God = love?
one of the most frustrating parts of life is that oftentimes, the answers to some of the big questions you have are simply bigger questions themselves...case in point: does God allow tragic events to happen, or does he cause them? maybe it seems like just semantics on the surfcae, but there's a deeper issue at stake. if God simply allows tragedies to occur (i.e. the death of a loved one, loss of a job, divorce, 9/11, etc), then it inherently implies that he doesn't have supreme control over our destiny, as in "God would never want this to happen to anyone, but because there's sin in the world, bad things do happen to good people." yeah right... sounds good, makes you feel better for a moment, but it's a load of empty and weightless garbage. here's why i think so: if God is a loving God (which i believe he is), and if we believe that he has supreme and ultimate power over the course, shape, and destiny of our life, then to chalk up events that we would normally label as "tragedies" to any other causeative agent than God is shortchanging him of his attributes. if God didn't want 9/11 to happen, it wouldn't have. end of story. if god didn't want a marriage to fall apart, it wouldn't. so what does that leave us with? the stark, cold, and yet slightly reassuring fact that everything in our lives is there because God loves us. everything.
so knowing that fact, we're armed with the reassurance that we have nothing to fear... nothing that life throws our way can be contrary to what God had planned for us. reassuring? tremendously. until.... you consider the fact that this means that an all-loving God is then the one ultimately responsible for a great deal of present-day sorrow. life sucking right now? it's all part of the plan. have a great deal of sorrow in your life? no fears, God's behind it. this isn't to discount the incredibly destructive force that sin is in life, but rather to emphasize the incredibly powerful omniscient presence of God. consider the following: right from the very beginning, before there was any sin on earth, God created man knowing that he was dooming him to sin and eventually death, and that a large percentage of mankind would eventually be doomed to hell for all eternity. and i know that most people's "free will! he forgot the part about us having free will!" alarms are going off right now, but again, you have to remember that God is omniscient. regardless of the choices and actions that you choose to take in your life, God already knows the outcome. so when he created mankind, he knew that many would, because of their actions and choices, be doomed to hell. and yet he created us anyways.
why?
if God is indeed all-powerful and omniscient, couldn't he have created man in such a way and in such a place that sin and death and pain and suffering were impossibilities, without diminishing the gift of free will that he's given us by one iota? of course he could... he's God, for goodness sakes. but he didn't, which brings me to only one conclusion...
everything God does is out of love
yeah... it doesn't make any sense to me either. hence the whole "questions leading to bigger questions" thing at the beginning, because now i'm at the greatest question of all that i've ever encountered:
why does God love me?
yikes.
on that note... i'm off in search of some ice cream
(btw... thanks both to john piper's book "life as a vapor" and also to the one and only uncle r.j. for illuminating some of the stations along this train of thought. if it doesn't make sense to anyone else, that's ok... none of it really makes sense to me, either :)
the.end.
posted by Patrick @ 7:35 PM
1 Comments:
i think i get what you are saying. and its something that i think is right, a little hard to swallow in some ways but right.
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