You know, many people wonder what God is really like. Sadly, they base their opinions on just personal feelings on what other people have told them instead of going to the Word of God. Did you know even sometimes when you go to the Bible, if you don’t really study it, you could get a wrong impression of God. In the Old Testament, God struck people. He would punish people. A man picked up sticks on the Sabbath day and God said, “Show him no mercy and kill him for breaking the Sabbath.” In contrast, in the New Testament in John 8, there was a woman taking in the very act of adultery. She was certainly guilty – more guilty than the guy who picked up sticks on the Sabbath day. Yet, Jesus showed mercy towards her.
It makes people wonder, “What is God really like? Would the real God please stand up?” They think: is He the God of the Old Testament that is angry, punishing everything, or the God of the New Testament? Has He changed? No, the Bible says in Hebrews 13, that He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. What you have to understand is that God has always been love – 1 John 4:8. God loves you. He loves you independent of your actions. People were taking God’s lack of punishment and rejection as approval. Because of that, they opened up the door to sin and the Bible says in Romans 6:16, “Know you not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?”
If you go out, and through sin open up a door to the devil, he is going to come in and eat your lunch and pop the bag. He will destroy you. Even though God was not wanting to impute peoples’ sin unto them, He was wanting to be merciful. He had to start punishing sin in order to deter people from living in sin and allowing Satan to destroy them. Under the Old Covenant, there was a wrath of God released upon sin for the purpose of turning people away from it. It was only temporary until Jesus could come and pay our sin debt. Now that Jesus has paid our sin debt, God is merciful to us in a way He wasn’t merciful to people under the Old Covenant. That doesn’t mean we can just get by with sin. Sin still has consequences, but God is merciful to us.
If you can understand this, it’ll help you to understand the true nature of God. I have got an entire teaching on this entitled “The True Nature Of God” that could really help you. I pray the little bit I have said today will help you to see God is a good God. God loves you and God wants to bless you more than you want to be blessed. That is the true nature. God is love. He loves you. There is nothing you can do to make Him love you more. There is nothing you can do to make Him love you less. God is love. Period.