BP 243
“Another of the disciples said to him, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead’” ~ Matthew 8:21-22
Have you ever felt that God has two different aspects to His character, two different voices? Some people describe it as the Old Testament version of God and the New Testament version. While they see the Old Testament God as harsher, threatening in action and angry in tone of voice, they experience Jesus in the New Testament as “gentle and lowly,” approachable, safe.
In today’s post, I’m not going to focus on what some claim are two different “manifestations” of God in Old and New Testament iterations, but rather consider the “two voices” of God which actually appear in both Testaments. I will call one voice the comforting voice of God and the other one the commanding voice.
How do you experience the character of the biblical God? Do you see Him as meek, mild, and nice? Or does He ever splash water into your boat as He did with His disciples on several occasions when they were crossing the Sea of Galilee? Do you perceive Him as always wanting you to be comfortable or does He bring discomfort into your life with His actions and His words?
I suppose we could even ask if He is the God of Contract (conditional) who in a transactional way gives you what you have earned because of your strong faith. If you do your part of the contract (have a strong faith), then He will do His part and bless you with good health, finances, and stable family. But if you don’t have faith, then . . .
Others would say that the Trinity is a God of Covenant (unconditional) who will wisely allow or bring difficulty into your life unrelated to your level of faith as a way to keep growing you since “suffering produces endurance, and endurances produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” Romans 5.
The God of Covenant will bless us with health and unhealth, riches and poverty, joy and sorrow, comfort and discomfort as He sees fit for our good not contingent on our level of faith. “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” ~ Job 1:21.
But let’s get back to how we experience God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
Another way to consider the two voices of God—Old Testament and New Testament, Contractual and Covenantal, harsh and angry as opposed to gentle and lowly—is to approach the matter from the angle of parenting styles. You probably know that there are three primary types of parenting personalities or styles known as Authoritarian, Authoritative, and Permissive.
At the harsher end of the spectrum, we encounter the authoritarian style of parenting. This parental mode is rigid, demanding, controlling–even raging, scary, and shaming with little to no emotional connection. Most children who grow up under this type of parenting style are taught compliance as opposed to obedience. No voice or will is allowed.
These children tend to practice outward compliance coupled with inward rebellion because the authoritarian parenting style extinguishes the spirit of the child–kills his or her true self. You know the old saying: Rules without relationship render rebellion.
At the other extreme is the permissive parenting style. This parent is fun, sometimes helicoptering, wants to be the child’s friend, always says yes, and often allows the child to run the household. In this family, the child often grows up to be narcissistically inclined not due to too little attention but because of too much attention. At a minimum, children raised in this environment will be bossy and offended easily if you don’t cater to them
The final parenting style is authoritative and falls in the balanced middle of the parenting spectrum. Authoritative parenting flows from imperfect but secure and mature parents who have no need to control their children or be their best friend but lovingly desire to grow them up to have well-developed frontal lobes that leads to abilities like good planning, wise judgment, respect for God and others, and a strong delay of gratification.
Christian parents believe that authoritative parenting is in line with who God the Father is and wish to model His character to their children instead of the two extremes of authoritarian (“my way or the highway”) and permissive (“whatever you want, my darling angel”) parenting.
So, one question we could ask here is if God has two voices or only one. Some people see God as only being one of the extremes—authoritarian or permissive: God is either wrathful and unpredictable, or He is nice and sweet. Personally, I believe that God has two voices, so to speak, but they are not defined as wrathful or nice as we find in the authoritarian and permissive spectrum.
As mentioned above, I believe God is authoritative, in the middle of the spectrum. As a loving parent, He never gets angry at His children for the sake of venting His anger and rubbing our noses in our sins. But neither does He coddle us and wait on us like some doting parent who is at the beck and call of the child.
God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are neither controlling parents nor child-centered parents. The Triune God is the center of the universe, not us. He is the Sun, and we are the planets who orbit around Him. He has not been created in our image like the gods of Greek mythology,—petulant, offendable, unpredictable, driven by anger. Even in the Old Testament, Yahweh is repeatedly described as a God who is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
So, if God is neither driven by wrath and control nor is He meek and mild, what is He? I see His “two voices” as comforting (sympathetic) and commanding (calling us to action). Jesus is known as gentle and lowly and will not extinguish a smoldering wick or break a bruised reed, but He will speak truth that will offend us at times.
“He [Jesus] Himself indulged no roseate visions of human nature: He “knew what was in man,” as St John tersely puts it. Nor can we imagine Him either using or advocating the invariable use of “loving” words. To speak the truth was obviously to Him more important than to make His hearers comfortable; though, equally obviously, His genuine love for men gave Him tact, wisdom, and sympathy. He was Love in action, but He was not meek and mild” ~ J.B. Phillips, Your God is Too Small (pp. 27-28).
Are not godly parents models of God’s character albeit imperfect? Do not such human parents have two voices, comforting (love) and commanding (truth)? Jesus will comfortingly hold us just as He held and blessed the children in the gospels, but He also will command us and sound very authoritative especially to those who naturally do not like the voice of authority telling them what to do.
John Piper describes Jesus’ commanding voice this way: “He [Jesus] loved in a way that was often not felt as love. No one I have ever known in person or in history was as blunt as Jesus in the way he dealt with people. Evidently his love was so authentic it needed few cushions . . . If Jesus were to speak to us the way he typically spoke in his own day, we would be continually offended and hurt. . . People were offended in his day as well. ‘Do you know,’ his disciples asked him, ‘that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?’ (Matthew 15:12). . . ‘Let them alone; they are blind guides’” ~ John Piper, What Jesus Demands from the World (pp. 218-219)
Piper goes on to put these words into Jesus’ mouth as way of explanation: “They don’t see my behavior as love because they are blind, not because I am unloving” (p. 219).
In other words, nonbelievers who don’t know Jesus will misconstrue what He is saying because of the distortions of their spiritual blindness and because they are walking in the dark. They will be offended when they need not be offended. Their natural state of rebellion against all authority, but especially against divine authority, will cause them to oppose God who seems authoritarian to them. Romans 8:7,8 says, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
But what about believers who distortedly hear God’s voice as authoritarian or permissive instead of lovingly commanding and sympathetically comforting? They might be hearing the lying voice of Satan who wants to portray God as condemning or nice. They might also be engaging in a practice known as transference.
Transference occurs when someone has unresolved emotional issues from a relationship in the past that they then transfer onto someone today. For example, if a person had an authoritarian parent as described above but has never “worked through” and healed their inner psychological trauma (and fear, anxiety, and rage) from that childhood experience, chances are good that they will “transfer” this experience onto God the Father and view Him as controlling, unpredictable, reactively rageful, and shaming—someone to be opposed.
Hearing God’s voice as authoritarian–demanding and shaming—may be the most common distortion for believers and nonbelievers alike. As Dane Ortlund writes in his book, Gentle and Lowly, “It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger.’ The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it” ~ (pp. 151-152).
Distortions can also occur due to a permissive parenting experience. John, for example, grew up with an authoritarian father and a permissive mother. His mother may have become excessively permissive as a passive-aggressive reaction against her authoritarian husband, or his father may have become even more authoritarian because his mother was too permissive. Who knows which came first or if either impacted the other much. Whatever the case, John may choose (consciously or subconsciously) to view God more like his permissive mother than his authoritarian father and so end up with a soft God that he “transferred” from his mother.
John’s view of God will be fixed on the gentle and humble aspect of Jesus’ character which feels (incorrectly) like his permissive mother. This transferred view of Jesus will cause John to distortedly view Jesus as safe, nice, sweet—someone who will never make him uncomfortable or come across as a strong authority figure. Consequently, John will love the comforting voice of God but will not be able to hear the commanding voice of God because it reminds him too much of his unpredictable and controlling father.
If John is going to hear God’s full voice, both voices, he must deal with his transference, or he will only be able to receive the sweet Jesus voice. This sweet voice is not accurate to begin with because Jesus is not “sweet” and nice as some would like to believe but loving. Nice never offends anyone. Love will speak the truth and offend all of us at one time or another.
Do you know what we could say to John here? We could say, “John, you can continue to insist that you can’t trust God because He offends you so quickly or–you could tell yourself that you don’t trust yourself because you get offended easily (because of unfinished business with your earthly authoritarian father).
The fact of the matter is that Jesus does not live to make us comfortable or to be permissive. While He can speak in a comforting voice, He can also speak in a voice that commands, challenges, and offends. His word, after all, is described as a weapon of truth in Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Listen also to Jesus’ words from John 6:60ff:
“When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this?” . . . After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Jesus’ commanding voice does not speak “nice” things or “comfortable” things to us. Indeed, His voice can speak very difficult things to us.
Receive the gentle and humble voice of Jesus but be ready to hear the commanding voice that is always for you, always keeping your best good in mind, but that will offend you at times with its truth and challenge.
God is gentle and lowly, but He is not permissive. God is sovereign and almighty, but He is not authoritarian, misusing His authority to control and shame. You must hear both voices. Do you have ears for both? Do you translate either into something they are not?
So, receive His loving comfort and also His loving commands. Healthy earthly parents (imperfectly) bring both voices to their children. God the Father speaks in both voices perfectly. Can you receive His comforting voice or is your heart too protected even against love or is your intellect your only resource?
Can you hear His commanding voice, or do you naturally rebel against it because it triggers a natural spiritual resistance in you?
Come to know the two true voices of Jesus and learn to embrace both equally. You must be able to hear both voices of God, for they are uttered by the same parent—the One who will comfort you with His Presence and who will command you to grow life and wisdom in you. Hearing his comforting voice will assure you that you are not alone in this world, and hearing His commanding voice will save you from sin and death.
Yes, hear both and live forever.
“Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” ~ Revelation 3:19,20
“. . . we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” ~ Hebrews 12:9ff
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” ~ 2 Corinthians 1:3f