Wrath = your right to be wrong.

For the Lord will not cast off for ever:  

But though he cause grief,

yet will he have compassion

according to the multitude of his mercies.

For he doth not afflict willingly

nor grieve the children of men. 

To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, 

To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High, 

To subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not.      Lamentations 3:31-36

The sport of calvinist/augustinian proponents is reprobate hunting.  They love to point out that their supposedly logical system demands that God pre-select certain people to go to hell in an unmitigated evil condition.  Notice it is that their logic demands it…not that God has stated that He will so behave in view of man and his problem of sin.  Ironically, these same calvinist imaginators (they have no right to be called “thinkers” since they dream in the realm of lies) will argue indefinitely that God can do whatever He wishes.  Except, of course, that He cannot do anything that is contrary to their imaginative system.  Instead of glorifying God in their expression of how He acts, they make Him their puppet.  Even in the foolishness of the calvinist theory of reprobation, they betray themselves as not knowing the heart of God: if the reprobate are condemned as a class, why has He made them each unique – like the supposedly pre-selected saved?

Verse 33 points out that God does not willingly cause affliction for humans.  The best translation for this verse is that He does not have the heart for it.  It is not a part of who He is to cause harm to His own creation.  It does not mean that He cannot bring discipline.  It means that He will not bring it without feeling it.  When the calvinist characterizes God as acting from a position of coldness and random inertia, he has ignored the truth of Scriptures that teaches that God keeps records and takes the time to visit with each person in judgment (Revelation 20:11-13).  The reason for this activity is obvious, each person is unique and God must explore what has happened in the life of each individual.  He does not condemn an entire class of peoples (what the calvinists call “reprobates”) by fiat but allows condemnation to work if humans choose darkness instead of light (John 3:19).

The wrath of God is often pictured as some relentless beating that God wishes to unleash upon all sinners.  Instead of whipping the sinners that deserve it (the reprobates don’t seem to count in this equation…), God whips His son Jesus instead.  The difficulty in this picture is that Jesus IS the wrath of God.  God’s wrath is best pictured as establishing the absolute standard for what is right and expecting all of creation to adhere to it.  To solidify His cause, He integrates Himself into creation and fixes that standard indelibly; signs it in His own blood, you might say.  God rejects any other attempts (pagan, legalism, etc.) to deal with Him apart from a Jesus deal.  This rejection is wrath.  The more deceptive and comprehensive the alternative dealers (satan and his minions) are, the more they are subject to the severity of eternal consequences.  Minions are not all angelic or demonic…some are human.  Even so, on the last day, God will pay them the compliment of their position in the created order by judging each according to the books.

The good news that the apostles began to preach by the power of the Holy Spirit was that the shed blood of Jesus on the cross was able to cleanse us of sins.  Because we are human, we have the right to stand before God and have the books opened as we are examined.  We have no hope that we will survive that examination unless the blood of Jesus has done its cleansing work in our lives.  We cannot invent systems of thought or imaginary scenarios that would, by the remotest possibility, lead people astray from the clear call of the Cross of Jesus Christ to come there for salvation.

Come to the cross.

Why look in there?

The heart is deceitful above all things, 
and desperately wicked: 
who can know it?   
I the LORD search the heart, 
I try the reins, 
even to give every man according to his ways, 
and according to the fruit of his doings.  Jeremiah 17:9-10

The illogical theological system that Calvin and his type concocted in response to their love for Augustine led them to draw stupid conclusions that they passed on for later generations of Christianity to explore.  People in the Dutch lands where the tulip grows most beautifully fell in love with Calvin and honored him with the T-U-L-I-P acronym that outlines the calvinist system.  The T stands for total depravity.  The calvinist types believe that man became utterly wicked when Eve ate figs in the garden and passed them on to Adam.  In their explanation of what mankind became, they grab for verses such as Jeremiah 17:9 to prove their case.  At first glance, it does seem to give credibility to their way of thinking.

 It is possible that we "Jesus above all else" believers would have to yield the floor to the augustinian/calvinist school of thinking if it weren't for the beauty of verse 10 that destroys the T of the TULIP.  If calvinist prophets are correct, then why is Jesus poking around in the human heart?  What is He in search of if, in His divine omnipotence (calvinists love to distract people from simple truth by using big words and grandiose notions to reinvent reality), He cannot remember that all humans are TOTALLY wicked.  You see, there is a difference between desperately wicked and TOTALLY wicked.  God knows the difference between desperate and total and, since He knows that depravity is not total, He visits His creation to offer a gift that will stir the heart of desperate humanity.

The heart of every human person was designed by God and built to respond to love.  The human capacity to love was not destroyed by sin and God considered that it was best to put Himself into His creation (Jesus is God) so that He could raise a banner to rally us to His Ultimate Love.  At the Cross of Calvary, God closed the deal on His pre-foundation of the world plan to draw the hearts of mankind to Him.  Having "John Three Sixteened" us all, He left us without excuse, knowing that we can only avoid the love of the Cross by deliberately closing our hearts to Him and investing that love in a foolish system.

The angels shouted and sang to humanity at the birth of Jesus.  God shouts and sings to us from the cross of the Unfailing Love that can heal every desperate heart.

Come to the Cross.

No Autonomy - chosen in the servant.

Isaiah 42:1  Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.

Isaiah 43:10  Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. 

Isaiah 44:1  Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen:

Isaiah 45:4  For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. (KJV)

Anyone see a pattern here?

When Calvin and people of that mindset began to imagine that they were more important than they were (what my Dad would call, "too big for their britches!"), they grabbed at an understanding of words from their OWN frame of reference instead of digging into the biblical context and gaining wisdom.  Full of knowledge of their own system of thought designed around Greek philosophy, they considered that the word "elect" could be used to describe how they were individually chosen by God for salvation.  There is no truth in the concept.  Paul does not support it.  The only way that anyone can make it work in the New Testament is to take out the prepositional phrases that the Apostles use:  "through Christ...by Christ...in Christ Jesus"...etc. 

The truth about salvation is that it is only available as a relationship with a servant of God.  The wonderful mystery that God designed before all worlds is that He became that very Servant and drew into Himself the work of all servants who had gone before Him in His own plan: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 12 brothers, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, Saul, David----------->Joseph, Mary, Jesus.  He then set in motion the plan to incorporate (the word means to bring into a body) everyone who has a relationship with Him into the church; "to the Jew first and also to the Greek (aka gentile)." Romans 1:16.

The beautiful thing about servanthood is that no one is exempt. NO ONE!!  Anyone can have a relationship with the Living God through Jesus Christ who is God Himself.  As one of us, -human- His expectation is that we will be conformed to life as He lives it...as a servant. (Luke 22:27)  His service to us is well understood in the way that He taught and behaved among the people in 1st century Palestine.  His service to us is best demonstrated by the Love that He exclaimed to the world from the Cross.  No one is exempt from the cross of Jesus.  Everyone must eventually do business there.  

Come to the Cross.

Above all else, guard your heart.

 The watchmen that went about the city

They found me,

They smote me,

They wounded me;

The watchers on the walls

They stripped my veil off of me.  Song of Solomon 5:7

Probably the most misunderstood book of the Old Testament is the Song of Solomon.  The most important difficulty is that most translators and interpreters establish the story along the lines of two principle characters: Solomon and the Shulamite virgin.  The reason that this problem exists is because translators refuse to properly render the Hebrew letters d-w-d as David.  Obviously, this rendering would introduce another character into the story that would make it more complicated.  However, when one reads the book of Ecclesiastes immediately before the Song of Solomon, the allegorical meaning of the Song becomes clear.  Solomon, knowing that he is profligate and unfaithful to the Lord, is able to point out his failure poetically by placing this virgin in “romantic” tension between himself and his powerful father, David.  The resulting story is a question to be answered by Israel; will you follow David with a heart for God or Solomon with all the trappings of religious power?

The tension in this book is poignant today in that there are religious ideas such as calvinism that are offered that seem wise and grandiose like Solomon.  The proponents of this system of thought strip away the heart of the loving God that is represented by David (1 Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22) to exalt an image of God that is derived from pagan and Greek sources instead of the Hebrew pasture.  If calvinism could work its will throughout Christianity, it would rewrite the Christmas story as the birth of Herod the Great’s grandson in a palace instead of the son of David in a manger.  The notions of calvinism are designed to reconstruct a city like the one administered by Solomon; heartless, pompous and apparently powerful but, in fact, a prison of man-made foolishness.

The prophetic character of the verse above shows the Shulamite virgin, supposedly the object of the king’s desire, being stalked and beaten by the administration of Solomon.  Watchmen, who are paid to protect the city from an outside threat, are imprisoning and terrorizing the virgin.  She is desperately trying to escape the walls of Solomon’s pagan city to pursue the vision of her beloved, King David.  She, like the church, is mistreated in the same fashion as her beloved, Jesus, Messiah, son of David the King (Romans 8:17). 

The trajectory of this story finds a landing place in a courtyard in Jerusalem where hidebound fools who deliberately ignored the heart of the Scriptures in favor of its ritual demands curse God by claiming that they “have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15).  The echo of this shout is punctuated by the sound of a hammer, driving accursed iron into the hands of God Himself (Jesus is God!) as the Savior completes the last details of a plan that was made before the foundation of the world.  The glorious promise made by God to all of humanity is that He has broken down the walls of Solomon’s city and opened the doorway of the cross to humble hearts that want to come home to a loving Father.

Come to the Cross.