God Loves You

 

2/8/15

What calling is more fulfilling than art? What can rival the euphoria of creativity? For when the artist sculpts a statue, throws paint on canvas, or sings a song that brings tears to eyes, he is imitating the very action of God. 

Lots of people imagine God as an engineer with a pencil and knit brow, who measured the angles, computed, added, adjusted, until the world didn’t have any bugs or glitches. And then, man chose to eat the fruit, and suddenly, the world was buggy and God got angry because all his meticulous work crashed into disarray.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of running off to a church retreat in New Hampshire. I got to flounder around in snowshoes like an awkward duck, and I got to walk half a mile across a frozen lake with my little sister to visit some guys at a remote ice-fishing hut. I also had the chance to listen to a couple lecture a couple lectures on essentials spanning from how to worship God in the act of brushing your teeth to how to love others.

The husband, Jonathan Warren, said something wonderful: “What if God is not an engineer, but a romanticist painter – making the world with all these crazy colors, blending them together – he loves his creation.” A romanticist painter. Ah. It is beautiful.

 In the beginning, God took nothingness and formed the universe with love and care until he could sit back, look at it, smell it, hear it, and say, “It is very good.” There is affection, pure affection in those words, the sound of a father’s smile when he sees his baby for the first time. God the painter, God the Father, God the Joyful. 

Going back to the idea of an emotionless engineer whose perfect system has been infected by a ton of bugs one might say, “Well, yeah, he thought his creation was good, but he must hate mankind now for messing it all up.” Let’s return to God the artist.

He has painted a lavish landscape, something he’s satisfied with, proud of, and feeling exhilarated over. Then he takes his paintbrush up and paints in a few little people. These little figures are special, because they are animated. Everything else in the picture is still except for Adam and Eve who can run around and do whatever they want, but – they look up at him with wide eyes, and he speaks to them clearly with good enunciation – they must not smear up the colors. And that’s an easy rule to follow in the paint world.

But at some point a sneaky animated guy God made ages ago sneaks into this painting and tells Eve God is the sneaky guy, and that God is also scared – scared that Adam and Eve will become like Him. So Eve is imagining how beautiful the colors would be look all swirled and smeared, and she wants to be in charge, so she takes her arm and smears all the paint around, and Adam comes in and sees how fun it all looks, and he doesn’t care about obeying God, the God who loves them so much he gave them all this freedom to move around when everything else was still. So he joins in too, and they are having the time of their lives…. you know the rest of the story. They got embarrassed when they realized they were naked and when God visited the scene, they smeared colors over themselves and tried to blend into the scenery. But after calling to them in hopes that they might confess, God faced them and doled out the punishment of death.  

But even though God punished man with death, he didn’t take away man’s ability to move. From the beginning, God has given humans what makes us human: the freedom to choose between right and wrong. Adam and Eve chose wrong, but God loves his creation still, and man is made in his image, and we want to create, and we want to love our creations. Unfortunately, since the world fell to sin so long ago, this love can be twisted into idolatry. And in the same way, much of God’s nature in us is corrupted by sin.

But all the same, man has many high qualities. All have agreed that love is at least one of the highest up there, and that therefore a God must be loving. And many use that to excuse their rebellion against him, saying that he hates us, that he is a cruel, indifferent force who toys with us like a cat toys with a mouse. They say a loving God would not allow so much injustice in the world, and they would rather not serve a God like that even if there is a God out there.

But have we not brought the horror on ourselves? God gave us a choice to obey one command and live in peace and joy or to disobey that one command and fall into every sin, fall into death, fall into tribulation and pain. Yes, us. We cannot simply blame Adam and Eve for everything. Though we were not there, would we not have done the same? We should not be so arrogant as to suppose we would never have caved to temptation through all eternity. Well then, if God knew man would choose disobedience, why did he give us the choice? Let me respond with another question. Is love true when someone forces you to love them? Does that not defy our own definition of love? Love is entirely voluntary, and our highest ideal of love is what we call “unconditional love”, the love that loves even if there is absolutely no benefit to the self.

And here we come to the mystery and heart-breaking beauty of God’s character. After giving man the choice, after punishing him as His just nature required him to, God sent his own Son as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, so that  man would no longer have to face the horror of death, but have the gift of eternal life restored to him. What more unconditional love exists?

And see what God’s done with this. He’s giving us a choice. Now the actions of our parents do not define us. We, individually, today, are given again the choice Adam and Eve were given in the garden: to either follow God and live forever in joy or rebel against him and face death. But our original state is reversed. Instead of being alive at first and choosing death, we are dead and given the ability to choose life, to be reborn.

Before Christ, everybody tried to do this by being as good as possible. Then perhaps God could forgive them. But nobody is perfect; we’re all human, as they say. Nowadays, all religions continue trying to be good, to reach nirvana, to be reborn as something better, but none following those religions can be sure they will get eternal life. They must live in constant fear of damnation, of a God who has such high expectations they can never be fully reached. We are all Adams and Eves when it comes to works; we all fail to choose to do the right thing.

But God the Father Almighty has given everybody who believes Him a guarantee of eternal life. Everyone. Doesn’t matter if you murdered a man, raped a woman, beat a child – God still loves you and wants you to repent of your sinful ways and run, run, run without fear, straight to Him.

But of course it must not be as easy as it sounds. There must be a catch somewhere. Otherwise everyone would be a Christian. What’s the catch?  — There is no catch.

The reason the majority of the world is not Christian is that nobody can prove God even exists. One must take a leap of faith. And doing that is scary. Being a Christian costs you something in the world. People might make fun of you or think all your opinions are rubbish, or that you are illogical because you can’t prove God is real. Taking the leap is like a trust fall towards a person who might have gone off to eat lunch or not even exist as far as you know. You might have reasons to believe they might be there, but you can’t see them and touch them even if you might hear a little sneeze or feel warmth that could be body heat.

However, Christianity does have a lot of evidence to offer. It’s easy to prove the credibility of the Bible. After all, half the people who wrote the New Testament ended up being killed in brutal ways for spreading the news of Jesus. The Bible in general is a reliable historical resource, as has been proven by countless architectural digs, and corroborations in other writings. There are many articles, papers, books, testimonies on such evidences.

But in the end, becoming a Christian is a leap of faith.

Will you repent of your sins and believe that a poor, ugly man born to a fifteen year old girl in the bad part of town is the son of God and came to save you from eternal death? Will you accept his sacrifice? Will you accept his love? I call you to do so! Run to God! He loves you, and he always has.

– Amelia

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