water said:
Christianity as the message of love
There is something that has always irked me when it comes to Christianity: its image of being a message of love, a faith of love.
Lovey-dovey, one might think.
But how in all this does God's severe judgement fit in? If God is loving -- why then does He sent some to hell?! How can God be so cruel to let people suffer, starve, murder eachother; how can God let tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts and so on happen -- if He is to be a good God?!
Either there is no God, or God isn't loving at all. Or?
God loves us, but He is also just. Judgment comes in where there is sin and transgression, which are exposed by laws. God's laws show his nature -- it shows us where we stand with Him, and they are readily accessible through our conscience. This is a relationship, and like any relationship it can be soured or strengthened. God gives us life; without God there is and would be no life. It is that life that we had in God that dies when sin owns us, and without God, we will die with it. Whether by natural causes or by natural causes (is there such a thing as
unnatural causes?), violent or peaceful, during wars, famine, or in our sleep; we all die. We could ask why God allows it, but then we must also ask why God allows
life. This earth, sometimes hostile and overwhelming as it is to us, nevertheless fostered and sustains biological life. But it is unaware of us; its forces do not act
around us. It does what it needs to and gives what is has, but it is not God. We can't have nature and not need God.
There is also little doubt that there is real evil in the world. There are people who choose chaos and destruction as a way of life, and there are people who choose their own will above God's will. Now we come back to God's laws. If God's will that we love Him, and each other, were only a
preference, then we could rightfully ask why there are consequences. But God
requires it, love and peace requires it; fairness
requires justice, and justice
requires a judge.
The question is now why God allows people to act against Him, and therefore against other people. The answer is that God also allows people to act
for Him, according to His will. To love and to show their character. The world isn't divided into criminals and saints, there are only
people. Some voluntarily place themselves under a law, they regulate their own behaviour and have their behaviour regulated, others live according to their own law, or outside the law. What they do show who they are, and God will judge them accordingly. But we shouldn't confuse our justice with God's justice. The existence of evil doesn't mean it is tolerated, only that its final judgment is delayed.
The irony is that God is called "cruel" both for judging evil and for allowing it. People want it both ways. Just enough tolerance for a little evil, enough to allow some freedom of choice -- a quick lie, a spout of unfaithfulness, a little selfishness -- but not enough for something to go horribly wrong, not enough for the consequences to ever become
fully realized. With this mentality, people remain pampered little children who know they could not bear the weight of responsibility once their sins have outgrown and overtaken them.
And the consequences for sin is death, and death without God is hell. Hell has become the symbol of everything God cannot tolerate, everything He despises, everything that is
not Him and
away from Him. The Jews and Christians, like Jesus himself, borrowed from sources around them to describe this state. It is
because hell threatens to swallow us alive,
because the reality of sin has overtaken us and guilt and fear threatens us, that we need God's love (Ps. 40:11-13), and why Christ answered with it. It is when we confess our sin and admit our need by turning to God ("repenting"), that we face God in humility and see His love clearly -- only then do we accept it, and can we express it and let it be the light of our lives.
Next, we have the Christian tradition -- the Inquisition, the forceful conversions: Acts of love?
Obviously not. Although atrocities committed in the name of Christianity are not automatically more evil than those committed under any other name, they are evidence of the same degeneracy, and the people involved are no doubt subject to the same judgment. The criterium will not be whether one professed to know God, but whether God in fact knows you. They had 1 Corinthians, they knew what it said:
1 Corinthians 8:3
But the man who loves God is known by God.
That those acts of intolerance were motivated by religion
in spite of the Christian message makes their condemnation all the more deserved. Aren't those who judge and condemn using pre-Christian and non-Christian arguments effectively
ignoring Christ? Drunk with the power of the Roman empire behind them, many Christians committed worse sins than those they professed to have been saved from. They continued the
Roman tradition. They were "senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless" (Romans 1:31).
What we should learn from such examples is not to confuse man's application of justice (or lack of it) with God's judgment. That we can judge such crimes with some objectivity is a clue that we rely on a higher justice, but it should also be a clue that we should not rely too much on our own objectivity. It's that "superiority" that would deny that we will be judged by the same measure we use. God has the final word.
Christians, I challenge you to clear up this "message of love"!
Is Christianity indeed a "message of love and peace" -- or is this some perverted idea -- or how are we to understand such statements?
This "message of love" is based on a shallow understanding of the Bible, and more specifically a misunderstanding of Christ himself. The hippies also advocated "love and peace", yet their 'message' was far removed from Christianity.
Jesus did not preach love first, He preached judgment and repentence. He was the answer to the problem posed by the law: are you perfect? He was God's answer to the problem of suffering and injustice. When we suffer, we do not want scientific reasons and philosophical explanations, we want love, care, and healing. The healthy do not need a doctor. If you are perfect, you do not expect punishment or fear justice, but no perfection makes you immune to being a victim of sin or death. It's no coincidence that we feel life at its most glorious and meaningful when experience love, not when our conscience is clearest.
While we focus on the ideal, on "heaven", the contrast of suffering, pain and injustice become shockingly evident and offensive. But without such a backdrop we would not notice it. Even the word "conscience" means "with knowledge". In fact, we are so confident in our ability to discern between right and wrong, that we would even hold God to it if we could. But if we put man up as the ideal, the individual becomes supreme and the law loses, and if we put the law up as the ideal, control and authority becomes supreme and man loses; there is no man just or powerful enough to trust with enforcing the world.
People question God's wisdom for choosing to suffer with us and for us, rather than simply take us out of the world or "fixing" it (us). But instead of admitting defeat -- as if God cannot deal with suffering or imperfection and therefore neither can we -- God came to be with us. In the first place, He became sin for us, satisfying the requirement of perfect law, and He gave us the comfort and hope of knowing that our suffering is not in vain. Now He is not only waiting at the other end of life -- the perfect, righteous and enlightened end -- He also came under us, below us, to the death-end, to patiently support and catch us when we fall. So God is the beginning and the end, encompassing all. Everything from the worst sinner to the angels themselves. This is His love: that He enabled, not disabled us; gave meaning, not sidestepped it; He did not take away the victory from us, and through Christ we never have an excuse to admit defeat...
Romans 8:35-39
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This
frees us from whatever we fear, and
permits us to love. "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment." If we have to be
freed at such a terrible cost, then it must mean that what we must be freed from is otherwise very real and threatening.
The law:
Matthew 22:37-40
Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'
All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
The love:
1 Corinthians 13:4
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
