God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

by David F. Wells

Overview

Building on years of research and teaching, experienced author and theologian David Wells offers a remedy for evangelicalism’s superficial theology and weightless conception of God: a journey to discover the paradoxical nature of his holiness and love. We all struggle, at times, to hold that paradox together, commonly resulting in problems such as liberalism or legalism. Yet understanding how God’s holiness is inextricably bound to his love is what enables us to live between the two extremes and defines our life of service in this world. In the vein of classics such as Packer’s Knowing God, Wells’s biblical theology is written at an accessible level so that all readers can cultivate a balanced vision of the God who belongs in the center of it all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433531347
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	01/31/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	541 KB

About the Author

David Wells (PhD, University of Manchester) is a distinguished research professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is the author or editor of a number of books, some of which have been translated into many different languages. He is a member of the John Stott Ministries board, where he has worked to bring theological education to church leaders in developing countries. He is also actively involved in working to build orphanages and provide educational opportunities for victims of civil wars and AIDS in Africa. David and his wife, Jane, live in Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

God Our Vision, Culture Our Context

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, Naught be all else to me, save that thou art; Thou my best thought, by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

ELEANOR H. HULL

In this book, we are on a journey. Our destination is a well-known place. It is the character of God. We are taking a journey into "the Father's heart," as A. W. Tozer put it. It is here that we find our home, our resting place, our joy, our hope, and our strength.

The goal of Christ's redemption was, after all, that we might know God, love him, serve him, enjoy him, and glorify him forever. This is, indeed, our chief end. It was for this end that Christ came, was incarnate, died in our place, and was raised for our justification. It was that we might know God. Once, we were part of that world which "did not know God" (1 Cor. 1:21). But now we "have come to know God" (Gal. 4:9). We "know him who is from the beginning" (1 John 2:13) because we know "the love of Christ," and the aim of redemption is that we "may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:19). And this knowledge of God, this experience of his goodness, is what our experience in life has sometimes diminished. That is why it must constantly be renewed.

This is our goal in life, that we might be God-centered in our thoughts and God-fearing in our hearts, as J. I. Packer put it. We are to be God-honoring in all that we do. And how is that going to happen if we never consider, or consider only fleetingly, or irregularly, the end toward which we travel, and the one who also walks with us through life on the way to this end?

The greatest in God's kingdom, down the ages, have always found a dwelling place here. Here they have found their sustenance, their delight, and their solace. "How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!" (Ps. 84:1), cried the psalmist. "My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food ... when I remember you upon my bed" (Ps. 63:5–6). Knowing God is itself what deepened David's thirst to know him even more. And it has ever been so.

Knowing God fills us with a hunger for more of what we already know. "As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God" (Ps. 42:1). David knew God at this time, but his desire for God drew him back to the great and glorious center of all reality for even more. That is, and always has been, the cry of those who know God well. And connected with this thirst for God is a deep delight in him. It is a delight we see in many of the psalms, a delight robust and virile, as C. S. Lewis said, and one which we today sometimes have to regard with "innocent envy." So, how might we know what the psalmists knew? How might we, too, learn to delight in God?

In this book, I will not be able to consider all of God's attributes. In an earlier generation, Stephen Charnock did this in his classic, The Existence and Attributes of God, but it fills more than 1,100 pages! Here, I must limit myself and so will be thinking only of God's character. This, as I will explain, I am summing up as his "holy-love." That is our main destination. As we think of this place, we will also think about the consequences of all of this for living in the twenty-first century.

At the very beginning, though, I want to highlight two challenges we will encounter. I am going to return to the first of these in several of the chapters that follow. The second I will mention here, and then, from here on, we will simply have to be aware of it. We have to think about these challenges in this book because we have already encountered both in our lives more times than we can even number. We are so familiar with them that we might not fully realize how important they are.

The first of these challenges may strike you as strange. I am going to identify what is the most important cultural challenge we will encounter as we try to enter into a deeper knowledge of God. It may strike you as strange that I want to raise this with you at the outset. Are we not starting at the wrong place? Do we not agree that if we want to know the character of God then all we need to do is to open our Bibles? After all, biblical truth is the foundation of our knowledge of God. It is Scripture alone that is God-breathed and, therefore, it is the source of our knowledge of God. Is this not entirely sufficient, then, for all we need to know about God and his character?

The answer, of course, is that Scripture is indeed sufficient. However, there is a proviso here. Scripture will prove sufficient if we are able to receive from it all that God has put into it. That, though, is not as simple as it sounds. The reason lies in what Paul says elsewhere. We are to "be transformed by the renewal" of our minds — which is surely what happens when we take hold of the truth God has given us in his Word — but also, he says, we are not to be "conformed to this world" (Rom. 12:2). The shaping of our life is to come from Scripture and not from culture. We are to be those in whom truth is the internal driver and worldly horizons and habits are not. It is always sola Scriptura and it should never be sola cultura, as Os Guinness puts it. This is a two-sided practice: "Yes" to biblical truth and "No" to cultural norms if they damage our walk with God and rob us of what he has for us in his Word. Being transformed also means being unconformed.

Why is this? The answer is that our experience of our culture may have affected how we see things. Given the intense exposure we have to our modernized world, we need to be alert to the way it can shape our perspective and understanding. Along the way, we will pick up on this, but shortly I want to explain what I believe is its central challenge.

The second challenge I am going to mention you may have experienced even in the short time since opening this book! It is the extraordinary bombardment on our mind that goes on every day from a thousand different sources that leave us distracted, with our minds going simultaneously in multiple directions. How, then, can we receive from Scripture the truth God has for us if we cannot focus long enough, linger long enough, to receive that truth? Every age has its own challenges. This is one of ours. It is the affliction of distraction.

The Center of Reality

The first challenge, then, has to do with our culture. How is it that our culture may get in our way of knowing God as he has revealed himself to be?

Let me begin with a baseline truth of Scripture. It is that God stands before us. He summons us to come out of ourselves and to know him. This is the most profound truth that we ever encounter — or should I say, the most profound truth by which we are encountered? — and it is key to many other truths. And yet our culture is pushing us into exactly the opposite pattern. Our culture says that we must go into ourselves to know God. This is the cultural question that we must begin to understand, because otherwise it will shape how we read Scripture, how we see God, how we approach him, and what we want from him. So, here goes!

I should say right away that real faith, faith of a biblical kind, has always had a subjective side to it. That is not in question. When we hear the gospel, it is we who must respond. It is we who must repent and believe. And it is the Holy Spirit who works within us supernaturally to regenerate us, to give new life where there was only death, new appetites for God and his truth where before there were none, joining us to the death of Christ so that we might have the status of sons. And not only the status but also the experience of being God's children. We have received, Paul declares, "the Spirit of adoption as sons" whereby "we cry 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God ..." (Rom. 8:15–16). All of this, of course, is internal. It takes place in the depths of our soul and it encompasses all that we are. And in no way are these truths being doubted when I say that God stands before us and summons us to come out of ourselves and know him. But what does it mean to say that God stands before us, that he is, in this sense, objective to us?

Let me begin at some distance from Christian faith and slowly work toward the center, where we want to be. Along the way, we will be thinking about how our experience in this pressure-filled, affluent, globalized culture shapes our understanding of who God is and what we expect from him.

God Is Out There, Somewhere

That God is before us will seem like an unexceptional statement. When some people hear those words they may only think that God exists and that he is in our world. In the West, the number of those who believe in God's existence has usually been in the 90–97 percent range. In 2013, though, only 80 percent of Americans put themselves in this category in a Pew study. Nevertheless, when those who subscribe to the "New Atheism" mock this belief in God's existence — a "delusion," as Richard Dawkins calls it; an "anachronism," Steven Pinker declares; and just a set of "fantasies," says Sam Harris — they find themselves outside the mainstream in all our Western cultures. Furthermore, about 80 percent of people in the West also consider themselves to be "spiritual." Remarkably, this is true even in Europe, where the processes of secularization have run very deeply for a very long time.

But the real question to ask about belief in God's existence is this: what "weight" does that belief have? The U.S. Congress had the words "In God We Trust" placed on our paper currency in 1956, but it is also clear that this belief, for many, is a bit skinny and peripheral to how they actually live. They believe in God's existence but it is a belief without much cash value. To say that God is "before" them, therefore, would be somewhat meaningless. It does not necessarily have the weight to define how they think about life and how they live. Indeed, one of the defining marks of our time, at least here in the West, is the practical atheism that is true of so many people. They say that God is there but then they live as if he were not.

How a person thinks about God, Paul Froese and Christopher Bader show in their America's Four Gods: What We Say about God — and What That Says about Us, is shaped by their answers to two other questions. First, does God ever intervene in life? Second, does God ever make moral judgments about what we do and say?

If the answer to both of these questions is "yes," then saying that God is before us will mean something entirely different from what it would mean if the answer to these questions is "no." If we think that God has a hands-off approach to life, how we think of being in his presence will be one thing; if we think he has a hands-on approach, it will be something quite different. Should we think of him, then, as a landlord who keeps the building in repair but does not interfere in the lives of those who live there? Should we think of him more as a cheerleader who shouts encouragement from the sidelines but is not himself in the game? Or a therapist who always maintains an arms-length relationship with the patient so that the analysis is not skewed but who knows that, in the end, it is the patient who must right his or her own ship? Should we think of God as being nonjudgmental, one who keeps his moral thoughts to himself? This is the direction in which our culture is pushing us: God does not interfere. He is a God of love and he is not judgmental.

The other angle here is how much God cares about our weaknesses and failures. Indeed, how much does he know? And what weight does he give to different failures?

Ours is a day in which information about the world — about its wars, tragedies, suffering, and hatreds — is instantaneous and simultaneous. We are becoming knowledgeable, through TV and the Internet, of everything of significance that happens. And a whole lot of what is entirely insignificant, too! This raises in our minds some interesting questions. Given the awful cruelties that go on in the world, does God really care about our own private, comparatively small peccadilloes? Does he get bent out of shape by a little moment of deceit here or there when we are simply trying to avoid embarrassment? Is it so terrible to tell a lie if there is no malice? How about a sexual weakness that we cannot resist? Or a little self-promotion that drifts loose of the facts? Does he obsess over these private failures? Does he really care? Or is he large and generous and does he overlook what we are powerless to change? Is he not more preoccupied with cheering us on than with condemning us? This, too, is where our culture wants to take us.

We hear this cultural way of thinking even being echoed in the church. Joel Osteen, pastor of America's largest church audience — not to mention his worldwide following of 200 million — takes us down this road every week. In his (saccharin-like) view, God is our greatest booster who, sadly, is frustrated that he cannot shower on us more health, wealth, happiness, and self-fulfillment. The reason is simply that we have not stretched out our hands to take these things. God really, really wants us to have them. If we do not have them, well, the fault is ours.

Actually, Osteen's message is not much different from the way that a majority of American teenagers think about God today. In his Soul Searching, Christian Smith has given us the fruit of a large study he conducted on our teenagers. It was released in 2005.

What is really striking in this study is Smith's findings of the view of God that is dominant among a majority of these teenagers. He calls it "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." The dominant view, even among evangelical teenagers, is that God made everything and established a moral order, but he does not intervene. Actually, for most he is not even Trinitarian, and the incarnation and resurrection of Christ play little part in church teenage thinking — even in evangelical teenage thinking. They see God as not demanding much from them because he is chiefly engaged in solving their problems and making them feel good. Religion is about experiencing happiness, contentedness, having God solve one's problems and provide stuff like homes, the Internet, iPods, iPads, and iPhones.

This is a widespread view of God within modern culture, not only among adolescents but among many adults as well. It is the view of God most common in Western contexts. These are the contexts of brilliantly spectacular technology, the abundance churned out by capitalism, the enormous range of opportunities that we have, the unending choices in everything from toothpaste to travel, and the fact that we are now knowledgeable of the entire world into which we are wired. All of these factors interconnect in our experience and do strange things to the way we think. Most importantly, they have obviously done strange things to how we think about God.

Indeed, Ross Douthat, in his Bad Religion, speaks of this as a pervasive "heresy" that has now swept America. He is quite correct, though most people would not think of heresy in this way. However, what so many Americans think about God is a distortion of what is true. And as a distortion it is a substitute for the real thing. And that is why it is heretical. So, why are people thinking like this? Let me take a stab at answering what is, no doubt, a highly complex question.

A Paradox

This context, this highly modernized world, has produced what David Myers calls the "American Paradox." Actually, this paradox is not uniquely American. It is found throughout the West, and increasingly it is being seen outside the West. In prosperous parts of Asia, for example, the same thing is becoming evident. And this paradox leads naturally into the predominant view of God. So, what is the paradox?

It is that we have never had so much and yet we have never had so little. Never have we had more choices, more easily accessible education, more freedoms, more affluence, more sophisticated appliances, better cars, better houses, more comfort, or better health care. This is the one side of the paradox.

The other side, though, is that by every measure, depression has never been more prevalent, anxiety higher, or confusion more widespread. We are not holding our marriages together very well, our children are more demoralized than ever, our teens are committing suicide at the highest rate ever, we are incarcerating more and more people, and cohabitation has never been more widespread. In fact, in 2012 in America, 53 percent of children were born out of wedlock. This new norm is a sure predictor of coming poverty for so many of those children.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "God in the Whirlwind"
by .
Copyright © 2014 David F. Wells.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface 13

1 God Our Vision, Culture Our Context 15

The Center of Reality

God Is Out There, Somewhere

A Paradox

God Disappears Within

Things Get Blurry

Here We Are

God as Holy-love

The Center of Our Attention

Pings and Jingles

Focus

2 The Gospel across Time 41

Where We Start

A Dilemma

Grace

Abraham

A Different View

The Reformation

Faith

Belief

Commitment

Christ

Alone the Way

Eternal Perspective

God at Work

3 So Much More 57

What Changes?

Toward Christ

Adam

The Exodus

David

The Work of the Holy Spirit

Bottom Line

4 The Love of God 77

Up the Down Staircase

Yes We Can!

Up and Down

It Has Always Been So

God's Holy-love

Love Revealed

From the Old Testament

The Trinity

Christ

The Patience of God

Amazing Grace

5 The Splendor of Holiness 101

What Holiness Means

Majestic Otherness

Isaiah's Vision

A Lost Vision

Far but Near

Moral Otherness

An Awful Sight

Goodness

Righteousness

Wrath

Through a Lens

6 A Sight Too Glorious 129

Born to Die

Judas

Divine Sovereignty

In Our Place, For Our Sin

In Our Place

For Our Sin

Justification

Different Meanings

Alien Righteousness

Imputation Disputed

Reconciliation

Double Alienation

How Reconciliation Happens

Conflict and Conquest

Captivity

Victory

Incarnation and Cross

The Imitation of Christ

Real Events

God's Holy-love

7 Walking with God 157

Roads and Ditches

No Separation

One with Christ

Position and Condition

Power

Work and Grace

No Confusion

Holy-love

The Soul of Sanctification

Looking Further

Ground Level

Not So Fast

Another Inconvenient Truth

Sound and Fury

8 Come, Let Us Bow Down 187

Prelude

Worship Wars

Call to Worship

The Presence of God

The God Who Is There

Early Days

Being Before God

The Word of God

God Acts

God Speaks

Word and Worship

Postlude

9 And, Come, Let Us Serve 219

A Thousand Ways

Reformation Recovery

Biblical Perspective

A Different Angle

Upside-down World

The Old Building

Sin and Culture

Under New Management

Counterculture

Losing and Gaining

Powerlessness and Privilege

Hostility and Joy

Holy-love

Love

Holiness

Seeing Tomorrow

Selected Bibliography 243

General Index 249

Scripture Index 257

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Rich, deep, and faithful—God in the Whirlwind invites us to come before the very heart of God. No theologian understands the modern world better than David Wells, yet no theologian uses the modern world more powerfully to wrench us back to truths that are foundational and never to be superseded by the latest anything. To be read slowly and with prayer.”
—Os Guinness, author, The Call

“In this important book, David Wells begins the process of bringing his influential critique of late modern culture and the church down into practice. Here we have a ‘practical theology’ for conducting the church’s life based on the reality of a God of ‘Holy-love.’ This particular way of understanding and preaching the doctrine of God, Wells believes, protects the church from either being co-opted by the culture or becoming a ghettoized subculture. Decades of teaching theology is boiled down here into accessible, practical chapters. I’m glad to recommend this volume.”
—Timothy Keller, Late Founding Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City; Chairman and Cofounder, Redeemer City to City

“Almost fifteen years ago, I enrolled at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in large part so I could learn from David Wells. His books opened my eyes to a host of ecclesiastical problems and to a lost world of glorious truth. As a student, I continued to learn from his deft analysis and careful theological critique. Now it’s my pleasure to commend this terrifically unique book, a fitting capstone to all that he has been building in the last two decades. Part biblical theology, part systematic theology, and part cultural reconnaissance, this is a powerful work that my generation—really any generation—cannot afford to ignore. After years of pointing out the shallowness of evangelicalism, this is Wells’s masterful summary of what should be our depth, our ballast, our center. What the world needs, and what the church needs, is a fresh encounter with the holy-love of God. This book will help you start down that path.”
—Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor, Christ Covenant Church, Matthews, North Carolina; Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte

“A timely and necessary antidote to the spirit of the age which is manifested in the prevailing man-centeredness of contemporary evangelicalism. Wells calls for the recalibration of our lives by a clear understanding of and a devout musing on the holy love of God. This book provides a fitting finale to the story line that began with No Place for Truth. Stott taught us how to preach between two worlds, and Wells teaches us to live there, at the intersection of faith (Christ) and culture.”
—Alistair Begg, Senior Pastor, Parkside Church, Chagrin Falls, Ohio

“Drinking from the fire hydrant that is David Wells’s writing is worth the rush. The water is not only bracing but sweet. God in the Whirlwind, his latest, is such a torrent, first showing how we postmoderns have put ourselves at the center of the universe—and the center doesn’t hold. We have more of everything and less satisfaction with it. But Wells takes us to a place where God is at the center of the universe, where God’s ‘holy-love,’ the unique union of God’s holiness and his love, defines better what we need and provides more abundantly for it. Comprehending the ‘holy-love’ of God and its culmination in the life of Jesus Christ reinvigorates our walk with God, our worship, our service, and our work in a fallen world. Wells shows the way, and it’s a whirlwind indeed.”
—Mindy Belz, Editor, World magazine

“In his No Place for Truth and its companion volumes Professor David Wells blew a chilling, chaff-separating wind through contemporary Western Christianity. While he may have sounded like a latter-day Jeremiah, all along his vision was in fact Isaiah-like in its grandeur. Now, in God in the Whirlwind, this is made wonderfully, and at times thrillingly, clear. Here Dr. Wells is again the splendid biblical theologian he has long since proved himself to be—whose work is driven by devotion to the God who is Holy-love, and whose Luther-like desire to ‘Let God be God’ is clear on every page. Drink safely, deeply, and be satisfied.”
—Sinclair B. Ferguson, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries

“This is a beautiful book. The gospel is presented in all its power and significance for this and any generation. David Wells has the unique ability to make deep and rich truths accessible to any reader. Utterly biblical, thoroughly orthodox, yet fresh and alive, God in the Whirlwind takes us to the very heart of God’s character and makes us want, not to study him, but to worship him. I know of no better introduction to the deep, deep love of Jesus, ‘and it lifts me up to glory, for it lifts me up to Thee.’”
—William Edgar, Professor Emeritus of Apologetics, Westminster Theological Seminary

“David Wells has long been one of our most penetrating analysts of the cultural confusions that Christians today must contend with and that sometimes distort the Christian message. This book, as he says, emphasizes the ‘Christianity’ part of ‘Christianity and Culture.’ Here Dr. Wells models how to communicate the holiness and love of God—as manifested in the gospel, worship, and the Christian life—to a culture that has forgotten what they mean.”
—Gene Edward Veith Jr., author, Loving God with All Your Mind and Post-Christian

“David Wells is like a most-valued guest who after several earlier, eye-opening visits has now stopped back by to sit down and share with us the heart of the matter. Having in previous books shown a world that makes no place for truth, in this one he lights up truth. Theological discourse here becomes a powerful call to the church to see God who stands before us—full of overwhelming holy-love shown finally at the cross.”
—Kathleen Nielson, author; speaker