Terribly Have the Theologians Misrepresented God...

"How terribly have the theologians misrepresented God's character. They represented him as a great king on a huge throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain...

But how contrary this is to what the Gospel accounts plainly tell us. Brothers, sisters, have you found our King? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at the table with the head of a fisherman lying on his chest and somewhat heavy heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well.

...the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; the God of history... - this God is the God of little children, and he alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted.

Therefore with angels and archangels, with the spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children of the kingdom, yea, with the Lord himself, and for all that do not yet know him, we praise and magnify and laud his name in itself, saying Our Father."

- George MacDonald -

God: Infinitely Beyond All We Can Imagine!

From a prayer of George MacDonald's:


"In spite of all our fears and weaknesses and wrongs, thou wilt be to us what thou art - such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart on earth could invent the thought of! Thou wilt take our sins on thyself, giving us thy life besides. Thou bearest our griefs and carriest our sorrows, and surely thou wilt one day enable us to pay every debt we owe to each other! Thou wilt be to us a right generous, abundant Father! 

Then truly our hearts shall be jubilant, because thou art what thou art - infinitely beyond all we could imagine. Thou wilt humble and raise us up. Thou hast given thyself to us that, having thee, we may be eternally alive with life. 

We run within the circle of what men call thy wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the arms of thy love!"

The Restful Yoke of the Father's Will

 "When and how much his creatures can do or bear, only God understands. But when it seems most impossible to do or bear, we must be most confident that he will neither demand too much, nor fail with the vital Creator-help. That help will be there when needed...To be able beforehand to imagine ourselves doing or bearing, we have neither claim nor need.

It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul that he has created..."

                                                                         - George MacDonald -

God and Fair Play

From George MacDonald:

"I will accept no explanation of any way of God that involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man...If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seem unjust, then either we do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it...because more is required of the Maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men - not less...

If, for instance, it be said that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, a man seeking to grasp the meaning behind the words and who takes 'visit upon' to mean 'punishes', and the 'children' to mean 'the innocent children', ought to say, 'Either I do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true, whoever says it.'

The justice of God is this - he gives every man, woman, child, and beast, everything that has being, fair play. He renders to every man according to his work. And therein lies his perfect mercy, for nothing else could be merciful to the man...God does nothing of which any just man, the thing set fairly and fully before him so that he understood, would not say, 'That is fair.'"

God is Always Doing His Best for Every Man

In the final days of this year, I will be quoting from one of my all-time favorites, George MacDonald, whose writings have deeply influenced my view of God all through my life...

"I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my Elder Brother, my Lord and Master...I believe that to obey him is to ascend the pinnacle of my being...I believe that he is my Savior from myself, and from all that has come of loving myself...I believe he died that the justice, the mercy of God, might have its way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect...

I believe that he died to deliver me from all meanness, all pretense, all falseness, all unfairness, all poverty of spirit, all cowardice, all fear, all anxiety, all forms of self-love, all trust or hope in possession, to make me merry as a child, the child of our Father in heaven...

I believe that God is just like Jesus...I believe that God is absolutely, grandly beautiful..with the beauty that creates beauty, not merely shows itself beautiful. I believe that God has always done, is always doing, his best for every man...that he is not a God to crouch before, but our Father to whom the child-heart cries exultantly, 'Do with me as thou wilt.'

I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God, and more and more of God, and that alone through knowing Christ can we come nigh to God..."

Why this Library of Books that We Call the Bible?

The following is a short portion of a blog post in a wonderful series of posts by Rob Bell on the topic "What is the Bible?" This is so beautifully written that I recommend you read it out loud with someone else, if possible, and savor the entire post (here). It's even better if you first read PartA of this particular piece about the Bible, which you can find here.

In this particular quote, Bell is in part answering the question, "why this library?":

"In the Bible, what you find again and again is brutal honesty about our human condition. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we watch shows about the Kardashians-we have the tremendous propensity to make a mess of things. Nowhere do you find this reality glossed over, avoided, denied, or ignored in the Bible. From 'we’ve all fallen short' to 'the heart is deceitful' to 'are you so dull?' (A fantastic line from Jesus, by the way) what you find again and again is the unvarnished truth about our sins, struggles, weakness, hardheartedness, small mindedness, and general slow-to-catch-on-ness. 
 

But what you also find, sometimes in the same exact place, and sometimes in the exact same breath, are stunning affirmations of our greatness, bigness, potential and promise. People are told they’ll lead nations, take good news about the reconciliation of all things to the ends of the earth, that we’re crowned with glory and honor, and that we’ll do greater things than Jesus did (He said that… seriously.) 

We are a quixotic cocktail, a strange blend, a odd amalgamation of skin and bones and spirit and soul. One minute we’re hearing about actual trips into space for people who aren’t astronauts, and then in the next we’re hearing about a man in Ohio who kept several women hostage in his house for a decade. 

It is bewildering the highs and lows we are capable of-not to mention frustrating, mystifying, inspiring, maddening, and at some times overwhelmingly beautiful."

Clues of What God Will Someday Achieve

“We live in a transition time, a transition from death to life, from human injustice to divine justice, from the old to the new – tragically incomplete yet marked here and there, now and then, 

with clues of what God will someday achieve in perfection.”

Philip Yancey (The Jesus I Never Knew)

The Dearest, Grandest and Most Precious Thing

 “I would rather be what God chose to make me 

than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for 
to have been thought about, 

born in God's thought, 

and then made by God, 

is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.”  

 - George MacDonald -

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on The Lord's Prayer

"All the prayers of Holy Scripture are summarized in the Lord's Prayer, and are contained in its immeasurable breadth. They are not made superfluous by the Lord's Prayer but constitute the inexhaustible richness of the Lord's Prayer as the Lord's Prayer is their summation."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Psalms, the Prayer Book of the Bible) - 

Retributive or Restorative Justice in God?

"Our typical image of God as loving on the one hand and retributive on the other puts justice and love in tension as opposites. We have a God with a split personality. In one instance, God demands retribution  for sin; in the next, we see God showing mercy and forgiving sin. But when we read and interpret the Bible from the perspective of divine love (and through our Jesus lens), we see that the standards of justice are driven by a desire for restoration, relationship, and harmony with God and others. In other words, divine reconciling justice is love in action that seeks to make things right, to reconcile with God and others."

                                                                         - Sharon Baker

The Meaning of Justice

"Justice...means coming face to face with the shameful depravity of personal sin by coming face to face with the one who has the right and the power to punish but who instead loves and forgives. Love and forgiveness instead of anger and punishment bring repentance and redemption, 

and in this manner, justice is served..."

- Sharon Baker -

Instinctive Bashfulness in Real Goodness

"We see the evil in our fellows much sooner than the good. On a very short acquaintance with persons, we discover their defects and the things in them which are disagreeable to us, and soon find the weak point in them...but their better nature is more slowly unfolding itself. The invisible character of goodness is not so obtrusive as defects, because there is an instinctive bashfulness in real goodness, even without a man's intending it. When we know people a long while, especially if we love them, there is apt to be the continual breaking forth of virtues in them we never dreamed they possessed; and oftentimes in little things, in the ordinary wear and tear of life, there will come forth in unostentatious ways traits of humility and self-depreciation, or a patience and sweetness and unselfishness beyond what we expect of them..."

                                                                                      - Paul Billheimer (Love Covers) -

God Didn't Need a Change of Mind

"Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity. 

Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. 

This grounds Christianity in love and freedom from the very beginning. It creates a very coherent and utterly attractive religion, which draws people toward lives of inner depth, prayer, reconciliation, healing and even universal 'at-one-ment' instead of mere sacrificial atonement...A nonviolent atonement theory says that God is not someone we need to fear or mistrust..."

- Richard Rohr - 

How Our Judgments of Others are Often Formed

"In our opinion of others we fail to distinguish between the sinfulness of sin and the deformity which has resulted from sin...We judge people, not so much by how they stand to God as by the inconvenient or disagreeable way in which they may stand to us. Much that the eye catches, which is offensive to our moral sense, may not be real sin, and yet we condemn it with a bitterness and severity much more than the real sin which does not happen to interfere with our interests or personal tastes.

"This is why an impartial God must condemn us so often for the very condemnation we give to others, because our judgments do not proceed from the love of God but from personal taste..."

                                                                                               - Paul Billheimer (Love Covers) - 

                                   

God's Compassion for Mankind - Voluntary Blindness to Our Evil

Valjean being freely released from thievery by bishop in Les Miserables

"Nothing is more amazing than the patient, gentle charity that God displays to His creatures. There is something adorable in the compassion of God for mankind which looks like a voluntary blindness to their evil...The Bible is full of instances of this in His dealings with both nations and individuals, where His justice seems to move with tortoise pace, constantly pursuing but seemingly on purpose to be a long while catching up with the one to be punished, as if to give him every allowance possible to infinite mercy. Now, the more we are with God, and the closer our union is with Him, and the more deeply we drink of the interior sweetness of His life, the more we shall catch something of His gentleness and compassion of spirit which will destroy our proclivity for harsh judgments and take away the keenness by which we discover evil in others..."

- Paul Billheimer (Love Covers) -           

Illiteracy of the Future...

"The illiterate of the future are not those 

that cannot read or write. They are those 

that cannot learn, unlearn, relearn." 

- Alvin Toffler - 

 

God is Better than Perfect...He is Good!

"This story (of creation) begins with something better than the perfect realm of Plato; (it begins with) the good world of Genesis. Jewish goodness, it turns out, is far better than Greco-Roman perfection… Genesis does not begin with stasis and sterility. From the first 'Let there be…' it glows, whirls, swirls, vibrates, pulses, and dances with change and fertility…Elohim doesn't pronounce this world perfect (or imperfect), but rather 'good.'…this beginning is not complete; it unfolds in  stages…none of it is perfect in the Greco-Roman sense. Instead all of it is good and wonderful, constantly evolving into something better and more wonderful. If it were perfect – in the Greco-Roman sense – the earth would have come into being fully populated, fully 'developed'. But this creation has plenty of room for reproduction and development...

"Although the evolving creation in-process would be appalling to Theos (Greek god), it is delightful to Elohim, because Elohim loves stories and seems to have little taste for states. And Elohim's story is not a 'safe' predictable story, but rather a story with unpredictability and danger written into its first chapters…We have been thoroughly trained...to read Genesis through Greco-Roman bifocals, and as a result Theos is so deeply embedded and enthroned in our minds, that it is agonizingly difficult for us to recapture the wild, dynamic, story-unleashing goodness of Elohim, a goodness that differs so starkly, so radically, from the domesticated, static, controlled perfection of Theos…"
                                                                                  - Brian McLaren (A New Kind of Christianity)

Can God Love Us Too Much?

"We don't see that the powerful change that happens in the life of a disciple never comes from the disciples working hard at doing anything. They come from arriving at a place where Jesus is everything, and we are simply overwhelmed with the gift.

 Sometimes it seems as if God loves us too much. His love goes far beyond our ability to stop being moral , religious , 
obedient, and victorious and we just collapse in his arms."

- Michael Spencer (Mere Churchianity) -

We Do No Great Things...

 

 

"We do no great things; we do small things with great love."

   -Mother Theresa-

The Most Infuriating and 'Productive' Trait of God

Another post from my archives:

In conversation with a young friend today, I was struck at a deeper level with the scandalous love of God! The Spirit through the apostle Paul says that "love never fails". Because we are heavily results-oriented, we assume this means that if we love people, we will see results to our loving them.

But self-giving love by its very nature is and acts independent of the recipient's response. It simply is, and nothing changes it. It is this love that never fails. So what does it mean that love never fails when there is no apparent response or result from genuine love? How can we know that love never fails?

The cross of Jesus is the most powerful example of both the "failure" and the "success" of loving; there we see what appears to be utter failure on God's part, the end and death of all that was wonderful and beautiful in the man Jesus. In this selfless outpouring of love, God appears to have utterly failed to win the love of humans, and Jesus' loving life on earth appears to not have gained much at all in terms of visible results.

As Jesus was, so are we in this world; God doesn't ask us to be "successful" in terms of being able to measure the fruit of love operating through us. In fact, I increasingly believe that the less energy I put into trying to figure out if my life "counts", and the more energy I put into receiving God's scandalous, unconditional love for me and then pouring that same love out on others without insisting on measuring its effectiveness, the more fruit there will be, because love never fails.

This love infuriates and confounds the evil one and his kind, because the world, the flesh and the devil absolutely cannot conceive of  love that simply is, with no ulterior motive. It was that love of God in Christ Jesus that disarmed the powers completely; it is still that kind of love today that disarms the powers.

In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis shows Screwtape infuriated at God and saying: "...we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy (God); He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left...He really loves the human vermin and really desires their freedom and continued existence...(but) that of course, is an impossibility... All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else...The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to find out that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them?...We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense..."

I John 4:8 "...God is love..."

Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness - Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King

As we remember a great peacemaker, Nelson Mandela, who has just passed from this life to the next, these wonderful words of another noble leader of non-violent resistance, Martin Luther King, are appropriate:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

I thank God for such leaders who follow the example of Jesus, of whom the apostle John said, "The Light keeps shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never been able to put it out."

My prayer is that God will raise up more leaders like these who will motivate people to resist violence and evil systems without resorting to violence and hatred.

Do Our Fears Reflect Holes in Our View of God?

Post from last year:
In my journey of faith in God, I'm discovering more and more that He is trustworthy in all areas of life. As I continue to mature in understanding and love (which has meant changing mindsets in the process), there are moments when I'm tempted to fear that I may be headed down the wrong road. Recently I had such a moment; then I stepped back and realized that the fact that I would fear this reflected a weakness yet in my view of God.

From the time that I was a young adult, I have periodically told the Father that I need Him to keep me steady in Him and His gospel, and I have asked Him to ensure that I am on track with Him. He has faithfully done this by one means or another. This doesn't mean that I have even come close to being perfect in all my ways of seeing God over the years, but it does mean that He has kept the living Christ central in my heart and mind.

The temptation recently to fear that I might "go off the deep end" was a temptation to think wrongly about God and His care and ability to keep me. In that moment I paused to think something to this affect: if I asked my earthly father (who wasn't perfect but genuinely cared for the well-being of his children) to watch over me and make sure I didn't go into dangers that would destroy me and others, he would gladly do that for me! 

How much more the heavenly Father, who in perfect love and power is dedicated to the well-being of His children, will do this for us when we ask! Catching a fresh glimpse of His nature and character released me from fear and from the idea that I have the ability to keep myself from "falling off the edge".

In the book Discovering the Character of God, George MacDonald writes about fearing God; he acknowledges that fear has a role to play but only until love casts it out:

"So long as love is imperfect, there is room for fear...Until love, which is the truth toward God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear should hold. It is a bond, however poor, between that which is and that which creates - a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely closer bond.

"...If then any child of the Father finds that he is afraid before Him, let him make haste - let him not linger to put on any garment, but rush at once in his nakedness, a true child, into the salvation of the Father's arms, the home from which he was sent, that he might learn that it was his home. What father would not rejoice to see his child running to his embrace? How much more will not the Father of our spirits, who seeks nothing but His children themselves, receive us with open arms!"

The Most Baffling and Wonderful Story Ever Told - What If God Were Really This Good?

This month I hope to post several writings for encouragement as we wind up the year 2013 and step into the year 2014. These will be random thoughts and/or quotes and postings from my archives...

Even by those who don't claim to be "Christian", the story Jesus told about the lost son is considered to be the greatest story that's been told. It is our story, the story of each of us; it is the gospel story. In his book The Cross and the Prodigal, Kenneth Bailey says this of the father in the story:

"Traditional Western interpretation has said that the father interrupted the son and didn't give him a chance to finish his speech. Rather, faced with the incredible event (of his father's stunning display of love by shamelessly running bare-legged towards him), he is flooded with the awareness that his real sin is not the lost money but rather the wounded heart. 

The reality and the enormity of his sin and the resulting intensity of his father's suffering overwhelm him. In a flash of awareness he now knows that there is nothing he can do to make up for what he has done. His proposed offer to work as a servant now seems blasphemous. He is not interrupted. He changes his mind and accepts being found. In this manner he fulfills the definition of repentance that Jesus sets forth in the parable of the lost sheep. Like the lost sheep, the prodigal now accepts to be found."

What if God were really this good (with none of the qualifiers that we add)?? Think about it and be in wonder...