The Bible tells us that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.  In the twentieth century liberal theology became uncomfortable with the idea of a God of justice and judgment.  It wanted to talk exclusively about God’s mercy, grace and love.  Those qualities of God are certainly valid: God’s grace and mercy go far beyond what we can imagine.  But the Biblical picture of God is also one of holiness, righteousness, justice and, yes, judgment.

        In the 1960’s and thereafter, the New Age movement arrived on the heels of liberal theology, and explained how God was only love; only positive, optimistic, sweet and gentle.  Joe Stowell, the former president of Moody in Chicago, said that even Christians started thinking of Jesus as their "Bible buddy."  We wanted a God we could hang out with, but who never judged us.

        Psychologists have talked about the desire in every human heart to be "unconditionally accepted," and some theologians and new age thinkers suggested that God was really like this; that He just unconditionally accepts us, no matter what we do.  It is true that Jesus Christ offers salvation to anyone who will accept Him, regardless of what we have done in the past.  But the God of the Bible also makes demands on us, and establishes limits beyond which we may not go without suffering.

        Suffering comes about because people violate God’s law.  If we transgress the limit, pain follows.  God’s laws are like natural laws; we disregard them at our peril. The fact that there are limits is not a suggestion that God is mean and punitive, anymore than gravity is mean and punitive because it occasionally destroys things.  God does not offer "unconditional acceptance."  Nobody does. Unconditional acceptance is an infantile fairy tale, which some people have mistaken for reality.  Whatever the relationship, I have to accept limits of behavior for that relationship to survive.  My wife cannot give me unconditional acceptance; she may give me a lot of grace and leeway, but there are things I could do which would kill the love she has for me.  I could so abuse my children that they would hate me, and they could do things which could ultimately destroy my love for them.  There are limits.  God's limits are very wide, but they are real.

        Scripture tells us that a believer may fall away from living by God’s standards to the point where God allows Satan to destroy the body in order that the spirit may be saved.  In other words, when we begin to reject God, begin to hurt other people, begin to live outside God’s law, the Scripture tells us that God will allow us to be destroyed.

        We may not like that scriptural fact about God, but there it is.  I think this is the reason that some modern theologians reject the authority of the Scriptures; they just don’t like the picture of God that the Scriptures clearly present.