“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
