Contradictory God?

Isaiah 65:5-7


"You meet him who rejoices in doing righteousness,
         Who remembers You in Your ways 
         Behold, You were angry, for we sinned,
         We continued in them a long time;
         And shall we be saved? 
    For all of us have become like one who is unclean,
         And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment;
         And all of us wither like a leaf,
         And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 
    There is no one who calls on Your name,
         Who arouses himself to take hold of You;
         For You have hidden Your face from us
         And have delivered us into the power of our iniquities."


This passage really shows the helplessness we find ourselves in because of sin. "How then can we be saved" if we are "unclean" and even our "righteous acts are like filthy rags?" We are wasting away because of our sins, and we cannot get back to God.


This is why we need a Savior. This passage is in the second part of Isaiah, which one of my commentaries calls the "New Testament of Isaiah." So we think it should just be warm and fuzzy prophesy of redemption. And we are met with the wonderful promise of a Savior, but that is not the only reality we encounter.


We also find that we are horribly trapped in sin, so badly that nothing we do is enough to fix our pathetic state. We are ill with the disease of sin.


And we also must remember that God is unchanging, and is therefore, still a God of wrath. He is loving and compassionate, but he also promises judgement. There are not two different Gods, the Old Testament God of wrath and judgement and the New Testament God of love and grace. Believe it or not, this was a belief deemed as heresy in early church history. A theologian named Marcion threw the Old Testament out of his canon of the Bible because it showed a God of wrath that he thought was different than the God who sent Jesus to die for our sins. 


And I think we do this too sometimes. We think that the God of judgement is contradictory to the God of grace we know. But then we become confused as to why Jesus even had to die. 


God is too holy to allow sin into his presence. His wrath against sin had to be satisfied through an offering. Isaiah 53:10 tells us that the coming Messiah will be a guilt offering. "Buy his wounds we are healed."


My friend and fellow 40/40 Gary talks about the guilt offering in his blog. He says that Jesus is our "one size fits all sacrifice." Jesus is the only remedy to our horrible disease of sin, the only one who can make us clean and whole. Jesus was the offering that satisfied God's wrath toward sin. God still hates sin, all of it, and it all separates us from his presence. But he shows the sinner grace by offering salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. That is who God is.