Consequence vs Penalty
By John Gavazzoni
Even though one is given to see from heaven's view how error ultimately serves the glory of truth, certain popular, yet deeply flawed, concepts of God, nevertheless...with their blatantly ignorant repetitive appearance in sermons, songs, Bible studies, and Christian internet discussion forums...cause at least drawn-out moments of heart-grief even for such a one. Very deservedly the insistence that God must be understood, from the very start of any quest for truth, in penal terms belongs on any list of concepts that cause painful revulsion in the heart that relates to the family-room God as opposed to the courtroom god.
We would think that if there is, indeed, a penalty-imposing factor intrinsic to the Divine Nature...thus intrinsic to how He relates to mankind...we would find it in the record of that event that supposedly drew forth that imagined factor. That is, we would find it in the Genesis record of man's original, and in the end, universally infectious off-the-Way departure from rightly relating to God. Redemption in Christ realigns us to relating to God according to how He relates to us. If we are to enjoy an undisturbed fellowship with God, we must think relationally as He thinks.
So if God has it in His nature to impose penalty in reaction to misbehavior, the Genesis account would read something like this: "Of every tree in the garden you may eat of it, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it, for in the day you eat of it, My mixed nature of law and grace is such, that I will be forced to impose a penalty upon your disobedience." No, as my Bible student readers know, God instead spoke of a consequence, not a penalty...big difference. From the Hebrew text: "for in the day you eat thereof, dying you shall die." That's the language of consequence, not penal imposition. (As an aside, please note the language of prediction, rather than possibility. It is not, "should you possibly end up eating...." it is, "in the day you eat...")
Dad was saying, if I may paraphrase, "eat that fruit which is, by its nature, alien to your nature, and of course, consequently, dying, you shall die. Poison will do that, you know." It was predictive certainty of a coming consequence, not of a penal reaction. It's difficult to explain how judgment is a factor in God's dealing with us, since the word, "judgment," carries with it in the average mind, so much religious baggage. In order to understand how judgment plays a part in how God relates to us, we must understand its not-necessarily-forensic root meaning. The judgment of God in scripture is about God rightly deciding things. And where things are not right, His decision is to make it right. Really! That's what the judgment of God is all about, deciding to make things right, and having the authority and power to do so.
But what about the law God gave through Moses? Doesn't the fact that God gave that law mean that a factor of penalty does exist in the way God relates to us? No, not really. From the time Adam joined Eve in eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... which symbolized metaphorically an intrusion of legally-based consciousness toward God...the resultant death passed on to all men, and was a condition of suffering that disconnect which is the nature of death. Death is a separation of disconnectedness. The carnal mind cannot help but think of God in legal terms. Since the garden-event (resolved, by the way, in the Christ-event set in motion in the Garden of Gethsemane), man naturally carries the constant burden of trying to please a god of rules and regulations.
In that condition, there is no rest. Deep within his consciousness are the questions, "am I really pleasing God; how can I please Him; what should I do or not do to gain His pleasure?" Over and over again the record plays. The atheist and agnostic try to shut out that "noisome pestilence," but it's there, even driving their denial of God's existence. The religious man stays on the treadmill going nowhere, until the law wears him out, and he's ready to meet the God of love and grace. Yes, God gave the law through Moses as a concession to Israel's already prototypical subjective legalism. God meets with us where we are in order to take us to where He wants us to be.
Law existed subjectively in all humanity before the law was given as an objective standard. And the cure for that vanity, that frustration and futility of the creature, involved the objective imposition that made the subjective state even more intolerable. That which is against our nature inevitably becomes a catalyst to discovering our union with Jesus Christ, with whom, from all eternity, there has never been any merit-based factor in His relationship with the Father. Law is about merit. Grace is about Love's insistent and unconditional givingness.
It grieves me when the grace of God is taught as based upon "the merits of Jesus Christ," as if the Son of God gained merit with the Father by His spiritual performance. That's Babylonian confusion at its worst, and it stinks to high heaven. Among other things, the notion that there will exist differences of reward in eternity among the saints of God derives essentially from that confusion. Any fiery temporal loss of our self-righteous "wood, hay, and stubble" in this lifetime exists only that we might gain Christ, and be found in Him not with any righteousness of our own, but with the righteousness of/from God by the faith of Christ.
No losers in eternity, only gainers: we all having experientially, by grace, gained Christ in all His fullness! God, all in all. No loss there. There is a gain that belongs to resurrection, and there can be no resurrection without death. Thus God placed that tree of death in the garden. Life is great, but life having passed through death to the glory of resurrection is life ablaze in its full glory.
