As you scan the Old Testament, God seems to pretty busy functioning in His role of Judge of All the Earth. It would be easy to view Him only as the high and holy one (beyond our reach); the all powerful God of the universe (destroying His enemies); and the righteous but wrathful one (fire and brimstone).

We, like the Hebrews gathered around Sinai, sometimes see only the fire and smoke and hear only the trumpet blast.  We see Him as the one who cannot tolerate sin and who lives in unapproachable light, Sometimes we feel, if we approach Him at all, that  we must approach him full of fear and trembling as the high priest did when he entered the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement.  Because of that, we sometimes choose not to seek Him or enter his presence at all.

But then Jesus dropped in to live among us for about 33 years. His view of God was radically different.  He taught us to pray, “Our Father in heaven.”  He used the Aramaic term “Abba” to address the creator.  “Abba” is the intimate and familiar term of a child calling out to a loving Father in whom the child feels totally loved and totally secure.

The cross launched a seismic shift in the heavenlies. The unapproachable God of Wrath became the God in whose lap we could fall asleep – Abba. The Old Testament displayed the power of sin to separate man from God and to create alienation.  The New Testament displays the power of love and sacrifice to reconcile God to his children.  Both are the same God, but a God relating out of different covenants.

It’s not that God never loved or showed mercy in the Old Testament. He did over and over but somehow His love and mercy get drowned out by the plagues and the earthquakes.  Sometimes it’s confusing.  Sometimes we want to say, “Will the real Father in Heaven please step forward!”

Actually, Jesus solves the dilemma for us.  In John 14, He simply says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father!”  Jesus carried the heart of the Father within Him.  Hebrews 1 tells us that Jesus is the exact representation of the Father.  Did you ever need to know how God feels about messed-up people, women caught in the act of adultery, people with multiple spouses who are now just shackin’ up, people crippled by disease, cheating tax collectors, or political terrorists? Just look at Jesus.

The heart of the Father toward you is reflected in every event recorded on the pages of the New Testament.  However you understand the God of the Old Testament, you need to know that Jesus released the love and mercy that always rested in the heart of God.  That love and mercy are waiting to heal you and set you free.  That’s what an “Abba” Father does.  Don’t run from Him, run to Him.

Bill Johnson has said that a gospel without power is no gospel at all.  I agree.  Much more importantly, so does Jesus and so does Paul.  A gospel that leaves us floundering in our pain and brokenness in this life while promising relief only after the funeral denies that the kingdom of God has come to this world.

Jesus scolded the religious leaders of his day because they neither knew the scriptures nor the power of God (Mt.22: 29). Paul warned Timothy about those who held a form of godliness but who denied the power of the kingdom (2 Tim.3:5).  He also declared to the church in Corinth that the kingdom is not a matter of words but of power (1 Cor.4:20).

A gospel without the power to transform lives and set people free from the oppression of the enemy is only a philosophy of life. Jesus didn’t come as a philosopher but as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Jesus didn’t come just to talk about how to navigate life in a fallen world but he came to teach us how to transform that world.  Jesus came to defeat the “prince of this world” and to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn.3:8).

Those “works” were the condemnation of man that came through sin, disease, suffering, torment, brokenness, violence, and finally death. Jesus spent three years and several hours on a cross triumphing over each of those things by the power of an advancing kingdom.  Jesus taught us to constantly pray that the kingdom of God would come to this earth so that the Father’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

God’s will is for the works of Satan to be eradicated from this world.  Some of that work will be done in the hearts of believers as they receive Christ and the love of God and as the Holy Spirit begins to redesign the landscape of their hearts. But much of that work will be done by confronting the powers of darkness with the authority and the power of heaven that has been given to the church who is destined to do even greater things than Jesus did on the earth. (Jn. 14:12.)

A gospel that does not declare the power of God’s kingdom as well as the grace of that kingdom, is not the gospel Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated day after day. Don’t settle for less.