God Is Love

Four Treasures of Adventism

A lecture series for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

NOTE: I am not preaching this morning. The sermon at Green Lake Church will be delivered by Andreas Beccai, our youth pastor. Since I'm posting this a week early, criticism has the real potential of influencing the final form.

Lecture Two: God Is Love

Sabbath School, April 6, 2013

God is love. God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. 1 John 4:8-11

Apophaticism

Theologians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition have developed an approach to theology called apophaticism. Apophaticism is the conviction that humans cannot make any deeply meaningful, affirmative statement about God because of the inherent limitations of human language. For example, if I say God is love, that would be a false statement because my understanding of love is so meager and so defective that my words distort more than they inform.*

This idea can be very seductive, especially for religious people who are philosophically inclined. We know there are vast oceans or even galaxies of unknowing surrounding us. It is indisputably true that the more we know, the more aware we can be of what we don't know. We can even cite Bible passages that caution us about the limits of our capacity to define God.

"My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

Apophaticism is a good thing when it reminds us that human language is inadequate to voice the full truth about God. There is a proper humility for those of us who attempt to speak truthfully about God. We cannot escape our own skins, our own personal and cultural histories. The Bible itself contains stories of people who had emphatic opinions about God—opinions that were judged to be false. (See the complicated stories in 1 Kings 13 and Jeremiah 28.)

But apophaticism can be overdone. All of us humans eventually come to the end of our humility. We can say “I don't know!” and “We can't know!” only so long. Eventually, being human, we cannot help ourselves: we do have opinions, not just mild, casual opinions, but deep-set convictions, about the fundamental nature of reality, about what is true, about what ought to be true.

We believe that truth and beauty, kindness and generosity, honesty and integrity are not just different from falsehood, ugliness, meanness, stinginess, dishonesty and duplicity. We believe these virtues are “better.” They are morally superior to the vices. This notion of morality cannot be reduced to a mere synonym of any other category. The virtues are more beautiful than the vices, yes. But beautiful doesn't quite say what we mean when we say the virtues are superior. The virtues are more desirable, they are more life-enhancing, yes, but when we say they are morally better, we mean something other than desirable or life-enhancing. Morality is a category that cannot be reduced to any non-religious or non-philosophical/theological term. All normal humans have moral convictions, even people who argue for a Darwinian origin of our moral sensibility end up arguing for truthfulness and honesty in dealing with data in a way that presumes a meaning for “moral conviction” that is not accounted for in any naturalistic explanation.

The most basic of all moral convictions for Adventists is simply this: God is love.

God Is Love

Years ago, when we lived in Thousand Oaks, CA, our yard bordered a large city park. We answered a knock at the door one day to find a rather cross Parks Department official standing there. “Did we have a brown dog?”

“Yes.”

“All the garbage cans in the park have been tipped over and garbage is everywhere. Witnesses say it was done by a brown dog that they have seen in your yard. This is not the first time the park has been trashed. We believe your dog is responsible. If you do not keep your dog in, you will be assessed a significant fine. If that doesn't persuade you to keep your dog in, the dog will be confiscated.”

I had one thing going in my favor. One of our neighbors had alerted us that the parks people were after us. And she had told the parks people that we worked hard at keeping our dog in. We did not deliberately let the dog run.

So now, facing the Parks official, I repeated what our neighbor had said. We had been working for months to make the yard escape-proof. We blocked his holes under the fence with logs and cinder blocks. Then he started jumping over the fence on the other side the yard. We knew he was getting out. And after he escaped, he always eventually came home and scratched at the front door. But we had no idea he was trashing the park. We thought he was just chasing gophers in the field next to the park.

The parks official was not amused. We were going to have to do something or face the consequences—a fine and possible confiscation of the dog. I made a counter offer. I would try harder to keep the dog in, though short of chaining him, I couldn't promise he would never get out. But then I offered this: I would check the park daily. If the trash cans were knocked over, I would clean it up. Whether it was Toby or another animal or vandals, it didn't matter. If the cans were knocked over, I would clean it up.

It was a deal.

So for the next few years that we lived there, every time Toby showed up at our front door wanting to be let in, I would put him in his kennel, then go check the park. Frequently, I spent a half hour picking up McDonalds bags with ketchup and food smeared on the outside, cigarette butts, paper plates coated with food on both sides. Napkins. Soda bottles and cans. Wrappers. Watermelon rinds. And worst of all, dirty diapers.

All of you who are dog lovers immediately get this story. If Toby were your dog, you would have done the same thing. Toby's problems were my problems. Part of the meaning of the word “love” is a commitment to the other.

When the Bible describes God as a shepherd and people as his sheep, the Bible is setting us up with certain expectations about God. When Jesus told the story about the lost sheep, his audience was not surprised at the searching of the shepherd. Good shepherds go out in cold, wet, miserable weather to find lost sheep. That's what good shepherds do. And we expect a good shepherd usually to be successful in his search for his sheep.

For a good shepherd, the problems of the sheep are his problems. This has profound theological implications which I will come back to a little later.

The dominant metaphor for God in Scripture is Father.

A couple of paternal pictures from the story of David are deeply revealing. David was apparently not much of a disciplinarian. Maybe this is why he is called the man after God's own heart? David's son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar. David was angry but did nothing. So two years later, Tamar's full brother, Absalom, killed Amnon to avenge the rape. Absalom fled the kingdom to escape punishment, and three years later David's pining his absent son Absalom is greater than his outrage over his dead son. Absalom is brought back from Gerar. Things happen and eventually Absalom leads a rebellion aimed at unseating King David and placing Absalom himself on the throne. The rebellion fails. Absalom is killed. And when David hears that Absalom is dead, he collapses into an agony of grief, crying, "O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son." 2 Samuel 18:33.

In this story, we see the danger of being overly permissive, the danger of an authority figure ignoring injustice. David's inaction against Tamar's rapist set up this entire sorry tale. But it is the final picture of David lamenting over his son, a son killed in his rebellion against the throne, that Christian preachers have come back to over and over again as a picture of the heart of God.

God's connection with humanity is so close, his love is so intense, that when confronted with the bald choice between self-preservation and the preservation of even a rebellious child, God would choose the preservation of the child.

I argue that if we were to see God make that choice, we would not scorn God for being sentimental. We would honor God for being sacrificial. We would understand his sacrifice as the highest imaginable expression of love.

One more picture from the life of David. Some years after Absalom's rebellion, David has become so infirm he is bedfast. At a point of crisis he abdicates in favor of his son Solomon. The abdication is not surprising given the situation, but what is remarkable is the comment of one of his courtiers when David makes the official pronouncement: “And may the LORD be with Solomon as he has been with you, my lord the king, and may he make Solomon's reign even greater than yours!" 1 Kings 1:37

It's fascinating to read this wish against the cultural backdrop of the passage. The king's favorite wife has come in to see him and she has bowed and paid obvious obeisance. Then Nathan the Prophet, who has more than once challenged the king, comes in. He, too, bows and goes through the formula acknowledging David's absolute preeminence. No one is the king's equal. Not a favorite wife, not a famous prophet, not leading generals, not even the high priest. But then someone speaks of the king's role as a father and suddenly the nicest thing you can wish for is to see the king superceded! “May your son be greater than you.”

It's the dream of every dad for his children: May they do better than I have. One of the greatest fears of the very rich is that their children will be less than their parents.

One more biblical picture of God as Father.

When we go through the gospels and notice Jesus' use of this metaphor, what leaps out is his instinctive, unvarying assumption that fathers are trustworthy and generous. Nowhere in all of the father metaphors Jesus uses is there even a hint of sternness or magisterial aloofness. Note these phrases from Matthew 6:

Your Father, who sees what you do in private, will reward you.

Your Father already knows what you need before you ask him.

Look at the birds . . . your Father takes care of them! Aren't you worth much more than birds?

It is God who clothes the wild grass . . . Won't he be all the more sure to clothe you?

Do not worry, saying, "What will I eat?" or "What will I wear?" Your Father in heaven knows that you need all these things . . . and he will provide you with them.

Matthew 6

Jesus portrays God as an idealized human father. He is responsive and affirming, aware, not aloof or absent. He actively provides for us. He takes note of our noble deeds and rewards them. He delights in doing us good. The presumption is that the father will make sure life goes well for his children. The primary responsibility for the well-being of the children resides with the father not with the children. And God happily embraces this responsibility.

Fear not, little flock. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom (Luke 12:32).

Then there is the father of the prodigal son. He eats the shame his younger son has brought on the family and welcomes the wastrel home. Then when the older son expresses scorn and resentment toward his younger brother (and by implication scorn for his father who welcomed the jerk home), the father does not rebuke the older brother, but affirms his place—all that I have is yours—and leaves open the possibility for the older brother to yet join the father in celebrating the resurrection of his lost brother.

Jesus expects his audience to buy the story. The father's generosity is surprising, maybe even astounding, but Jesus expects his audience to hear somewhere in their own hearts an incontrovertible yes to the father's generosity.

So what?

These pictures of the God who loves—the shepherd who regards the lostness of his sheep as “his problem,” the father who values the preservation and exaltation of his sons over his own, the father who is trustworthy, generous, forgiving—have important theological implications.

Let me address two. First: what grief says about God.

According to popular Christian teaching, when someone dies, he or she goes immediately into the presence of God or enters the torments of hell. In this view, before death, God is limited in his interaction with people by the illusions and frailty of our bodily existence. When a believer dies, death heals this separation and leads immediately to the joy of unhindered spiritual fellowship between God and his children. So, for God, death is a great boon. It is the door through which he welcome his children into sweet, eternal communion with him. We who are left bereft on earth may be wracked by grief, but God's heart is gladdened by the homeward flight of his child.

According to Adventist theology, when someone dies, the person stops interacting with God through prayer, worship and obedience. People are not lost to the heart or memory of God. But as an active, thinking, loving, talking human beings, dead people are as unavailable to God as they are to their grieving friends on earth. In the language of the Bible, the person "sleeps" (John 11:11-14). A dead person has no awareness of time or "waiting." The person remains "unconscious" until the resurrection. At the second coming all God's people are united and taken en masse into the presence of God. They all arrive at the heavenly party together (Hebrews 11:39-40).

In this view, God himself is deprived of the living companionship of a person who dies–just as are the grieving family and friends. Instead of death being a boon to God, death robs God of the worship of his people (Psalm 115:17). When people die, the heavenly Father no longer hears the voices of his children in praise and prayer. He has memories to cherish and a future to anticipate, but he is not in fellowship with their vital, interactive "souls."

In this view, human grief is a mirror, an image, of the grief of God. It is a truism that when children hurt, their moms and dads hurt as much as or more than the little ones. And God, our heavenly parent, hurts for his children. When grief batters our hearts and wets our eyes, God hurts because we hurt. But there is more to God's grief than that. God's grief is not only the response of his heart to the pain that wound us. God himself is wounded by the separation caused by death. Death interrupts God's own conversation with his child. God bears the emotional cost of the system he has designed and allows to continue even in its broken condition. When it comes to enduring pain, God asks nothing of us he does not require of himself.

This perspective of God as a grieving parent has large implications for how we view the "delay of the Advent." Why hasn't Jesus returned as he promised? What's taking so long? Explanations include: God is waiting because he wants to save more people. He is waiting for some predetermined time. He waits for evil to reach its full flower or for the gospel to be preached in all the world or for the character of Christ to be perfectly reproduced in his people.

Each of these theories has something to recommend it, and each has problems. The Adventist understanding of the nature of death does not answer the question, why does God wait? It does, however, change the emotional content of the question. In addition to asking why God doesn't hurry up and rescue us from our trouble (a very good and proper question), this picture of God's grief prompts us to ask, why doesn't God spare himself? If the redeemed between death and resurrection day, then every day God delays the second coming is another day he carries the wounds of his own bereavement. Since God loves every human more intensely than a mother loves her only child, the Adventist understanding of death is a picture of a brokenhearted God.

In the traditional view of death, there is diminished motivation for God to bring human history to an end. Every day God is welcoming children home. But in the Adventist view, every day that passes adds to the grief that weighs on God's heart. God does not ask us to bear burdens he himself does not carry. He does not encourage us to be brave in the face of pain that he himself does not feel.

I remember listening to a funeral sermon at a funeral in Akron, Ohio. On the front row were four or five kids, siblings of an eight-year-old boy who was killed when the front wheel of his bicycle hit a rock threw him in front of a car.

The preacher spoke directly to the young people on the front row. "Try not to take your brother's death too hard. I know you miss him, but God needed him up in heaven and that's why he took him. God must have some very important job in mind for your brother up there. Stay close to Jesus and some day you'll join your brother in heaven, and he'll show you around the New Jerusalem and tell you all about what he's been doing while you were down here working for Jesus."

The pastor was doing what a pastor is supposed to do–mining the spiritual and theological resources of his community for all the comfort and solace he could find. I was not critical of the pastor as a person, but I was appalled at the theology that drove his words.

"So are you telling me," I imagined shouting, "that every time God runs low on kitchen help in the heavenly cafeteria he throws rocks in front of little kids' bike tires? Is God really that hard up for help in heaven? What kind of God is that?"

This view, if true, would mean our deepest wounds bring great joy to God. People who are the most lovable and leave the greatest hole here on earth when they die, bring instant joy in the courts of heaven. We on earth bear all the cost of improving heaven's work force.

The popular view of death does offer some comfort. It places those who have died in a good place far from all pain (though logically, the joy of heaven would be tainted by the awareness that "back on earth" are loved ones still exposed to evil and suffering). This traditional view actually does offer an accurate description of the experience of the person who dies. When a believer dies, the very next moment in their experience will be the resurrection and the presence of God. The time in the grave that is felt all too keenly by grieving survivors does not exist in the experience of the one who has died.

The Adventist understanding of death addresses the reality of pain confronted by those who are still alive. For those who survive the death of a loved one, the "immediate" reality is grief and hurt. And in every death, one of the survivors, one of the mourners, is God himself. There is no benefit for God in the death of his children. He is not knocking off children to fill the heavenly kitchens or choirs. He does not forget our grief in the great joy of his communion with his children who have escaped into his presence from their earthly prisons. Instead God enters the very depths of our grief. In fact, our purest, deepest grief is but a faint reflection of God's grief. If we are able to receive it, the pain of our grief is a stern education about the depth and intensity of God's love.

A second theological implication: I do not expect most (or even many) to be lost.

Can we imagine a “good father” would allow his children to romp in a playground where there was a real likelihood that they would fall into a trap from which that all the resources of heaven would be inadequate to rescue them?

The standard Christian view of humanity is that because of the error of Adam and Eve in the garden all of humanity is naturally damned. A few may accept God's offer of gracious deliverance, but the default destiny of all humans is damnation and only a few will avoid it.

If Toby the dog was confiscated from the McLarty house and sent to the pound and then because no one else wanted him he was euthanized, in our home that would be considered a massive failure—not a failure by Toby, but a failure by the McLarty zoo to find an adequate way to deal with his nature.

If the shepherd did not find the lost sheep, in Jesus' story, it is the shepherd who would be called a failure, not the sheep.

In the story of the prodigal, at the end of the story, the father's heart remains wide open to both sons.

When I was young, I spent a huge amount of energy searching a reassuring answer to the question: will I be saved? Have I been perfect enough? Then later, was my faith sufficiently real to qualify me for salvation by faith? I projected onto God, my sense of never-quite-good-enough that I developed in my family of origin.

Now I am old. The pictures of God as Father are turned on their head. I no longer imagine myself primarily as “son.” I am father, the father three kids or four, counting the one who died, or five counting my daughter-in-law or dozens or scores counting the young people who have have sneaked into my heart.

As father, the question is not what do these children have to do to avoid my condemnation. More meaningful questions would be, What could they possibly do that would cause me to damn them? Can I persuade myself they are so broken the universe would be better without them? Can I imagine sustaining the pain of my own existence in their absolute, eternal absence?

God is love. This conviction, illuminated by the metaphors of Scripture and our own deep understanding of parental and shepherd and pet-keeping love, should lead us to reverse our question “who could possibly be saved, given human sinfulness.” Instead we should ask, “Who could possibly be lost given the love and resourcefulness of God?” Then, having dismissed our fearful concern with damnation we are freed to ask really good questions like: what can I do with the life God has given me? What shall I do to make the world a sweeter, more beautiful place? Whom can I touch with help, healing and hope?