Scripture makes it evident that the universe is engaged in a great controversy. We are the theatre of the universe; therefore, we would expect the enemy to tell lies about God. In a war, we are told the first casualty is the truth. Jesus told us that satan is the father of lies. We have been considering some of those lies.

Please let me put the meditations of the last week in a nutshell before we move on to some more lies that we hear about God. We have discussed our modern supermarket style of religion where God can be whatever you want Him to be. Man has made God in his own image. The essence of idolatry is to fashion God into more manageable and understandable levels, but this ignores the revelation that God made of Himself and the way that He made it.

We also noted that the statement, “I believe in God” is the most meaningless statement of our age (the garb – age) because everybody has a different God, and it is not the God revealed to us in the Bible. Even Christianity has a variety of “Gods” because in the most part they ignore the revelation that God has made of Himself from the Old Testament. Thus, God becomes a power, a force, a psychic energy, or as Jeremiah said, “like a scare crow in a cucumber patch.” God HAS revealed Himself and He chose to do it in a particular way. If we ignore the Old testament revelation, then we will not get a right picture of God!

If we were in school, we could make 2 lists on the board of the attributes of God. What do you think the two headings would be? One list would be God as unfailing love, forgiveness, understanding, patience, longsuffering, and redeeming. In the other list we would write; harsh, exacting, punishing, wrath, anger, awesome, powerful, judging, unchanging, and particular. The two headings we would place on these two lists are the two main attributes of God’s character. These two attributes are the centre piece of the Old Testament sanctuary service (God’s sand box lesson book of salvation.) The two focal points of this pantomime in the desert were Justice and Mercy – the two words we would put on our two lists. This ancient ceremony, which is strongly represented in the New Testament but largely ignored, unified the love and justice we see at the cross. As Psalm 85:10 says, “Unfailing love and truth have met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed!”

This led us to the second lie that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are somehow different. We noted that God’s opinions regarding sin and judgement have not changed only the timetable has. Grace is just as evident in the Old testament as it is in the New. The wages of sin have always been death in both Testaments – in fact since the beginning of time for our world. There is no difference between the Old and New testament God.

The third lie we have considered was that there are not multiple ways to be saved. There are not many paths to God, there is only one way. Fourthly, we reiterated that it is not Ok to mess with the rules. God’s rules and laws are immutable.