What Every School Boy Knows

Tis January, the time for post-Christmas doldrums.

I’m still hopeful I can get things right this year—have a better plan, a better strategy. But when the eyelids are heavy and it’s only mid-morning, fighting off a feeling of futility has to figure into the plan too.

I read my previous essay just now in such a state, or tried to. My, I did go on and on, so I’m appreciative of anyone who made it through to the end.

The gist was, that God can feel like an extra burden in life, just as even Christmas can, if you lose your sense of what he is about—or what it is about, in the case of Christmas. This is can happen because of  the following causes:

1.      The trials in life that make God seem either distant or even antagonistic. (As in the case of Job.)

2.      The manner in which the truths of God can lose freshness. Christian phrases become cliché, whether true or not.

3.      A certain fog can set in because certain truths are unclear, unexamined, or intermixed with falsehood. Or some people can say things that are true, but with the wrong spirit, which transforms what they say into a lie.

4.      The cares of the world and daily issues that make “spiritual” matters seem less pressing than the tasks and concerns at hand. (Matthew 13:22.) (Which leaves the question to look at later, are there any matters which are non-spiritual?)

5.      Related to all the above, one’s picture of God can be skewed so that God can seem like a bother, a nag, a bully, or a being with no interest in us.

6.      The flesh, to use Biblical language. I’m too lazy to try to put it in my own words, which exemplifies what I mean by the word in this case, which is to say, I’m just physically tired today, and this can  undermine one’s interest in anything.

With all this going on, where does one start?

Or—as I picture it now, Charlie Brown, in a variation on his question in the Christmas Special, with nose to the sky, only the mouth visible on his face, crying out, “Can anyone tell me what God is all about?”

I will approach the question in these essays like one who is putting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together—starting all over on a puzzle already worked over a few times. (I’m doing so as an antidote especially to point 3 above.)

Let’s see now. I remember seeing a puzzle piece somewhere that had Jesus summing up what the Old Testament is all about. I could chose that as my starting point, and then I might be well on my way to grasping what a big chunk of the Bible boils down to. It’s Matthew 22:36-40. Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is. It’s the kind of clarifying question I like. I want to get to the essence of things.

Jesus answers,  “‘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 neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

I remember another piece that fits in here quite well: Galatians 4:15: “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Just this much is material for many observations and questions. Let’s start with the command to love God. One question might be, “How does one command love? Is that how love works?”

A man might be said to command respect, but who ever said, “My, that fellow certainly commands love”?

A woman I once knew told me that as a child she would chase her mother around with raised arms saying, “Love me!” This she related to me as an indictment of her mother, and I suppose  it was, but she didn’t seem aware of how unappealing her own role in this story may have been and how counter-productive her approach was.

Is this the sort of thing going on when we encounter the command to love God? A plea from one chasing us, begging for our attention?

This doesn’t seem likely. It’s a command– from a person with ultimate authority, not from an insecure child.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. Neither a plea nor command brings about love, does it? Any school boy with a crush can tell you you can’t make someone love you. (I suppose school girls know it to, but I know boyhood experientially.) That’s something you can’t control—nor would you want to. You can’t lay down the law and make it happen. You can try for sympathy or guilt, but the response isn’t necessarily love, is it? (For an example of this approach, consider the lyrics to the song “You AreMy Sunshine”.)

Perhaps, one might propose, the commandment would have effect in the case of a hypothetical person of extreme goodness—a humble, compliant person of high moral excellence. The problem with that is, such a hypothetical person would already be loving God and neighbor perfectly. A command to do so would be superfluous.

This is just what it says in 1 Timothy 1:9. “ We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers…” So we can put that piece of the puzzle in right here. We’ll put that “lawbreakers” part on the back burner for now.

But here’s another reason the law seems an ineffective means of producing love: how will you ever know if you’ve complied with the commandment to love? It’s not as though at the end of the day you can go to your check list and put a  mark by this item, saying, “Yup, did that.” The question is, did you love enough? Is it a law that can ever be satisfied?

So what we have so far is the very sort of thing that potentially makes God an added-on burden—the picture of someone trying to control us so we will love him and our neighbor.

Is such a picture false? To answer the question, “What is God all about?” can we say, “God is all about bossing people around”? It’s a question worth pondering long and hard about, as I see it.

I can easily imagine someone replying, “Of course he is! Maybe I wouldn’t use the pedestrian phrase ‘bossing around’, but isn’t that the very definition of God—the one who is sovereign?”

I’ll tip my hand here and say I’m inclined to disagree with such an answer at this point. However, when I consider the sweep of scripture, I have to acknowledge dismissing the above answer isn’t a simple, straightforward proposition.

So, this being a genuine, sincere process, I will just entertain the idea that God isn’t all about bossing people around and see where it takes me. And for this I’ll start with what I said earlier about what every school boy with a crush knows: you wouldn’t want to make someone love you—even if you could.

The term “love potion” is an oxymoron. If it worked, the result of someone’s drinking a love potion wouldn’t be love, so even if it worked, it wouldn’t work.

Why?

Because a component of love is freedom—a major component, I’m thinking.

Now shoot me down if I’m wrong on this, as a Sunday School teacher of mine from many decades ago used to say.

I want explore that theme of freedom more in my next essay. For now, I just want to bring up this question: “Supposing God isn’t all about bossing people around, how did it come about that he seems to be in a position where he does a lot of that very thing?” Is it possible it’s because of what the human race chose for itself? And is it possible that choice was made when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Dostoyevsky said something interesting—or The Grand Inquisitor did, in the story bearing that title—in The Brothers Karamazov. “..for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” I pulled up this translation from the internet, but I seem to recall a translation that put it more like: “Nothing is more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom.” This latter version makes the point more strongly. It gets our attention because it’s so counter-intuitive. How could anyone not want freedom? Dostoyevsky makes a convincing case that I won’t get into here.

But if it’s true we really are inclined to reject freedom—as a consequence of the choice of Adam and Eve—we will also be inclined to require a God who is all about bossing people around. By this I mean, we require it in the same way a child needs someone to administer correction, but I also mean we require it in the sense that we need to see God that way, to put him in that box, so to speak, and keep him there. And if we can keep him in that box, we will have more of an excuse to see him as an added burden, and to eventually reject him, if we’re so inclined. The other direction to go is to cooperate with this version of God, “lording it over” people, as I Peter 5:3 puts it—as God’s representatives.

I hope to illustrate all of this further next time.