“It’s all good?”…Part 2

How much does God love us?  And what does that even mean?

Once again, we must battle the tendency to embrace commercial stereotypes. God, the all-powerful creator and passionate redeemer, has been reduced to a spiritual Santa Claus or at least the rich uncle who is willing to spoil someone else’s child.

Since God really loves us, He is committed to our well-being, our growth, our maturity. Anything less would not be love. Could we say that God was “good” if He allowed us to remain as spiritual infants unable to act responsibly and sacrificially?

Any child would willingly eat a bag of M&Ms and coke for breakfast, but what kind of parent would provide in that way?  We all know that may be a child’s perspective of the perfect breakfast, but it’s not true.  It would be enjoyable and the child may feel “loved”, but it would be a lie.   In the same way, a parent may feel “loving” when they are doing their child’s homework or habitually enabling him or her to avoid difficult tasks. 

C.S. Lewis explained in his classic, The Problem of Pain, “As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any term: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most, tragic, most inexorable sense.”

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;          Romans 8:28, 29