Is God sunshine and rainbows? Is He cruelty and spite?
The debate rages around the world and throughout the centuries, in both the sacred and secular…what is the nature of God? Many a sincere Christian has been flummoxed and disturbed by how God can claim to be love and yet give instructions or commit acts that in our human perspective seem unloving.
This is why, I think—and it’s vitally important to understand—we are not the best judges of what truly constitutes love, fairness, or righteousness.
Human beings struggle to hold both love and discipline at the same time; it’s why a child or teenager, when being punished or restricted from something they desire, will often say “You don’t love me!” We have a default to see love, or the loving thing, as the thing that allows us to carry on exactly how we want to regardless of the potential downsides to our behavior. Blow that up to the world at large, looking back through history, and people struggle to understand how God could love Israel and yet let them fall into their enemies’ hands; how God could be loving and yet allow His people to be carried off into slavery; how God could be loving and yet tell people what they should and shouldn’t do. This flies in the face of our “live and let live” attitude, especially in modern times.
This is why places like Psalm 99 are so important; it provides a succinct summary of God’s dealings with mankind. He is a God who answers—not just humanity’s prayers, but He answers our deeds. When we are repentant of mistakes and meek and humble before Him, He is so forgiving! He will forgive any sin from which we truly repent! Yet when mankind lives unrepentant, flagrant in sin, waving their right to do whatever they want, however they want…well, those deeds will be avenged, either in this Age or at the Judgement Seat.
So, what is God, really? Above all else, He is a fair and just God, and He is love. That means He gives ample warning but also that He can be trusted at His word—so when He instructed Israel, warning them of the consequences of disobedience, and they disobeyed anyway, then they fell into enemy hands and entered into slavery. He has warned us, too, in His Word, how best to conduct our lives; so, when we choose to perpetuate our sin, we too are by default accepting the consequences of our choices, just as Israel did.
Regardless of what mankind chooses to do, we can always trust that God is fair, honest, and loving; and that, as Psalm 99 says, He will answer us with forgiveness when we repent of our sins. And we should also be mindful that He will answer us for our deeds, too—and let that spur us into living an upright and righteous life in His sight!
