God's Saving Love
“ The Lord is become as an enemy . . .” ( Lamentations 2:5 rv).
Deliverance comes through destruction, and for a while the soul does not know whether God is a friend or an enemy. God has one purpose in destruction, and that is the deliverance of His own. God’s own is not you, but His own in you. All that is saved is the work of God in a man, nothing else. Destruction means the obliteration of every characteristic of the life that is not rooted in godliness, it never means the annihilation of the life. The judgments of God are a consuming fire whereby He destroys in order to deliver; the time to be alarmed in life is when all things are undisturbed. The knowledge that God is a consuming fire is the greatest comfort to the saint, it is His love at work on those characteristics that are not true to godliness. The saint who is near to God knows no burning, but the farther away from God the sinner gets, the more the fire of God burns him.
In verses 1-9 the wrath of God is emphasised. God’s love is wrath towards wrong; He is never tender to that which hates goodness. All through the Bible reveals that when once communion with God is severed the basis of life is chaos and wrath. The chaotic elements may not show themselves at once, but they will presently. All that this Book says about corruption in connection with the flesh is as certain as God is on His throne if the life is not rightly related to God. When we speak of the wrath of God we must not picture Him as an angry sultan on the throne of heaven, bringing a lash about people when they do what He does not want. There is no element of personal vindictiveness in God. It is rather that God’s constitution of things is such that when a man becomes severed from God his life tumbles into turmoil and confusion, into agony and distress, it is hell at once, and he will never get out of it unless he turns to God; immediately he turns, chaos is turned into cosmos, wrath into love, distress into peace. “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord” we persuade men to keep in touch with Him. The world pays no attention to those who tell them how God convicted of sin and how He delivered them; the warnings of God are of no use to sinners until they are convicted of sin and the warnings become applicable to them.
Chambers, O. 1996, c1950. Conformed to His image. Marshall, Morgan & Scott: London