The Precursor Answer 3; God's Love
Why does God allow bad things to happen to innocent people?
Note: Each of these articles builds on the one before, so if you haven’t already, please return to the Substack Channel and read the introductions (1 & 2).
Before I begin this week’s article, I need to make a point of clarification from the second article of the introduction to this series (last week’s article).
In it I wrote:
‘According to this theology, that is the choice that He made. And because it covers the events in the garden of Eden as well, it must have been a choice He made before them. In fact, before anything. It was not a ‘response’ to anything. It was the plan.’
What I did NOT mean to suggest is that it was God’s plan that we suffer. It was not. It was His plan that we live in a perfect loving relationship with Him in the garden He prepared for us. Scripture is clear that this changed because of our choice to disobey Him. And it bears mentioning that according to scripture the garden didn’t change, we were evicted from it. The following points are also worth noting:
We did not change. We were endowed with free will before there ever was an apple, and the possibility that we would choose to disobey existed at the point we were created.
In order for God to be omniscient He would have to have known that we would choose to disobey before we actually did. But foreknowledge does not mean predetermination. For the Precursor Answer to be true the fact that God knew we would choose to disobey does not mean that He ordained it to be so, and the fact that it happened anyway simply means that He did not intervene. That is the plan I referred to in the paragraph above; not to intervene. And the question is “why not?” Augustine states that it is because He wanted our free will to be uninfluenced by anything, because He hoped we would choose it to offer our love to Him, unconditionally (more on this later). And why would He want that? Because He loved us first.
This and the next two articles will be about the nature of that love.
As I’ve said before, the Bible is filled with verses that are easy to read past without even noticing how impactful they actually are. So it is with Matthew 23: 37.
“How I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you refused.”
I don’t know how many times I read through this verse without thinking anything of it when one day I read it again and had one of those ‘wait a minute’ moments.
There are many verses in the Bible that tell us that God loves us; an often quoted one might be John 3: 16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
But there is a difference between John 3: 16 and Matthew 23: 37 that is easily missed. The verse in John tells us that God loves us, but the verse in Matthew 23 is Jesus (as and on behalf of God) speaking in the way that someone who loves would speak. It would be like the difference between someone saying to you, “I care about you” and saying, “I’ve been miserable since you’ve been gone, I’ve missed you so much.” One is a statement about love, the other is a statement compelled BY love. A liar could say “I care about you” and not mean it. But the second statement is more an expression of love than a statement of fact.
And the words in Matthew 23: 37 are the words of a God whose heart has been broken.
It is difficult to imagine that God’s heart can be broken, because He would have to be vulnerable for that to be possible. And how can a God be vulnerable? But what if He is? What if He is vulnerable just as the Matthew 23 verse strongly implies?
The ideas first introduced by Augustine suggest that it is His love for us, paired with our independence that makes Him vulnerable. There is a saying in the secular world that perfectly captures this sentiment: ‘Never make someone a priority for whom you are only an option.’
In the Garden of God we are a priority, but in the world that we occupy He is only an option.
And so we have the first characteristic of God’s love; it is selfless.
In the next two articles I will describe how God’s love is universal (available to everyone) and how it is also unconditional. In the discussion of the unconditionality of God’s love I will explore how unconditional love can coexist with the prohibitions against sin.
I hope you read on…
John Villegas-Grubbs
Website: Greyjump.com
Youtube Channel: @johnthepilgrim