Two-God Christians

Illustration by Paul Mathers

Many Christians have two gods who serve different purposes in their spiritual lives.

They have a god who is angry at them. This god motivates them to quit sinful habits and reform their lifestyles. They use the “god of wrath” to get serious about personal change. I can watch them serve this god as they use violent, demeaning language about themselves, place themselves under severe accountability, and describe their sins with exaggerated loathing.

The other god is disappointed with them but reassures them with forgiveness. This god has what we like to call unconditional love, the love that overlooks what we do and never rejects us. We claim this is the love that finds something lovely in us to be redeemed. I also watch people serve this god as they use different language about themselves. “I know that God is disappointed in me, but I’m so grateful that he loves me anyway.” This way of talking reminds me of how abusers act when they’re repenting—tearful, worshipful of the one they abuse, full of hope.

The false gods we serve are always designed to serve us in some way. In the case of these two gods, we use them first to stoke and later to calm our feelings of shame.

The high view of God taught by Scripture corrects the two-god Christian with key principles.

One is aseity, the principle that God relies on nothing outside himself. He is absolutely independent. Among other things, aseity means that God’s love flows out of who he is, rather than being attracted to who we are. God does not start to love us when he finds something lovely in us. His love is as boundless as his being.

Another principle in this teaching is that God is simple. He is not composed of parts. He is a unity.

When we talk about God’s attributes, like love or justice, we are not describing distinct, separate things within God. All of his attributes are one. There is not a forgiving part of God and a wrathful part, as if God might alternate between the two, reacting to one sin with anger and another with mercy. In God’s being, forgiveness and wrath are deeply unified. They are one response to sin.

Our problem is that we cannot talk about God at all unless we focus on these attributes distinctly.

True, God does not experience anything different when forgiving sin than he experiences when displaying wrath against it. But our experience as human beings in time is dramatically different under wrath or under forgiveness.

When we experience God’s wrath, we see his hostility to sin. We feel alienated from him and we are afraid of his coming near. In fact, we flee from him like a forest fire. He is too hot. By contrast, when we experience God’s forgiveness, we see his love for us. We feel reconciled and welcomed because our sin is removed. We no longer flee from him. We run to him. God is warm.

The simplicity of God helps us realize that God eternally responds to sin in one way. He drives it out. We will have some experiences of wrath driving out sin and others of forgiveness because our sin has been removed. How can such different experiences come from a single response to sin?

Consider what happened at the cross of Christ.

Paul says in Romans 3.21-26 that the righteousness of God has been manifested “through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” All have sinned but have been made righteous as a gift from God. The gift was purchased by Christ when he died on the cross. God made Jesus a “propitiation” of his wrath in this way. Christ bore the Father’s wrath in order to extend the Father’s forgiveness. Christ proves that God is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

God’s justice and his forgiveness are not two separate things. Christ has displayed them at the cross as a unity.

The sad reality for idolatrous Christians serving two gods is that they don’t need either one. True repentance is not motivated by shame. True gratitude is not motivated by guilt. All of our attempts to create godly outcomes in our own hearts fail because we are serving idols to reassure ourselves. True repentance is a response to God’s wrath poured out on Christ. True gratitude is a response to God’s forgiveness extended through Christ.

There is only one Savior.

Paul Mathers is our illustrator in this series. Head over to Paul’s Instagram profile to see more of his work!