Is the major theme of the Bible, a holiness of God, or the love of God?

In my previous episode, I encouraged us not to pit these attributes of God against each other.

That is never a good thing to do with the

character of God. All the attributes of God, of course, equally in hair, in God. So we need to

make that very clear. There's not one attribute that God has more than he has other attributes. God is

perfectly just. God is perfectly loving. God is perfectly omnipresent, God is perfectly

wise, and on it goes. But we do have a Bible. We have a Bible where the self-revealed God

has declared who he is and given us intelligible data for us to understand and then sift through

and apply to our life.

And what I am saying in this two-part episode series is that the biblical God presents himself

as a very, very loving God.

And the argument I'm making, if you'll recall, my pregate's episode is that evangelicals often

get a little bit fearful, I sense, of talking about

the love of God, especially the conservative type. That is because of our context. The love of God

has in some cases been hijacked and has been made to be really the only attribute of God that matters

at all. And there's a squishy form of that that then gets preached and communicated to

people. And that then leads to squishy living, where people don't think that holiness matters,

people don't think that there's any kind of striving in the Christian life, and people drift into

lives of fleshliness and sin. And that is no good thing. That is not what we're after we are

expressing. Not after that.

We want a vision of Christianity where holiness matters tremendously. But all of that drive for

holiness is driven by a deep understanding of the everlasting love God has for his people.

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