not to break the law of God, they built fences around the law to stop them from getting close to the law of God. So when the law said, you know, “On the seventh day you shall do no labour,” they said, “What is labour?” To make sure you don’t do it, we need to define labour, and they defined labour in about sixty different ways, including you couldn’t carry a burden. So they said, “What’s a burden?” They defined a burden as anything which weighed more than two dried figs, a couple of prunes. They decided that labour was going on a journey. Well, how far can you go? They defined what they called a “Sabbath Day’s Journey.” It was only about 500 yards. You couldn’t go beyond that. All in a sincere attempt to understand the mind of God and obey the will of God, but says Paul, “It left me not only empty,” he says as far as legalistic righteousness was concerned, “I was faultless. I kept the law. I was no hypocrite. I kept it. I knew the law of God. I understood the mind of God about these things. I was faultless in my obedience.” We might stand back and say, “Wow! That is fantastic!” But he says, “The only problem is it left me cold. It left me rigid. It left me legalistic. And it left me an enemy of the church of Jesus Christ.” The reason why Paul sought to persecute Christians was out of sheer obedience to what he felt was the law of God and the will of God. You see, knowledge of the will of God alone can make us cold. Knowledge, of course, is very important. When I preach, I always try to communicate information to people. Whether I do is a different matter, but I try to. When I was appointed as the pastor here, I was given when I was invited to consider that, I was given a … I suppose it was a job description. One of the things it said was that, “You prepare sermons that have doctrinal substance to them.” And I’m very

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grateful for that requirement because it’s important we understand doctrine and theology. That is true, but that is not enough. God is more than a mind. You see, if we see God as supremely intelligent, we reduce Him to little more than a powerful, celestial computer, and the Bible is His printout and these were His instructions. If He’s here, our absence is irrelevant; get on with it. These are the instructions. But He’s not all brain. He’s not all mind. He’s not all intelligence. God has a heart, and that’s why the highest virtue is not simply obedience to His will, important as that is. The highest virtue is you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. That is stated – the first time it’s stated – in the Book of Deuteronomy. And to love Him with all our heart means we have to make connection with His heart because we can love Him with our hearts only as we connect with His heart. And that’s what I want to talk about: the Bible revealing the heart of God tonight. Now, what do we mean when we speak about the heart? Well, physiologically speaking, the heart is just a pump in the middle of your chest, and it’s the key organ in the body. But in this sense here, the heart is the key to our personhood. That is the common usage of the word heart amongst us. If somebody is kind, we’ll often say they have a heart of gold. If somebody is without compassion, we describe them as being “heartless” or “cold hearted.” If someone is courageous, we say they’re “brave hearted.” When we experience our deepest hurts, we call them “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are described as being “heart broken.” When you go on vacation, we are “light hearted;” our responsibilities have gone. When we are deeply in love, we say, “I love with all my heart.” When we talk at the deepest level to people, we say we’ve had a “heart-to-heart” talk. When we lose passion for something, we say, “My heart isn’t in it any more.” Because the heart is the key to our personhood. And life without heart is hardly worth living. Life without heart becomes just existence. It becomes routine. It become passionless. And our relationship, our central relationship, with God is not with a head but with a heart. Now, we know the heart of God through our heads. It’s not just some intuitive sense of God. There is understanding. But without knowing the heart of God and without loving Him with all our hearts, we can read and study our Bibles in order to get to know God, but it will be like studying the anatomy of a corpse in order to get to know the person who once inhabited it. And you won’t know the person by studying their corpse. You’ve got to know the life that pulsated within it. And that’s why detached from the heart of God, this book has been the source of wars and battles and antagonism and fights and squabbles and fallouts because we’ve not known the heart of God. Now I think it’s very significant that the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength comes in the Book of Deuteronomy, and I’ll tell you why I think that’s significant. You probably know the word Deuteronomy, the name Deuteronomy, simply means “second law:” dĕutĕrŏs – second; nŏmŏs – law. And the name Deuteronomy comes from a statement in Deuteronomy 17 where it gives rules for a king, when there’s a king in Israel. He’s to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law. This is a copy of the law. In fact, the Book of Deuteronomy is the amplified version of the law given to Moses in the Book of Exodus. It was written in the 40th year of the children of Israel’s journey through the wilderness, the last year of Moses’ life, the last thing he ever wrote. He didn’t even write the last

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chapter because that’s about his death, and presumably somebody else wrote that. But it’s the law; it’s all about the law. I find that very interesting, that in writing this second version of the law, this amplified version of the law, in Chapter 6, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” In Chapter 11, verse 1, “Love the Lord your God and keep His requirements and His decrees.” Chapter 11, verse 13: “If you faithfully obey the commands I’m giving you today to love the Lord your God and to serve Him with all your heart …” In fact, he goes on to say that the law of God is summed up in love. Deuteronomy 11:22, “If you carefully observe all these commands I’m giving you to follow, you will love the Lord your God and walk in all His ways.” Deuteronomy 19, verse 9, “Because you carefully follow these laws, I command you today to love the Lord your God and to walk always in His ways.” Deuteronomy 30, verse16, “I command you today to love the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 30, “that you may love the Lord your God and listen to His voice and hold fast to Him.” That amidst this record of the law, this amplified second version of the law, right throughout it, permeating it, are these instructions: love the Lord, love God, love God, love God. That’s why I chose it as my text tonight. God reveals the deep things of darkness. He brings deep shadows into the light because when you read these laws, you see the laws, and in the shadows what we don’t see is the heart of God. And we don’t always see His love. And if that was written the last year of Moses’ life, Joshua replaced him and at the end of Joshua’s life He said the same thing. And Joshua was 22 when he addressed the three tribes that lived on the east side of the Jordan. He said, “Be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses, the servant of the Lord, gave you: to love the Lord your God and to walk in His ways.” And in Joshua 23, he gave his farewell address to the leaders of Israel before he died. He said, “So be very careful to love the Lord your God.” When you come into the New Testament, Jesus was asked the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” And He replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Your mind, you see, is involved, but it’s loving God with your mind. And that is repeated in Mark and in Luke’s gospel. And to love God with all our hearts requires that we know something of His heart. You see it says in 1 John 4 and verse 19, “We love Him …” Why? “… because He first loved us.” My love of God is a reciprocating love. It’s because I know and experience His love. And it’s knowing His love, knowing His heart, that is going to release our hearts to love Him. Let me read you a quotation from Alister McGrath. He is the Principal at Wycliffe College in Oxford. He’s one of the leading evangelical theologians of today, written many, many helpful books. In his book, “A Passion for Truth,” he warns that the Bible is not primarily a doctrinal handbook. That’s good to hear from a theologian. It’s not a doctrinal handbook. He says this, “To reduce Revelation to principles or concepts is to suppress the element of mystery, holiness and wonder of God’s self-disclosure.”

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First, principles may enlighten us and inform us, but they do not force us to our knees in reverence and awe, as with Moses at the burning bush or the disciples in the presence of the risen Christ. I spent many years leading a bible college in England, and I know it’s one of the most dangerous places to lose God Himself because you’re studying things about God. You’re analyzing God. When I fell in love with my wife and we used to write letters. I guess people don’t write letters anymore; they just e-mail each other, which isn’t anything like as nice. You don’t get the signature and all that kind of stuff. I always typed my letters. I never typed a letter when I wrote to my girlfriend, as she was. But she’d tell me about herself, and I’d probably less so told her about myself because she says I don’t expose myself very much. But you see, I wasn’t drawing up a systematic theology of Hilary Alerton, as she was then called, so at the end I could say, “I’ll tell you this about Hilary. She was born on a certain date in a certain place, and these were her strengths. These were her weaknesses. These are her attributes.” Someone says, “Well, what is Hilary like?” “Well, listen. I’ve got a little document here. It’s kind of a systematic summary of her.” Do you know, I couldn’t care less where she was born. I’m not especially interested in what her weaknesses and strengths are, although I liked both. It’s who she is. And so it is with God. We can lose the heart. Let me read you a verse in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 8 and verse 1. 1 Corinthians, Chapter 8 and verse 1, and the context is about food sacrificed to idols. I’m not talking about the context here. But then he says this, in verse 1, “We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God.” Interesting verse. I never noticed that until two days ago. I knew knowledge puffs up, and love builds up. But he says, “The one who knows something doesn’t yet know as he ought to know,” because it’s not something. “But the one who loves God is known by God.” You see, it’s very easy for us as Christians to be very concerned about dotting our “I’s” and crossing our “T’s” theologically. And I am concerned about that. Don’t sense any weakening about that; it’s so important. But that can be like a tinkling brass and a gonging cymbal. I know the people who have communicated most to me have not been the people who have told me the right things, but there’s been a passion in their lives that has excited me. You see, the best things are not taught; they’re caught. And out of the passion the truth makes sense in the context of a heart that’s aflame. We talk about the image of God in which we were created. The image of God is not an image of intelligence or knowledge or brainpower. His image is His moral character, supremely His love. Most of you know that every Sunday morning there’s a meeting that runs along side our 11:15 service. It’s called, “The Friendship Class.” It’s made up of some wonderful people, all developmentally disabled in some way. Hilary is a helper in that class, and week after week she

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comes home with fabulous stories about these people and their love and their spontaneity. And some of them may not have the same capacity to know as much as others know intellectually about God, but they have a capacity to love God and to experience His love and consequently, many of them are much closer to the heart of God than others of us. We might tend to think there’s some disadvantage there. There may be huge advantage there because they respond to the heart. We have cluttered our hearts up. I have cluttered my heart up. The image of God is His moral character. His character is summed up in 1 John in three words: “God is love.” Don’t reverse that as I heard one preacher one day and say that means love is God. If two equals two, two equals two. Reverse it; it’s just the same. “God is love,” he said, “Love is God.” Now that isn’t true, but God is love. What that means is it’s the very nature of God. It’s not just that love is an attribute of God, like when we say, for instance, God is powerful, and we see display of His power. Or we say God is all knowing; we see indication of His knowledge. We say God is present everywhere. There’s an attribute of God, but God’s love is something much deeper than that. It’s not an attribute. It’s His essential being. He doesn’t need to attain to love. He doesn’t need to maintain His love. He IS love. I tried to think of an illustration this afternoon. It may not be a very good one, but if you were to bake a cake – I’m not into baking cakes; I have done … 1986 I think was the last one, just for something to do on a day off – but if you put some cocoa into a cake mix when you’re baking a cake, you produce a chocolate cake. And wherever you cut the cake, it’s chocolate. Whichever part you eat, it’s chocolate. Now that cake may have certain attributes. It may have candles. That’s an attribute of the cake. It’s got candles. It may have two tiers. That’s an attribute of the cake. It may have frosting. That’s an attribute of the cake. But the cake itself, wherever you cut it, wherever you eat it, wherever you taste it, it’s chocolate. It permeates everything. The cake is chocolate. God is love. That’s why, by the way, there is a trinity. There are all kinds of arguments that are presented for and against the trinity. There are certain groups and sects who don’t believe in the trinity. But the fact that God is love by definition requires an object of love. Love, by definition, must have an object. You meet a teenage girl, her knees are knocking, her eyes are rolling, she’s giddy; you say, “What’s the matter with you?” She says, “Oh, I’m all in love!” And you say, “Who are you in love with?” “Nobody, I’m just in love!” Can you just be in love? You can’t just be in love. Love has to have an object, whether it’s a cat or a dog or a person … or a car, if you’re really hard up. And the fact that God is love presupposes the existence of the trinity, that the Father loves the Son as the Scripture tells us He does. That the Son loves the Spirit; the Spirit loves the Father; the Son loves the Father; the Spirit loves the Son. Who have I missed out? It’s a love relationship because God is love. And let me take just a few moments to give some pointers to the heart of God in Scripture. You see sometimes when we read through the Scripture, the spectacles we wear when we read it determine how we understand it. And I want to suggest putting on the spectacles that look for the heart of God, that verse from Job: “He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light.” I want to suggest that you look through the law of God, which is often

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how we see it, and the rules of God and the judgement of God, and we look for the heart of God through Scripture. You see, people have sometimes seen a dichotomy between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. And when we see that dichotomy, we normally don’t like the God of the Old Testament very much. And I think we all emphasis with that to some extent when we read through the whole Scripture at the beginning of the year. I remember sitting in here as we went through parts of the Old Testament, and you felt you were up to your neck in hard, harsh, difficult situations. And I remember thinking to myself through some of that, “I hope there are not many folks here who are not Christians. They won’t like this. I don’t like this, and I’m a Christian!” We need to look for the heart of God, you see. The Old Testament has laws about stoning the adulterer. The New Testament talks about forgiving the adulterer. Is this a contrast? Is this a conflict? Let me try to trace the heart of God, just a little bit, in just a few instances. You go right back to the beginning, and you know the story of the fall in the Garden of Eden. If I were to say to you, “Well, summarize the fall for me. Summarize the story in the first three chapters of Genesis,” and you might well tell me that God placing man, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden said, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for when you eat of it, you will surely die.” He made that very clear to them. Then along came the tempter, and they saw it was good for food. It was pleasing to the eye. They took of it. The devil lied to them, and said, “You’ll be like God.” And they took of it. They ate of the fruit. They violated the law of God. They became embarrassed. They were aware of their nakedness. They hid, and God came. And He judged them. He drove them from the garden. He cursed the earth. He cursed the woman, and He cursed the man. And we say, “That’s the story. It’s pretty harsh, but you know, they asked for it. God told them: eat anything you like except that one fruit.” But no, that isn’t the story. That’s dissecting the corpse. It’s not finding the heart. You see, let me show you what goes on in this story. When they became aware of their nakedness these two, they covered themselves with fig leaves. God came to them in the cool of the day and said, “Where are you?” Not because He didn’t know, but He wanted them to know why they were where they were. Let me read you what it says in Genesis 3, verse 21. And here you begin to find the heart of God. It says, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” Was it necessary for them to feel the embarrassment of their nakedness? Seemingly not. But now they’ve broken their innocence. They’ve clothed themselves with fig leaves, and it says, “God made them garments of skin.” There are several important things to notice about that. There was an act of personal love. God could have said on the basis of justice, “You stoop in your own juice. You created this situation.” He made them garments. But not only that, He made them garments of skin, which means the first animal to die died to clothe the embarrassment of Adam and Eve. And that’s incredibly significant because right from the Garden of Eden onwards, the shedding of blood is the means by which guilty people can be

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covered. And the heart of God is right there in the Garden of Eden. The first animal to die – the first occurrence of death, seemingly – was the consequence of their sin. This is an embryo of what was going to come to full form in the cross of Christ. You find the heart of God in His dealings. Yes, God dealt in justice because God is just. That is part of His love. Love has integrity. Love is not soft. Love is true, but it’s real. And He cares for them. Not only that, in verse 22, it says – Genesis 3, verse 22, “ ‘He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.’ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden.” Why did God banish him from the Garden of Eden? It was protective. It was not simply judgement; it was protective that they should not eat of this second tree in the garden, the tree of life, and live forever in their sin. Don’t miss the heart of God in this because the heart of God is, as they have chosen to disobey, He reaches to them, clothes them with the skin of an animal that has to die. He bars them from the opportunity of eating of the tree of life and living forever in their condition. And actually, you go right to the very end of the Bible, the very last chapter of the Bible, and you find this: Verse 13 of Revelation 22, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” You don’t get it until the last chapter of the Bible, this tree of life. At last. You see, “I’m the Alpha and the Omega. I was there at the beginning. I am here at the end. I’m the First and the Last.” And at the beginning, He protected them, but now they’re redeemed. And as redeemed people, they have the right to the tree of life, and they go into the gates of the city forever. Do you see the heart of God in this? If you were to be thrown on a desert island with nothing but the first three chapters of Genesis, you would have the gospel within those three chapters. The heart of God is there. Or you can just see it as simply a story of sin and judgement. Or you look in the shadows. What is God actually doing here? Look at His heart. And, by the way, the heart of God in judgement is to be your heart and my heart in judgement. There are things that are wrong. That is very true, but I sometimes hear we as Christians making sweeping condemnation of peoples and their behaviours, and there’s very little evidence of the heart of God in this. What about the judgement in the days of Noah in Genesis, Chapter 6 [verse 3]? Again, it says, “ ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever …’ ” And He finds there, in Genesis, Chapter 6, and verse 5 – it’s a beautiful verse – it says, “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” I love the NIV rendering of the next verse:

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“And the Lord was grieved that He had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with pain.” It’s the first time the Bible talks about the heart of God, and it was filled with pain. He was grieved. You see, grief is an expression of love. Joy Davidson, the wife of C.S. Lewis, died of a terminal disease. It was a tragic time for her and her husband of course. They married late in life. C.S. Lewis was, I think he was in his forties. And I can’t find the exact quotation, but I’m going to paraphrase it. I think it was something like this. Joy Davidson said as C.S. Lewis was grieving her … she said, “Sorrow is the price we pay for love.” She said it much more profoundly, but that’s the idea anyway. And one day I’ll get the quote right. But “sorrow is the price we pay for love.” The more you love, the deeper your sorrow. And if you want to be free from the sorrow, from the grief, then hold back on the love and the grief won’t be as bad. You see, what is God’s response? It’s not the response of a judge. It’s the response of a lover. He’s filled with pain. He’s not just an angry God; He’s a hurting God. And every act of judgement hurts the heart of God; it filled it with pain. This is the God that comes through the Scripture, and we can lose it. We can have a fixation on the judgement and the righteousness and the sinfulness of man, and we loose His heart. What about the nation of Israel when God set them apart as a nation? He gave them a land, you remember. And as they were leaving Egypt in Exodus, Chapter 15 and verse 13, they had been set apart since the day’s of Abraham but it’s been four hundred years and now they’ve become a nation and now they’re going back to occupy the land God had promised to them. And as they were leaving Egypt, it says, “In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling.” Why is God taking us back? It’s in His unfailing love, it says. And when they got to where they were journeying, He gave them the law. Remember how that Moses smashed the tablets of stone the first time God gave the law to him? He had to go back up the mountain. In Exodus, Chapter 34, verse 6 and 7, he was given the law for the second time. And it says that the Lord … God “ … passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” Now listen. That is the preface to the law that He then gave: the Ten Commandments. And if you read the law and don’t read the preface to it, you won’t understand the heart of God. God is just. God is righteous. His law does reveal His character, but He says to Moses, “The Lord is the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. And I give you my law because I love you.” Not “because I’m a perfectionist and demand that you jump every time I tell you to, but because I know what is good and what is right and what is holy, and I love you. And I’m forgiving.”

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Of course, if we looked at the whole story of Israel and Canaan, there’s a cycle of rebellion and coming back to God, and then going away and coming back, and going away. In the Book of Judges alone, there are seven cycles of that, where they turn away from God, they call, and God gives them a deliverer that brings them back. Then they become self-sufficient; they become subdued by their enemies, and they become overrun again. They cry to God; He gives them a deliverer. He delivers them, and this cycle goes on seven times in the Book of Judges alone! And it goes right through the Old Testament story. You remember the period of the exile. And this is the period when the prophets, most of the prophets, were on the scene, and they talk about God driving Israel out of their own nation, taking them off to Babylonian exile or the Israelites before them to Assyria, now the people of Judah to Babylon. And Jeremiah was one of the prophets of that time. And let me read what Jeremiah says in Jeremiah, Chapter 9 [verse 15]. This is God speaking: “I’ll make this people eat bitter food and drink poisoned water. I will scatter them among the nations … I will pursue them with the sword until I have destroyed them.” Now you read that, that isn’t comfortable. You say, “Is that what God said? ‘I’ll make them eat bitter food, drink poisoned water, scatter them, pursue them with a sword? I’ll destroy them?’” Let me read you from Lamentations, when God did what He then had promised Jeremiah, and He drove the Israelites out of their land. And Jeremiah walks through the destroyed city of Jerusalem. The Book of Lamentations … it’s five chapters. It’s Jeremiah walking through the destroyed city. Lamentations, the word Lamentations meaning weeping. Jeremiah is weeping over the destruction and the calamity. And in the midst of this weeping, in Lamentations, Chapter 3, and verse 19, I’ll read you several verses here. He says, “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.” And they’d been through lots of that, “I remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself: ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.’ “The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.” And Jeremiah, having declared the judgement of God on the people and having seen that judgement carried out, and utterly devastated himself, remembering the gall and the bitterness, and he’s downcast: “But I call this to mind. What is it I call to mind? The love of God is unfailing. What is God doing? He is purifying us; He’s correcting us.” Do you know they came back from their exile, and you never hear about Baal worship after they came back from exile.

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You never hear about Asherah poles and this kind of pagan worship that the Israelites engaged in before the exile. It’s His love that was behind His judgement. Isaiah, in a similar time, Isaiah, Chapter 5, verse 25 says, “Therefore the Lord’s anger burns against His people; His hand is raised and He strikes them down.” That’s a graphic picture of God with His hand ready to swipe them. It’s in Isaiah 5, and as that is carried through, later Isaiah 60, verse 10, God says, “Though in anger I struck you, in favour I will show you compassion.” It’s anger; it’s sin. It’s provoked by His love for people. But you can read the Old Testament story, and you see God simply as a judge, an awesome judge. But out of the shadows into the light, when you look for it, is the heart of God behind His judgement. That’s why in Hebrews, Chapter 12, the writer there says, verse 5, “And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: ´‘ “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son.’ “Endure hardship as a discipline; God is treating you as sons. What son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” And the writer is saying, “Remember, if you’re a child of God, you’ll come under the discipline of God as a human child comes under the discipline of his father.” And discipline is designed to teach and mould and, in this case, the discipline of God is that we share His holiness. You see, sometimes we experience the discipline of God, but you need to look behind it to see the heart of God. The Israelites experienced the discipline of God, but behind the discipline and His judgement was His heart. And you get to the end of the Old Testament, and do you know how the last book of the Old Testament begins? The very last book, God’s last word before going silent for 400 years until the birth of the Lord Jesus, in the Book of Malachi begins this: “An oracle: The Word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi. “ ‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord.

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“But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’” Because you say, well, are you sure? Are you sure? He answers their question; it’s in that first chapter, but He begins that last book, as we come to the end of that story, “I have loved you.” You want the story of the Old Testament? It’s the story of the love of God. You see, this is the heart of God. You see, this is the chocolate cake, wherever you cut it, it’s chocolate. Wherever you cut it, it’s love. You come to the New Testament, of course, and supremely. You come to the cross of Christ, and in the cross of Christ, you see the wrath of God on sin. And we see the love of God that sent His Son to be our substitute. I have talked in the past about the legal issues that took place in the cross, how the justice of God was legally satisfied. And we are justified, we’ve defined this word, how that Christ was the propitiation who satisfied the wrath of God. We’ve talked about that on other occasions, and all that is true. All those legal intricacies are true and necessary to our understanding of God as a God of integrity. But never forget the Bible’s most famous verse, John 3:16: “God so loved the world that He gave His Son.” Behind the cross is the love of God. I don’t know what our resurrection bodies are going to be like, but we do know that the Lord Jesus had a resurrection body. You see, the body in which He was buried was the body that was marred beyond that of any man, it tells us. He had been whipped and His back lacerated. It would have been torn to shreds by the whippings He’d received. He’d been beaten on the head with sticks, it tells us, before they ever crucified Him. They had nailed Him through His hands, through His feet. They had put a crown of thorns onto His head. Blood had trickled down His body for the time He hung on the cross. He would have died of sheer exhaustion, drowning ultimately because of the build up of fluid and the inability to breath and to breath have to raise the body because everything is taut. The weight of the body pulling on the hands, and that’s why eventually you would die out of sheer exhaustion, unable to raise your body to breath. And to speed the process they would break the legs, and you couldn’t push anymore. You could only pull, and you would just not have the strength anymore to inhale. And the build up of fluid on your lungs would lead to technically a drowning internally. And we know the body of Jesus that was buried was a badly disfigured body, but He rose again from the dead, and it was a new body because when He met His disciplines it didn’t say, “This is wonderful, but you need a doctor. You’re in a bad way!” It was a resurrection body. There was a body which carried scars on His hands and His side. We know that because when Thomas doubted that He was really risen from the dead, He said, “Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach your hand, put it into my side.” And the body that ascended to heaven on that Ascension Day is a body that was wounded. And this same Jesus, the disciplines were told, will return again. And every eye will see Him. This may have an element of speculation on my part, but I feel it very much. When eye sees Him, they will see His wounds. And there’s no reason to believe that Jesus Christ will not carry His wounds throughout eternity because they’ll be appointed to His heart. See Isaiah saw this in Isaiah 49 and verse 16, in that context there, grumbling about the fact that God seems to have neglected them. And God’s response, Isaiah 49, verse 16:

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“See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” What is He engraving on the palms of His hands? They’re the nail prints, and through all eternity, through all eternity, we’ll be reminded of the heart of God by the hands of God … wounded out of love. You see, it’s true the Bible reveals the mind of God, but if that’s all we grasp, it may make us theologians. We may dot our “I’s” and cross our “T’s”, but our hearts will be cold. The Bible reveals the heart of God. And it’s connecting to His heart. It’s reflecting His heart. It’s restoring us to being what He created us to be by putting His heart back into us. “I’ll give you a new heart,” was His promise about the new covenant. “I’ll take away your heart of stone. How come you’ve got such stony hearts? Because they’re legal hearts. And I’ll put a heart of flesh, a heart that’s real, within you.” And this is why you have a Bible, not just so we know His mind, but we know His heart, and we look for His heart. What I’m saying to you tonight is something I am just learning myself because my mind, you see, is more awake than my heart sometimes. And my mind is enthralled with all the intricacies of what the Bible reveals to us, but my heart isn’t as much in touch as it needs to be. And so He reveals the deep things of darkness. He brings deep shadows into the light, and out of the shadows of God’s judgement, out of the shadows of God’s dealing with His dealing of His people through history, out of the shadow even of His wrath, there steps a heart that wherever you cut it, it’s love. May I ask you as I finish: are you enjoying His love? Do you believe in His love? Not as an article of a creed, but something which allows you to sleep with peace at night because you believe it. Do you experience His love? Are you liberated by His love? Are you confident of His love? One last verse, Romans 5, verse 5: “ … God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given to us.” This is a ministry of the Holy Spirit, to pour out the love of God into our hearts, and when the Holy Spirit pours the love of God into our hearts, we are in touch with His heart. And when our hearts connect, we’re in heart-to-heart relationship with God. That’s His goal for us. And so in studying the Word of God and understanding the Word of God, look for the heart of God, and you’ll be a better person. And you’ll have a richer God.

NOTE: On page 5, Pastor Price refers to his wife’s maiden name. It sounds like Alerton, however, it may need to be confirmed that this is the correct spelling.

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