And why an angry God loves you more.
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end… but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature … and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?
–Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
‘Ooh!’ said Susan, ‘I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.’
‘Who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’
–C.S. Lewis, The Narnia Tales
Last week I spent a day ar a recycling facility in New York City. As it turns out, we can learn a lot from our trash.
Did you know that after your trash is sorted, a ton of “Pure White” paper is worth $450, but that any tint of color or discolor drops the selling price to $350 per ton? It’s value drops from there until it is, well…garbage.
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Christianity asserts that the God of Creation loves us more than we would ever dare hope. It’s a worldview that suggests we were created in God’s image to share in a perfect relationship with Him and to enjoy all the good things He created for us. It provides a plausible explanation of who we are and why we’re here, a rational basis to believe in eternity, heaven, Truth, significance and hope, and a tangible prototype of service and love in the life and death of Jesus Christ. In many ways, it’s the answer to what I think we would hope was true if we didn’t know. That is, if God didn’t reveal Himself, we might have invented (this part of) Him.
It’s critical that we dwell on God’s love for us–understand it and bask in it–but it’s also possible to focus so much on God’s love that we end up with an incomplete picture of God Himself. We tend to pick Biblical ideas about God we like…and leave others out. A God who answers prayers, yes; but one who judges…not so much. We like the idea of a loving God but not a jealous one. We’d prefer to take the cuddlier version and leave out the one with teeth–forgetting His perfect Holiness, Justice and Wrath. We would never invent that God.
Ironically, when we strip away God’s Anger, we end up with a less loving god, not the more loving god we set out to create. And perhaps most importantly, we lose an understanding of what sets the Christian worldview apart from all others—the way it addresses sin in the world and in our lives…
