It Won’t Stick

I have an old beater truck that I use for hauling yard waste and junk to the dump…and furniture for family and friends. It has a rearview mirror attached to the windshield that keeps falling off. I have tried all kinds of glue…superglue, gorilla glue…but nothing holds. Just touch the mirror and it falls off again.

Fortunately for me a local auto parts store here in Edmonds recommended a two-part epoxy glue guaranteed to do the job.

But the store owner was emphatic.

You have to clean both surfaces really well and then be sure to mix both vials of the epoxy in equal parts. Get the mixture wrong, he said, and it won’t stick.

It takes both ingredients.

That’s the illustration that came to me in my quiet time this morning as I read the first chapter of Nahum. Nahum is God’s messenger to Nineveh. A century earlier, when God sent Jonah to prophesy the destruction of the city they repented and God stayed His hand of judgment.

But now, 100 years later, their repentance long forgotten, Nineveh had turned back to their evil ways.

And God was having none of it.

So, Nahum starts out, “The Lord is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and rage. He takes revenge on all who oppose him and continues to rage against his enemies. The Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished” (Nahum 1:1-2a NLT).

Wow!

I bet this is a text you likely have never heard preached, at least not in the last 30 years, except maybe in a small rural fire-and-brimstone church in the deep south. From what I have observed none of today’s celebrity preachers or mega church pastors would touch this text with a ten foot pole.

Why are today’s pulpits silent re: the wrath of God?

They obviously haven’t read Jesus’ letter to Thyatira, threatening to “throw Jezebel on a bed of suffering or striking her followers dead” (Revelation 2:22-23).

Or God being a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29).

Or Jesus telling the man in the Temple, whom He had just healed, “stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you” (John 5:14).

Too many pastors are afraid that if they even speak of judgement, that it will cost them their pulpits, their popularity and their social media following.

So, they preach exclusively on the love of God, the grace of God, and how to have your best life now.

They have even made the suggestion that it is time for today’s Christian to “unhitch their faith from the Old Testament.”

Really?

Is the God of the New Testament a different God than Abraham or King David knew?

Has he gotten softer with age, like permissive grandfather?

This aversion to the God of the Bible is nothing new.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited New York in the late 1930’s, he said that if you wanted to hear any sermons on sin, judgment, the blood of Jesus and repentance in New York City, you had to go to the African American churches of Harlem.

Here is the problem.

The wrath of God and the grace of God are two indispensable ingredients to the “glue” if salvation is going to stick and do it’s life-long work.

You can’t have one without the other.

You set either aside at your own peril.

You totally mislead your audience concerning the nature of God when you preach one at the expense of the other…and quite possibly jeopardize the foundation of their salvation.

The wrath of God against sin and the grace of God to save sinners are two elements of his character that are not in opposition to each other but exist in Him at the same time. In perfect harmony. They are not mutually exclusive. They are not in conflict.

This is who God is.

And the sooner we get back to balance in our portrayal of who God is the quicker we will see people become truly born-again followers of Jesus.