30 - God, Wrath, Emotion, Judgment [B]

God, Wrath, Emotion, Judgment. 1 Kings 11:9

1 Kings 11:4 ^NASB "For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away after other gods; and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father {had been.}" This is an important contrast to pick up as we go through this chapter. Because of his failure to follow in David's footsteps with a focus, a devotion, a faithfulness to God, he is not going to receive the blessing that would have been his if he had been obedient to God. The conclusion is in verse 6: "Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and did not follow the LORD fully, as David his father {had done.}" We will see again and again as we go through Kings that the concept of evil is contextually defined as idolatry—leading people to worship a deity other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is fundamentally the worship of anything other than God as God.

What does it mean to fully follow the Lord? The idea is not that he is completely obedient or perfect, or that he never made mistakes, or that he never sinned. We know that is exactly what David did: he sinned in incredible ways, and very publicly. All of these things indicate that David was a sinner; there wasn't anything perfect about him. Yet his heart, the focus of his thinking, his volition was positive and never shifted, he was loyal to God even though he sinned many different times. That is the issue, and it is the same issue for our own lives. The way that God evaluates us is in terms of our heart focus, our positive volition, our dedication to Him. It is not that we get away with sin or that sin in our life is not significant, that is not the issue. The issue fundamentally is that orientation, that devotion, that loyalty to God.

Then we see the response of God in verse 9 ^NASB "Now the LORD was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice." Notice how the writer of Scripture under the influence of the Holy Spirit emphasises the significance of that twofold appearance of God to Solomon. Many people think that if they had just seen Jesus they would then have had a stronger faith, have been a better Christian, and they would not have doubts. Solomon's heart has turned away from the Lord, he is on negative volition. Twice God has appeared to him, so he has an incredible amount of empirical evidence of who God is and what He can do for him. He has been blessed beyond almost any other human being, and yet despite the physical blessing, the appearance by God, he turns and rejects God. That is a tremendous lesson for any of us. The issue isn't that empirical reality; it is trusting in God's Word. It is the same principle that Jesus reiterates when he tells the story of Lazarus and the rich man. As the rich man was in torments he begged Abraham to let Lazarus be raised from the dead so that he can go back to his brothers and tell them about God and what the consequences are if they reject God. Abraham said that if they don't believe Moses and the prophets they won't believe somebody who is raised from the dead. The issue is the Word of God. If the Word of God is available—and it is to everyone in the church age—then it is sufficient, and we don't need signs and wonders and miracles and all of these other things that don't actually work.

The rest of the chapter sets us up for God's divine discipline and His judgment on Solomon. God is going to outline what He is going to do to Solomon in the rest of this paragraph and then starting in verse 14 He is going to raise up external enemies to Israel that will begin to cause problems, and then internal problems with the rebellion of Jeroboam.

"Now the LORD was angry with Solomon." What does it mean that the Lord was angry. The verb that is used here is the Hebrew word anaph. It means to be angry and it is an intensified form in the hithpael stem, but it is built off of a noun aph, which means nose, nostrils, in some places face, and it is used metaphorically for anger. We run into this in Hebrew and in Greek as well where certain things described as emotions are stated in terms of these body parts. For example, we hear of someone getting made and his nostrils flare, or his face gets red, etc. It is a figure of speech that means His nose burned. A term that was used in the early church was impassibility, but it is a term that has come under tremendous debate over the last fifteen to twenty years because of the rise of a heretical teaching within evangelicalism known as the openness of God theology or open theology.

The term "anthropopathism." The basic thing we have to remember is what God says to Isaiah in Isaiah 55:8, 9 ^NASB "'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,' declares the LORD. 'For {as} the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.'" One of the doctrines we get into in this kind of a study is the question: How do the creatures know the creator? How do we come to learn about an infinite, eternal, personal God? What kind of knowledge do we have of God? Over the course of time people have suggested that our knowledge of God is based on one of three things. Knowledge of God is though to be either equivocal, analogical, or univocal. Univocal = unit, meaning one. That has the idea that our knowledge of God is identical with His; it is one to one. Analogical means that there are points of similarity but also points of great difference, but these points of similarity allow God to utilise analogies to give us some idea of what this infinite creator is like, even though what He is like is far beyond anything we could possibly relate to. Then equivocal is the idea that we don't really know God at all, He is just so "other" that we don't know Him. What we see in the Scripture is this idea of analogy, that God uses various analogies in order to explain who He is. 

As creatures we have a certain understanding of things in a creaturely frame of reference, but God is totally other. What is fundamental to biblical Christianity is the creator-creature distinction. So when we get on the other side, beyond our finite frame of reference—from empiricism, rationalism and mysticism—into the realm of God's true existence in heaven there is little that we can truly comprehend because of our finiteness. But God has revealed Himself to us in certain was so that we can know Him, and what we can know about Him we can know truly. But there will always be things about Him that we fail to understand, and so we have to be careful as we set up this analogy between the finite realm on the one hand and the infinite realm of the creator on the other hand that what is on our side of the divide is merely a comparison. And God is saying, as it were, if you could grasp what is going on with me and my character and my attributes then what I am telling you just gives you a glimpse in your frame of reference of what I am like. It is not that we don't know Him but we don't know Him and can't understand Him exhaustively. So we should be in awe that this God that the Bible reveals to us, the God who seeks our relationship, our fellowship, the fact that he has created us for a purpose and that part of that purpose is to be in relationship with Him.

So we look at these words like the verb for "anger" and one place that we find it is in Psalm 2:12 ^NASB "Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish {in} the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!"

Psalm 79:5 ^NASB "How long, O LORD? Will You be angry forever? Will Your jealousy burn like fire?" Notice in the parallelism that jealousy is parallel to anger. So all of these terms—jealousy, anger, wrath—have to be treated the same way.

Carl F. H. Henry: "God's agape is comprehended in voluntary relationship to extend from His creative and compassionate personality [he assumes the meaning of compassion and doesn't explain it or deal with it where it comes from Scripture]. As represented in the Bible God's love presupposes the exclusive voluntary initiative of the sovereign divine Being who no external power can manipulate."

He is basically saying there that whatever is in the attributes of God are not being impacted by that which is outside. That is what impassibility means.

"Schliermacher's effort to explain theological representations of divine grace is merely the symbolic language of preaching and poetry distorts what the Bible consistently affirms, namely that God freely engages in compassionate and merciful acts."

He then goes to a well-known Baptist theologian from the late 19^th century, Augustus H. Strong, who observes that while God's holiness is invariable His mercy is optional.

"Compassionate response is no induced in God by the distress of creatures as if they were able to effect a change in the nature of an otherwise uncompassionate being."

There he is trying to explain impassibility, that the inner nature of God is not affected by what is outside. If it is, God is mutable. So Henry is wrestling with how to explain this.

"Rather, response is grounded in the living God's essential nature, i.e. His will, His voluntary disposition. Whatever Christian theology means by the passibility of God it does not mean that God's love, compassion and mercy are mere figures of speech."

That's the statement. His assumption is that to say it is a figure of speech means that there is really nothing on the other side of the analogy. You just say we have an analogy but it is just a figure of speech, it doesn't really refer to anything. The point we make is that for the analogy to work there is something on the divine side that what is on the human side is analogous to. We just can't comprehend it. And it is much more extensive and very different from words like emotion and feeling. When we read anything on emotions one of the things that is interesting is how our emotions are enacted by things we see, things we smell. We have an emotional reaction of joy or pleasure or maybe revulsion, whatever it might be; but the emotion is stimulated physically.

Historically these have been understood as anthropopathisms. E. W. Bullinger: "… the ascribing of human attributes, etc., to God… the figure is used of the ascription human passions, actions or attributes to God."

An anthropopathism is a figure of speech or language of accommodation whereby human emotions such as regret, surprise, remorse, sorrow, happiness, anger, jealousy, are ascribed to God which He does not actually possess, or ascribes to God to communicate with any finite creaturely frame of reference God's policies, plans and person.

Illustrations