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.
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