The Whole Counsel of God

Is it possible to believe in God's mercy and grace without believing in His justice, wrath, and holiness? Today, R.C. Sproul warns us against straying from a full, biblical understanding of God.

The problem with idolatry—which is the number one evil in biblical history—is not in making deities out of stone or wood, but the issue of idolatry is producing a substitute for the true God. Now, we don’t make idols of stone and wood anymore, but the kind of idolatry that pervades the church today is that idolatry where we take the biblical revelation of God and we look at those attributes of God that we find distasteful, such as His sovereignty, His holiness, His justice, His wrath, and we say, “Oh, we don’t like those; we like the love of God, the mercy of God, the grace of God,” and we construct a God who is all love, all grace, all mercy; no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness, no wrath. And we create a God with our own minds who is not God. That God is an idol.

The only God that we are to worship is the God who reveals Himself in sacred Scripture. And true worship focuses on the whole counsel of God, not on isolated aspects of God with which we are comfortable.