LSF bible Study 090110

LSF bible Study 090110
Vicar Darren Harbaugh
(Thank you Lutheran Study Bible)

How do we read and Study the Bible? - God’s Two Ways

Is the God of the Old Testament a mean, vengeful God?

Is Richard Dawkins right when he says, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

How do we make sense of some of those difficult Old (and New) Testament passages?

Continuing with the theme: “How do you read and study the Bible?,” Let’s examine “God’s 2 ways: Law and Gospel.”

Law and Gospel
…or “Commands and Promises” (Gen 12:1-3), or “the Lord’s Two Ways” (Ex 34:6-7), or “Repentance and Forgiveness” (Mk 1:14-15, Lk 24:45-47), or “Twofold power” (Deut 32:39, 2 Cor 3:6) or, “Law and Grace," "Sin and Grace," "Spirit and Letter," "Ministry of death/condemnation" and "Ministry of the Spirit/righteousness” (2 cor 3:6-9), or…

Passages that command good works or threaten punishment for sin are passages of God’s Law. This is one way of how God works with people. The law cannot save, but it shows us our sin and drives us to repentance. It serves the central message of the Bible, the Gospel, by which God saves us.

Passages that declare God’s forgiveness, life, and salvation in Christ are passages of the Gospel. You see this in the Old and New Testament. It is fulfilled in Christ’s work on the Cross.

The Law: commands and condemns (Shows Our Sin – curb, mirror, rule)
The Gospel: forgives and saves

Alien Work Isaiah 28:21-22
For the LORD will rise up as on Mount Perazim;
as in the Valley of Gibeon he will be roused;
to do his deed—strange is his deed!
and to work his work—alien is his work!
…for I have heard a decree of destruction
from the Lord GOD of hosts against the whole land.

Proper work (and Alien work)
Ex 34:4-7
So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first. And he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand two tablets of stone. The LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD. The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

(See also Ps 118:18; 119:28, I Sam 2:6)

It’s important to realize this about God–something probably only knowable through His revelation in the Incarnate Son–that His deepest nature is life-giving, expressed in the Gospel, and that His wrath, while very real, being a function of His holiness, is somehow alien to His nature, though something He uses to bring us to Himself. – Gene Veith