The Marriage of God's Character

By Kaysie Vokurka

Have you ever been confused by various pictures of God, struggling to find a balanced perspective? Do some pictures draw you whereas others repulse you? Have you wished there was a way to determine how God's character works and which view is true? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phytonourish
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645515114

Book preview

Preface

There was silence. The people sat thoughtfully, pondering the question that had just been asked. Soon someone spoke up. But it was not the answer. Another offered a response. Still, it wasn’t quite right.

I sat quietly taking in the whole scene. Others continued to call out, but their answers didn't seem to satisfy the person who asked the question. An answer rested clearly in my mind, but no one else was saying what seemed plain to me. Finally, I decided to share my thoughts. Loud and clear, I called out - The character of God.

The answer was correct. It was just what the preacher was looking for.

While I was satisfied that I gave the right answer, I did ponder as to how it became so clear to me. Who taught me the answer? How did I come to know it? Where and when did I learn it? I couldn’t remember anyone vividly impressing me with this answer.

It’s quite likely I could have read the answer somewhere or learned it from someone preaching or teaching from the Bible. It is certainly something that others have talked about. But who etched the answer so vividly in my mind? I couldn’t put my finger on anything other than that the Holy Spirit must have impressed me with its importance through studying the Bible.

No doubt by now you are wondering what the question was. It was a million-dollar question. It was a question that has hung around for centuries, millennia. In fact, it existed before humans. Before this earth was inhabited, it rang through heaven. Angelic minds raised it, pondered it, wrestled with it. It was and is a question relevant to all. Every intelligent creature should ask it and understand its answer.

What was the question? It was this:

What is the issue in the Great Controversy (the war between Christ and Satan)?

That was it. It was the opening question in the presentation for the day. To me the answer was crystal clear: The character of God.

I cannot pinpoint an exact time when I became interested in this topic. It crept up on me slowly. But the incident I have just recounted had a profound effect on me. It was as though answering the question as I did, tripled its importance in my mind. It catalysed a deeper interest in this topic.

The Search

About this time, I was quite interested in how to find balance in the Christian life. My own experience of imbalance included my struggle with a bit of a legalistic mindset. On the outward appearance, you wouldn’t have been able to tell this. I was seen as a smiling, happy person who may always appear to find the Christian life a breeze, according to a fellow church member. If there was a shadow that darkened my mind, it wasn’t easy to pick. But I struggled quite a lot in the first couple of years following my baptism at age 15. I wrestled with doubts, fears, making sense of my feelings, understanding faith, and finding assurance.

My experience was also burdened with an unhealthy mindset. I felt that I had to do what was good and right to be good enough, accepted, and find peace. Experiencing this was contrary to the principle of salvation that I knew. I understood the principle that I don’t have to do anything to earn God’s loving favour. I knew Christ’s righteousness counts in place of mine. Somehow that principle hadn’t reached deep enough into my heart yet. It still had a leavening work to do in my mind.

At the time I didn’t fully realise that this was my problem. Yet, the burden of my legalistic attitude of doing good to be good enough troubled me. I struggled to find meaning in life. How could I? You see, everything I did to avoid disapproval and find favour never really provided meaning and peace anyway.

It’s never good enough.

One day I told the Lord that I was sick of it. I told Him that something had to change, or I couldn’t continue. I then went through several rather miraculous experiences and answers to prayer that deeply touched my heart. These experiences helped me see that God does love and accept me… ME!

Although I understood this before in my mind, it now probed deeper to affect my emotions and touch my heart. With the assurance of His loving kindness and tender interest in my life, my burdensome experience fled away. I have enjoyed a peaceful, growing walk with God since.

This whole episode of my life taught me something very important. I learned that to have a deeply happy and fulfilled walk with God, I needed to have a balance. I needed a balance of experiencing His loving kindness towards me and learning to obey His requirements. Seeking to live according to Christian standards without appreciating the reality of God’s care and compassion resulted in a dry, monotonous tyranny of trying. The other extreme of just focusing on God’s love and forgetting all about standards was equally a problem. God’s standards are good and to drop them wouldn’t be in my best interest. For me to go in that direction was out of the question. Thus, I reached a point where having a balance of God’s law and love in my life was critically important.

I have often wondered how this legalistic mindset developed. I knew the principles of salvation well. What I had learned of faith, works, the law and love was balanced. Certainly then, this mindset didn’t come from the theory of truth I had been taught. Perhaps it had something to do with my personality. I am naturally task-oriented and love to please people. Or maybe it came through what I had learned from life experience.

Did it have something to do with how I was treated as a child, such as people telling me to be good? I didn’t ever think of my parents as legalistic – to me they were quite balanced. But there were people in my life who would tell me to be good. So, I would try to be good and do right and would feel satisfied and pleased when others approved.

Perhaps it was in this way that I subconsciously learned it was possible to obtain favour by doing good. In any case, it ended up becoming a part of my Christian experience. This made me question how you could teach children the balance of obedience and love in their childhood experience. Could parents, teachers, mentors, and influencers follow certain principles that would enable children to get the right impression of God?

I was also looking for balance in other areas. I noticed that people around me seemed to go into different extremes. Some people focussed a lot on standards and even created specific standards, for instance, in diet and dress, that to me seemed overly strict and at times rather ridiculous. Other people I observed were careless about Christian lifestyle standards. This was to their own detriment spiritually, mentally, and physically. I wondered how it was possible that there could be so many variations in what the right way was to live in the areas such as food, clothing, recreation, and music.

Intriguingly, my Mum considered herself to be middle-of-the-road in her standards and Christian lifestyle. Yet she commented to me that what was considered middle-of-the-road 20-30 years ago, is now considered traditional, conservative, strict. How was I to make sense of this? Where is the anchor point of balance? How can things such as standards simply be at the mercy of the ebb and flow of human tendencies? I thought they should be absolute. Where was the middle ground of safety that wasn’t off to the left or the right? How could the sure place of balance be found?

I also wondered what the best approach was when sharing one’s faith. In the church environment I was in, there were a whole host of different ideas as to how outreach should be done. For example:

Some seemed to think it best to have quite a direct approach in telling people Bible truth. Others simply believed we must be a friend to people and help them and one day they will come to Christ.

Some churches strongly emphasised the importance of Biblically educating new believers. Others were more interested in simply giving them an experience of fun, fellowship, and entertainment.

There were those who were very rigorous in making sure people had a thorough understanding of our doctrines before baptism. Others would baptise people without ensuring they had even a basic understanding of the belief system they were committing to.

The scope of approaches seemed to span from weak to confronting. Somehow, I thought, there must be a balance in the myriad of methods out there, and a way to precisely pinpoint it.

Discovering Answers

You can see then that a variety of experiences in my personal faith, home life, and church environment filled me with questions. Through them all I sought certainty. For some reason, alongside my journey of being challenged with experiences and questions, there simultaneously grew a deepening interest in my mind in the topic of understanding God’s character.

Intriguingly, I don’t remember intentionally studying God’s character to find answers to the many questions I had