When God is understood as the unmoved mover, the Great Law-giver in the sky; when God is known to work through decrees, in a God-world relation; when God is understood as a pure being (or pure act actus purus); when God is known to have ad hoc favorites among the massa of humanity; there is no place for disobedience.
The above is to say the following: if God is first understood as the Judge rather than the Father, if He isn’t known as the Judge judged, as the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, then all that is left, to understand who is in and who is out, is whether or not a purported Christian follows the Law to a T (in emulation of Christ’s active obedience for the so-called elect). But if God is, indeed, understood to be our Father, as He surely is, according to Scripture; then, there is plenty of room for disobedient children. The Old Testament is replete with examples like this, as is the New Testament. Not that this is the ideal, of course. But if a person’s “assurance” and reality of salvation is contingent upon an outward display of obedience (for all to see); if this is the summum bonum, that is, to be constantly striving to live up to a righteousness that was already out of reach to begin with; then, indeed we are all most to be pitied among men.
My only point with this post is to underscore the fact that the way we think God, in a doctrine of God, has radical consequences towards the way we view the world, and our lives within that world. If I understand my relationship to God to be based, primarily, upon a filial relationship, rather than a forensic one, I will know that no matter what happens He will never leave me or forsake me. The nomists don’t have this understanding of God, and so they are always uncertain on whether or not they are actually going to make it. They can’t run to God as their abba Father, I mean in their piety they will say they can; but in reality, bubbling underneath the whole paradigm, God remains a Monad, a singularity who is pure act. In this frame, these folks, in the background, constantly have this gnawing fear that God, in the end, might decide in all of his arbitrary might, that they weren’t in fact one of the elect; that He had only given them a temporary faith, that appeared real, all their live long days, but in fact was only a temporary faith. These folks won’t have recourse to cry out to God as their dearly beloved Father, they simply can only slump back into the dregs of performance, and hope that God, the Judge, in the end, in fact did die for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ.
To think God, biblically, is to think the following: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name . . ..” This is the basic ground of who God is for us, in His eternal life, as He freely elected to become human in the Son, that we might become sons and daughters in the grace of the hypostatically unioned life that the Man from Nazareth actually is. When God is for us, because God is our Father, as co-heirs with Christ, who can be against us? There is no decree, no artificial covenant (of works/grace), that stands behind the back of Jesus Christ. When we see the Son we see the Father without remainder. Take heart bruised reed, there really is a real hope of life eternal in the God who is our Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice!