From Jim McGuiggan... IS GOD A ROMANTIC?

IS GOD A ROMANTIC?

I'm not particularly interested in being "in love" with God. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but I’ve never have had the "warm fuzzies" about him—well, so rarely as to be almost “never”. I have had those emotional feelings about Ethel, our children and a large number of other humans. I can't get emotional about God the way I can about fellow-humans. I don't think that troubles him. I don't think that that makes him "jealous". The only relationship he gets "jealous" over is one that draws us away from him.

But it's difficult not to model God's love for us on the way we feel about fellow-humans, especially those fellow-humans who mean more to us than our own selves. If we must make difficult choices between our families and strangers we know what we will do without having to think long and hard over it—we'll choose in favor of our beloved ones. That makes sense. If our beloved family was the entire human family things would be more complicated. How do you bless them all and act in favor of them all when their interests are in conflict, when some are powerful and corrupt? "Love" is more than "romance" and sometimes it has to do what at some levels it doesn't want to do.

Centrally, in the biblical witness, God’s “love” is the expression of his covenant commitment, his faithfulness, his keeping his word to pursue and bring to completion his eternal purpose. His eternal purpose is to bring a human family to immortal life, free from sin, sickness and death and a family in love with righteousness; a family that lives in his image in unbroken joy, peace and adventure.

In pursuing that eternal purpose, God is working with a sinful human family, a sinful human family that let loose a "virus" that has triggered chaos in the human world. God is working with a human family of his own creation, one that makes choices but one that has corrupted that choosing and in the process has corrupted itself. He works to bless a human family that tolerates that intolerable moral evil but in order to bring it to eternal life with him the moral corruption has to be dealt with because the fullness of life that he has in mind cannot be enjoyed in the pleasing presence of evil.

That God has not yet seen fit to bring all evil to an end is his choosing and I know nothing about the reasons for his choice. [2 Peter 3:9 has its own specific point and, in my view, it doesn't help us much with the larger and more general question though its truth no doubt is part of the answer to the larger question.] Martin Dalby famously said, "Bad religion answers the unanswerable. Good religion cherishes the mystery." Strident atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently grudgingly admitted what we all know, that he has to acknowledge mystery also.

This is a pain-filled world with inexpressible evil in it. Imagine this true to life picture. A car is at the side of a road, it's getting dark, a woman and her daughter are in the vehicle, a man is screaming through the window at a terrified woman as he tries to drag to door open, he wants in, her eyes are rolling and he smashes the window, unblocks the door, trails her out on to the ground, stabs her in the throat, rips her clothes and stabs her in the side. He turns his attention to the little girl, punches her in the face, attacks her with a knife and hacks off one of her arms.

     Can a world get to be more evil than that? What moral insanity!

     But in this case the "attacker" is a paramedic, there's been a wreck, he smashed the window to save their lives. He worked on the woman's trachea and then because her lung had collapsed he pierced her side so she could breathe. The little girl was trapped and her mangled arm was pinning her into a vehicle that threated to burst into flame and the rest you know.  The paramedic has children of his own, he takes no pleasure in what is happening or what he does to these two people! Life is his aim—not the infliction of hurt!

What if it's the case that there's been a cosmic wreck and the Divine paramedic is handling this with a view to life and not purely inflicting pain? What if he isn't heartless, what if he isn't a foaming at the mouth lunatic? What if his alleged "powerlessness" isn't really a lack of "power" to prevent or immediately obliterate the consequences of a cosmic wreck? What if he isn't some poor weak fool who would like to do something but can't? What if allowing agony to exist is one aspect of how an all-powerful but all wise and all-loving God brings to completion his glorious purpose toward a human family that's in the clutches of an evil force too powerful for it? What if there are some truths that we don't know and in our pain don't care to know? What if those truths are truths even though in our personal agony we don't care but just want the pain removed—now?

What if he is powerful enough to obliterate pain and loss—yours—but won't do it [as he refused to rescue John the Baptist from imprisonment and death though he was rescuing others; as he refused to deliver Jesus from what he feared most in the garden and as he refuses to immediately deliver millions as pain-filled as you are]?

I'm aware that none of this removes the pain. I just hate it that not only must such anguish be endured--I hate it that suffers also endure the feeling that God doesn't give a damn about any of us.

In the name of and in the vision of the Lord Jesus I'm saying that we don't need to lose God as well as the things that mean so much to us in this phase of human living. I'm saying we don't have to do what atheists are forced to do—shrug and live, as atheist Bertrand Russell put it, in "unyielding despair".

 

 [I’ve taken much of this from my little book, Celebrating the Wrath of God, Waterbrook Press/Random House.]

 

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.