God’s Love
September 18, 2007
What the Church says: God is love. He is omnipotent (all-powerful), omnipresent (everywhere), and omniscient (all knowing). God is merciful, forgiving, and is the father of all. God loves all his children. All who follow him will go to heaven; sinners go to hell.
What they say: How can God be so loving and there are children dying, wars, and unjustified homicides? What kind of ‘love’ promotes war and chaos? What kind of ‘love’ allows for such a place as hell? After all, if he forgives all our sins, why the need? If God is all-good, he wouldn’t allow this state of being we call civilization. If God is omnipotent, he would not allow the bad that which he knows we are going to do. If he were omniscient, he would know to stop us or change our actions before they do ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’. **An aside: some say there is no right and wrong even. This will be discussed in later posts.
What I say: God loved us so much that he gave us free will. Think about it: did you like it as a child when your parents did not let you do that which you wanted to do? How beneficial would it have been if they decided to make all your decisions for you unto adulthood? What is it we are taught? That we need to make our own mistakes in order to be a better person? Why is this same concept not applied to the father-child relationship that is God and man? God allows us to be who we want to be in order for us to grow. We can’t know that we need him til we need him; we can’t know that the blindness that is ignorance is a crutch until we find out for ourselves. Who wants a forced love?
So if we have this free will, how can God control us? Is this not the antithesis of free will? How does a master control his slave if he has freed his slave? He has no more control over this fellow man than the next master. If we are going to use a vacuum test for every quality of God, we have to use it for the non-quality. Think about it: if God controlled us at all times, how is he loving us? How is he letting us be who we are. Moreover, God wouldn’t have to love us as then we would be nothing more than robots that he controls– toys to play with. It defeats the purpose of a loving God, a Father, a reason for life.
God is not fair– he does not have to be– he’s just. A judge may send away his only son to imprisonment for life for killing a man, but that does not mean that he loves his son any less. Is it fair that he has to send away his only son? Some would not think so; moreover, he would not think so. Is it just? The law is the law; a judge cannot deny that which has been established by the lawmakers. Why is God not fair? Because it would contradict his very nature. It would mean that he would have to intervene and control our every move; sure, not all of us are killers, rapists, or child molesters, but then we are presuming to set standards on what is a greater or lesser evil. If God has to intervene in instances of ‘greater’ evils, why not ‘lesser?’ To control us would to kill our nature and our very being. It would eliminate our identity. By not being ‘fair’ by our standards, He really is being fair by a universal standard: is it not more fair to allow us to be who we are and to be afforded the glory of God and Heaven than not? Relativity tells us that there can not be a standard of what is and is not fair so how can we hold anyone let alone God accountable to a dynamic illusion?
God’s knowledge of what I am going to do does not make him any more or less loving. Jesus wept. Is it not the natural reaction of a parent to weep when their child has gone against what they have taught them? Just because God does not do anything in our eyes, does not mean that he is not doing anything at all. He can cry right along with us, can he not? But actually, God does not have to react at all to be more ‘godly’ than he already is. He does not have to prove himself. Do you have to prove who you are to your parents on a daily basis? To your wife? Perhaps your kids!? Why then does God have to repeatedly prove himself to us? Why does he have to be a good guy for our viewing pleasure and to appease our logic? Where does it say in any book anywhere that God must do xy and z in oder to prove that He is who we know him to be? Since when did we set the standards of the Almighty?
We bitch and complain that God is not loving by not stopping baby killers and child molesters. We argue that he isn’t loving because he does not give them their just deserves. Yet we don’t like the idea of hell? We don’t like the idea that God would set up a place to punish the very beings we despise because said place is also a contradiction of his loving nature… Remind me again…what is fair? …But wait, is God throwing people in the lakes of fire without warning? Does he hold a random lottery where he decides who will go and who will stay? Is there no forewarning of the consequences to come? Then how is he bad? How is he not being just, fair, or even loving? He loves us so he sets up a place where we can live in eternal happiness. Would you be happy forever with the sinners of the earth? You don’t seem very happy now…
Until next time: I have not even touched the tip of the iceberg of what ‘I say.’ Stay tuned for the cluster fock that is my mind.
Tags: God is love, free will
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