Installment #3 ~ In the Beginning
"Do you think that Adam and Eve would have sinned if they had the advantage of 'future sight'?" I asked this of my friend as we stood vigil over her husband who was in the emergency room. As I've mentioned before, I've dealt a bit too much with death lately, and although this episode with my friend was not life threatening, still it was another medical emergency and too much of this kind of stuff gets your mind thinking about deeper things of God. So I mused the question to her, "If they could have known about the hate, the jealousy, the anger, the envy, starvation, disease, and all the other horrors that we deal with today; if they had know that they would be banished from the Garden, if they had known that one of their sons would murder the other, would Adam and Eve have committed the original sin?"
We thought about that for a moment. I wanted to say, "No! Of course not!" But...today we do have that advantage. We live amongst the consequences of sin. On a daily basis, we deal with pride, selfishness, greed, sexual immorality of all kinds, sickness, pollution, you name it; even death, and yet knowing that, having that hind-sight, don't we still run to sin every day? Unfortunately, the answer is painfully, "Yes. Even if they knew, they would still have done it."
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
So Where's the Love in Pain?
Installment #2 ~ In the Beginning
I once worked with a lady who's mother was dying an agonizingly slow and pain filled death by cancer. She would come to work with tears in her eyes over the suffering her mother was going through. Shadows behind her eyes and dark circles under them from the horrors she watched in her long bedside vigil.
One day, I attempted to step in beside her, so to speak, to let her know that someone was there praying for her and her mother. She said to me, "I don't think I believe in God anymore. How could a loving God allow my mother to suffer this way? My mother was a good person, she doesn't deserve this. If God truly cared, He would take this away from her."
Whew! Powerful words that hit me hard. And at that time, I had no answer for her...at least none that would have helped. Sometimes a person just needs to get the poison out of their mouth and they don't need theology. So I remained silent except to state that I would continue to pray for her and her mother, and that I cared.
But seeing this pain and suffering play out so close to me yet again, caused me to go to God seeking His answer, "Lord, why do You allow pain and suffering in good people? Do You really care about us?" It took several years for me to grow enough in Him to find the answer, but I have it now, and if you're interested, read on.
God; He had just created the most beautiful of all settings, a perfect garden for the ultimate of His creation; Man, the object of His eternal, omniscient Love...Adam and Eve, the shining glory of the Creator God, set into His perfect garden. Perfect love.
But wait. Something is missing. God Almighty has shown His perfect love to man; in fact, He's poured it out on His beloved without restraint. But what about their love for God...will it be returned? There is only one way to know, and that is to offer them a choice, to love...or not... through simple obedience. (1 John 5:2 & 3)
Love without options, with no choice except to love, is not love at all...it's a form of slavery. It's also delusional. But God loved us so much that He would accept nothing less than our love in return through our choice! So knowing the consequenses, still He offered the option.
He gave us the tree...
And He gave us the choice.
A perfect garden.
A tree to manifest our choice.
He took the ultimate risk.
Can you imagine the agony of knowing the outcome, but still offering it anyway?
The hope...the hope...how He must have hoped!
Will they love Me enough to trust me and simply obey?
The broken heart!
The agony of His rejected, broken heart.
And the agony of the consequences of our choice.
Pain
Death
Disease
Murder
Anger
Hatred
Selfishness
Pride
The list is huge...and it was us who opened the door and allowed it in to God's perfect setting. The horrors are caused by our sin, not by God's apathy. The horrors are the consequences of our choice...our choice to withhold our love from Him.
Were it not for God's ultimate love...the risk He took of loosing our love by giving us the choice to love Him back, or not, we would still be living in Paradise, with no suffering, pain or death, but also with no knowledge of good and evil, with no knowledge of real Love, with no choice to return His love in full measure...from our hearts.
So we must deal with the pain, and the death, and hate, and war, and sickness and all the other evil things that we loosed upon ourselves in our moment of rebellion, but we also get the choice to truly love Him back. Isn't that worth the price? He thinks it is!
Love returned.
That's the prize He waits for,
Hopes for,
Endures all things for.
Perfect love from God,
Returned to Him.
Love never fails.
I once worked with a lady who's mother was dying an agonizingly slow and pain filled death by cancer. She would come to work with tears in her eyes over the suffering her mother was going through. Shadows behind her eyes and dark circles under them from the horrors she watched in her long bedside vigil.
One day, I attempted to step in beside her, so to speak, to let her know that someone was there praying for her and her mother. She said to me, "I don't think I believe in God anymore. How could a loving God allow my mother to suffer this way? My mother was a good person, she doesn't deserve this. If God truly cared, He would take this away from her."
Whew! Powerful words that hit me hard. And at that time, I had no answer for her...at least none that would have helped. Sometimes a person just needs to get the poison out of their mouth and they don't need theology. So I remained silent except to state that I would continue to pray for her and her mother, and that I cared.
But seeing this pain and suffering play out so close to me yet again, caused me to go to God seeking His answer, "Lord, why do You allow pain and suffering in good people? Do You really care about us?" It took several years for me to grow enough in Him to find the answer, but I have it now, and if you're interested, read on.
God; He had just created the most beautiful of all settings, a perfect garden for the ultimate of His creation; Man, the object of His eternal, omniscient Love...Adam and Eve, the shining glory of the Creator God, set into His perfect garden. Perfect love.
But wait. Something is missing. God Almighty has shown His perfect love to man; in fact, He's poured it out on His beloved without restraint. But what about their love for God...will it be returned? There is only one way to know, and that is to offer them a choice, to love...or not... through simple obedience. (1 John 5:2 & 3)
Love without options, with no choice except to love, is not love at all...it's a form of slavery. It's also delusional. But God loved us so much that He would accept nothing less than our love in return through our choice! So knowing the consequenses, still He offered the option.
He gave us the tree...
And He gave us the choice.
A perfect garden.
A tree to manifest our choice.
He took the ultimate risk.
Can you imagine the agony of knowing the outcome, but still offering it anyway?
The hope...the hope...how He must have hoped!
Will they love Me enough to trust me and simply obey?
The broken heart!
The agony of His rejected, broken heart.
And the agony of the consequences of our choice.
Pain
Death
Disease
Murder
Anger
Hatred
Selfishness
Pride
The list is huge...and it was us who opened the door and allowed it in to God's perfect setting. The horrors are caused by our sin, not by God's apathy. The horrors are the consequences of our choice...our choice to withhold our love from Him.
Were it not for God's ultimate love...the risk He took of loosing our love by giving us the choice to love Him back, or not, we would still be living in Paradise, with no suffering, pain or death, but also with no knowledge of good and evil, with no knowledge of real Love, with no choice to return His love in full measure...from our hearts.
So we must deal with the pain, and the death, and hate, and war, and sickness and all the other evil things that we loosed upon ourselves in our moment of rebellion, but we also get the choice to truly love Him back. Isn't that worth the price? He thinks it is!
Love returned.
That's the prize He waits for,
Hopes for,
Endures all things for.
Perfect love from God,
Returned to Him.
Love never fails.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
The Perfect Garden
I've had a lot happen this past month...and I've had a lot of huge and constant blessings from God...and I've thought a lot about life, and death, and God...and His creation. This may take several entries to get through, but here goes ~ Installment #1 ~ In the Beginning...
I've been told by more than one suffering person, "If there were a God, He wouldn't allow suffering such as..." and they fill in the blank with the horrors being experienced by them or a loved one. And I have no doubt about the horrors! There are horrors going on around this globe called earth by the gazillions on a constant basis. Horrors that are too horrible to even contemplate. And these horrors affect good people. And they make good people sometimes do and say horrible things! And then there are horrors of a "smaller" nature, like love dying. Like my co-worker's mother dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. Like the grief experienced by the lady who rides my bus every night and never fails to give me a sweet smile but who just miscarried her 9 week baby. Horrors like the pain of my dog dying last month from another horror called "cancer."
Death is horrible!
And we tend to lay it at God's door and blame Him.
Or deny Him.
Because of the pain.
"Where's the 'love' in pain," we ask?
Stuff like that used to make me wonder about this God who defines Himself as "Love." I don't wonder about it anymore. I prayed for insight on this subject, and if I may, here's the thought path that my loving heavenly Father led me down.
When God made the heavens and the earth, and the oceans and the sky, and everything in them, on them, above them and below them, He did it for only one purpose, that of nurturing us humans. He didn't make it for Himself, He made it for us.
Kind of like we do with our spaces. We go to great lengths to create beautiful backyards, or the perfect decor in our home. We agonize for weeks over what color to paint the walls of the living room, and will it go well with the furniture we've picked. And we don't do that so much for us, as we do it for "them." The "thems" that we will invite to share our lives. We wait anxiously for that moment when someone from our beloved group will enter our back yard and go, "Wow!" We hold our breath hoping for that gasp of delight as they enter the door of our home. We day-dream of the moments we will spend there with family or friends, sipping tea and chatting, eating Thanksgiving dinner, opening Christmas presents or blowing out birthday candles. We decorate for love.
God did to. He created a perfect universe, and then a perfect world, and then a most perfect garden, holding His breath in hopes of our gasp of delight. He wanted to make it perfect...and He did. He made it so perfect that there was no death or decay, no shed blood, no cellular degeneration. Do you know what that means? It means that nothing would ever die. The animals wouldn't die or get cancer, the people wouldn't hate and fight and kill, the animals wouldn't eat each other, the flowers wouldn't fade and die, the grass and leaves would endure forever because of, and through His infinite love. There was no death! Think about that for a moment. No death!
And then think about this absolute perfection. At each stage of His creation, He stepped back and surveyed His handiwork, and He pronounced it "Good!" Mind you, He wasn't gaging His success by our standards, but by His, which are infinitely more exacting than ours. Six times He stood back, surveyed what His hands had wrought and said, "It is good!" In fact, let's call it perfect.
And He made it just to share with us; so He could come walk with us in the cool of the evening and look at the fun things we had done with His garden. "Look, Father...I decided to move the honeysuckle vine over here where that spot of sunshine comes in while You are here, so it perfumes the area where we sit. Do you like it?"
Perfection.
Just for us.
Love.
I've been told by more than one suffering person, "If there were a God, He wouldn't allow suffering such as..." and they fill in the blank with the horrors being experienced by them or a loved one. And I have no doubt about the horrors! There are horrors going on around this globe called earth by the gazillions on a constant basis. Horrors that are too horrible to even contemplate. And these horrors affect good people. And they make good people sometimes do and say horrible things! And then there are horrors of a "smaller" nature, like love dying. Like my co-worker's mother dying suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. Like the grief experienced by the lady who rides my bus every night and never fails to give me a sweet smile but who just miscarried her 9 week baby. Horrors like the pain of my dog dying last month from another horror called "cancer."
Death is horrible!
And we tend to lay it at God's door and blame Him.
Or deny Him.
Because of the pain.
"Where's the 'love' in pain," we ask?
Stuff like that used to make me wonder about this God who defines Himself as "Love." I don't wonder about it anymore. I prayed for insight on this subject, and if I may, here's the thought path that my loving heavenly Father led me down.
When God made the heavens and the earth, and the oceans and the sky, and everything in them, on them, above them and below them, He did it for only one purpose, that of nurturing us humans. He didn't make it for Himself, He made it for us.
Kind of like we do with our spaces. We go to great lengths to create beautiful backyards, or the perfect decor in our home. We agonize for weeks over what color to paint the walls of the living room, and will it go well with the furniture we've picked. And we don't do that so much for us, as we do it for "them." The "thems" that we will invite to share our lives. We wait anxiously for that moment when someone from our beloved group will enter our back yard and go, "Wow!" We hold our breath hoping for that gasp of delight as they enter the door of our home. We day-dream of the moments we will spend there with family or friends, sipping tea and chatting, eating Thanksgiving dinner, opening Christmas presents or blowing out birthday candles. We decorate for love.
God did to. He created a perfect universe, and then a perfect world, and then a most perfect garden, holding His breath in hopes of our gasp of delight. He wanted to make it perfect...and He did. He made it so perfect that there was no death or decay, no shed blood, no cellular degeneration. Do you know what that means? It means that nothing would ever die. The animals wouldn't die or get cancer, the people wouldn't hate and fight and kill, the animals wouldn't eat each other, the flowers wouldn't fade and die, the grass and leaves would endure forever because of, and through His infinite love. There was no death! Think about that for a moment. No death!
And then think about this absolute perfection. At each stage of His creation, He stepped back and surveyed His handiwork, and He pronounced it "Good!" Mind you, He wasn't gaging His success by our standards, but by His, which are infinitely more exacting than ours. Six times He stood back, surveyed what His hands had wrought and said, "It is good!" In fact, let's call it perfect.
And He made it just to share with us; so He could come walk with us in the cool of the evening and look at the fun things we had done with His garden. "Look, Father...I decided to move the honeysuckle vine over here where that spot of sunshine comes in while You are here, so it perfumes the area where we sit. Do you like it?"
Perfection.
Just for us.
Love.
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