Why Would a Loving God . . .
I’ve been thinking a lot about that bit in Moses 1 where God “covers” Moses with his glory so Moses can bear His presence and have a vision of the infinities and the eternities.
It reminds me of that Atonement metaphor where you are short on a debt and God covers the difference. God becomes your partner.
Sometimes people get upset that God wants them to repent and grow, because that stuff can be kinda miserable. Why would a loving God expect me to change, they say?
But when you think of how God covers for your inadequacies it puts a different complexion on the question.
The real question is, why would a loving God want to enter into a partnership with somebody who doesn’t contribute anything and doesn’t want to? Who doesn’t even contribute the widow’s mite of desiring to please Him and trying to please Him?
Wesley Dean
February 2, 2022
I came across this quote from J.J. Chapman the other day about Christ telling the Rich Young Ruler to come follow Him:
“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ’s love for mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others.”
In our day Jesus’ teachings have popularly morphed into a senseless parable about how God must sit around feeling about us, instead of what they were intended to be: stark facts about what He is willing to do to help us (i.e. give us all He has to make us like Him) because of how He feels about us.
All this to say, we have to be able to stand in God’s presence before we can ask Him any real questions, and we have to be reaching out for Him to the best of our ability to even want to stand before Him and with Him.