Guest Post: The Love of God and Suffering- Pt2

Excerpt from the book Is This A God Of Love, 

by A. E. Wilder-Smith

Chapter V

The Problem of Rebuilding

Just what would we expect a God of

love to do after his creatures had chosen

the wrong road — turning their backs on

the only good?

The Scriptures say that even before

the wrong choice had been taken either by

man or angels, God, because he is omniscient,

knew all about it. He had even

drawn up careful plans in advance to cope

with the situation that would arise, even

though he was in no way responsible for

it, nor did he cause it (cf Rev. 13:8, Eph.

1:4, Heb. 4:3, 1 Pet. 1:19-20).

This last fact—that God, if he is God,

must obviously have been omniscient

with respect to the fall long before it

happened — has been a stumbling block

to many. Actually, few real intellectual

difficulties are involved in this matter if it

is considered carefully.

If I observe a person carefully over a

period of time, I may notice some of his

little idiosyncrasies. He may say “Ah,” for

example, as a prelude to every difficult

word he has to pronounce. Or he may

twitch his eyebrows (or his ears) before

relating a good joke. Gradually I learn to

predict just what he is going to do before

he actually does it. My previous observations

allow me to do this with a fair

amount of accuracy.

However, my ability to foretell his

actions in no way makes me responsible

for them when he acts. Similarly, the fact

that God was able to foresee what Adam

and Eve, the angels and mankind in

general, would do, does not necessarily

implicate him in the sense that it makes

him responsible for initiating their actions

and choices. The only implication is that

involved in his having given them a gloriously

free choice of action in order to

create the possibility of their love.

The Problem Of The Consequences

At this point many will maintain that,

if God saw in advance the chaos, misery

and suffering which would certainly follow

the gift of the possibility of love, why

did he proceed with his plans to create.

Was he not rather sadistic to have persisted

in these plans, knowing the consequences

in advance?

In principle, the same type of questioning

arises every day in our own lives,

but seemingly we don't recognize this fact.

Consider, for example, the decision we

must make on whether to marry. Even the

marriage ceremony emphasizes rather

drastically that the same question is involved,

for the clergyman says our marriage

vows are binding until death us do

part. Surely there is scarcely greater grief

than that experienced by a really devoted

couple when separated by death. We could,

of course, avoid this terrible grief by the

simple expedient of not creating a marriage

relationship at all! Avoid marriage

and its love relationship and no grief of

parting by death will ever overtake you.

Yet, we rightly go into marriage with

our eyes open. We know that in normal

circumstances, death and all its sorrows

will overtake us and will separate us. Most

of us fear this more than we could ever

say. In spite of all this we marry, because

we believe that the joy of love and the

ennoblement of giving ourselves to another

in the abandon of devotion even for

a day (and forty or fifty years pass like a

day) is better than no love at all. It is

written of Jesus Christ that he endured

the sorrows of death on the cross for the

sake of the joys which would result from

the sorrow. The same principle is involved

here. The joy of love, even "short" love,

because it stems from a God of love,

compensates for even the sorrows of a

cruel death such as that which Jesus

suffered for all mankind, and the death

which separates all lovers.

The enrichment and ennoblement of

the human character brought about by

the experience of even the brief joy of love,

as God intended it to be, compensate for

certain future death, separation and

present trials. It is a question of balance.

Those who know the love of God in Christ

and those who have experienced a faint

taste of that same quality of love in God given

marriage will confess that it is worth

the certain severe suffering which it brings

with it. The principle is that even a little,

short-lived love is better than none at all.

The reason is that even mortal love changes

the eternal human psyche.

Evidently the Creator, being love personified,

thinks this way too, for he did

indeed create us and the rest of the fallen

creation, in spite of the foreseen mess and

separation.

All the same, many people — including

ourselves sometimes — feel tempted

to say "God, forgive God"  when contemplating

the dire mess in which the world

finds itself. Yet if it is true as the Scriptures

assure us that temporal sufferings

can and do bring eternal recompense, if it

is true that suffering is not necessarily

punitive but can be remedial as well, then,

relying on the Scriptures, we are able to

accept the anguish, just as God did when

he crucified God to remedy the fall of man.

The next question is: what would we

expect God to do to pull us out of the mire?

The Problem Of God's Answer

Now that the fall has taken place and

sin and anguish are in the world, what

would we expect God's answer to be? The

answer we give will depend entirely on our

conception of God's character.

If God is a God of love, then he is our

loved one. What would we expect a true

loved one to do who had been misunderstood

and rejected? Perhaps the scriptural

answer is the best one here: Love

"suffereth long, and is kind...is not easily

provoked, thinketh no evil... beareth all

things... endureth all things... (love) never

faileth."

Surely that is the reaction we would

expect of someone who truly loves us.

Love endures all these things in the hope

of ultimate success in the wooing process

of love. God saw man's wrong choice and

all of its consequences which would lead

to chaos and anguish, long before the

wrong choice was made. When it did

come, however, we would not expect a real

God of love to impatiently and disgustedly

dismiss and destroy the object of his love.

Many who have difficulties with these

points apparently expect God to act like a

hard-hearted unforgiving tyrant rather

than a forgiving father. Such an expectation

probably arises from the fact that

such action is typical of short-fused people

like ourselves. But then, we are no real

examples of love in being short-fused.

In actual fact we would expect a God

of love to try to salvage what he could out

of the carnage. It takes the patience of

genuine love to set about this process. He

had warned in faithfulness and sternness

of the consequences of the wrong choice

—men would surely die of it—but neither

angel nor man heeded. One thing God

would not be expected to do, once the

wrong choice had been taken, would be to

block the way back to himself by attempting

to threaten, cajole or force us back.

Force cannot restore anything in the way

of love. That would be to cut off all possibility

of a way back.

How To Restore Love

Thus, in order to restore love, there

remains only one way open—the exercise

of further patient love. Accordingly, God

exercises long-suffering and patience in

trying to win us back freely to love and

reason.

Therefore, we should expect the consequences

of the fall not to be "fire and

thunder," but rather the "still small voice"

in the attempt to realize the word said

about God by the apostle: “who desires all

men...to come to the knowledge of the

truth."

But this attitude of quietness and

perseverance can be mistaken for passivity

or even inactivity. A large part of the

Scriptures is devoted to just this point in

fact. God is not inactive; he is not indifferent.

He is certainly not dead: “The Lord is

not slack concerning his promise, as some

men count slackness; but he is

longsuffering toward us, not willing that

any should perish, but that all should

come to repentance.” This means just what

it says: not all men will repent and come

to a knowledge of the truth. But it confirms

that God is a God of love and

patience who is ready and willing to receive

all who do turn to him.

The fact, then, that He has waited so

long before judging sinful man is, in reality,

another indication of God's true

character — loving-kindness, patience,

long-suffering, not being easily provoked.

Only by looking at the situation in this

way can I see any explanation of why God

has not long since exercised general

judgement on all of us and set up a

"puppet state" on earth and in heaven to

slavishly and immediately carry out his

every demand, just as any dictator would

do if he could, particularly if his will had

been thwarted as God's will certainly has

been.

Thwarting God's Will

Some will feel shocked. Can, then,

God's will be thwarted? The fatalistic

Muslims think not. Is it possible that his

will may not be done on earth as it is in

heaven? Anyone unsure about this point

should ask himself whether God planned

any act of sadism that has taken place.

Was it his will to kill six or seven million

Jews in gas chambers simply because

they were Jews? Was this not rather,

thwarting God's perfect will? And does not

any other sin also thwart it?

Sinning is one way of thwarting his

will. Another way would be to set up a

dictatorship to "restore order to the chaotic

creation." If this route to rebuilding

creation were adopted, it would just as

effectively thwart God's real purpose of

setting up a kingdom of love. Under the

present circumstances of freedom to do

good or bad, there are still a few people

who see the situation as it really is and

who turn to God to be refreshed by his

love, even in the midst of the general

anguish of creation. Even a little of such

love and refreshment is better than none

at all. If the Lord had judged immediately

after the fall or after any sin, how many

who have since drunk of the water of the

well of life and love would have been lost

to him and his kingdom of love for ever?

His patience has been rewarded with

responding love which would have been

impossible if immediate judgment had

supervened.

King George VI Of England

A story is told about King George VI of

Great Britain and how he won Elizabeth.

As a young man the future king fell in love

with the charming young Scottish lady.

After a long time of reflection he plucked

up his courage and approached her on the

subject although he was rather shy, especially

with the opposite sex. He had

never been much of a lady's man and was

neither very robust nor strongly masculine

in the film-star sense of the word.

Moreover, he had a slight speech defect,

which added to his difficulties. His proposal

was rejected.

The young prince, greatly upset over

this rebuff, asked his mother, Queen Mary,

for her advice. The Queen listened sympathetically

to her son's tale of woe. Then she

told him she just wanted to ask one

question before advising him. Did he really

love Elizabeth only? Would he be able

to find a substitute if Elizabeth proved

reluctant? After a moment's consideration,

he replied that he would marry

Elizabeth or no one else. "Well then," said

his mother, “there is only one way open to

you. Go and ask her again."

So the young prince put his pride in

his pocket, gathered up his remaining

courage, and arranged another interview

with Elizabeth. He probably stuttered as

he repeated his proposal, remembering

what had happened to him the first time

at her hands. She refused him again.

Not knowing what to do then, he

returned to his mother, Queen Mary, for

advice. Again she listened quietly—some

say, severely — to the whole story. She

showed him every sympathy, and, after

hearing all he had to say, indicated that

she had one question to ask before she

could advise him. The question was: "Do

you really want her after this rebuff?

There are plenty of other young ladies

around who would be delighted to have a

prince as a husband. I myself could show

you some.” But poor George was quite

clear about his feelings. It was Elizabeth

or no one at all. “Then," said his mother,

"in that case there is only one way open to

you. Go and ask her again."

So, after a considerable period of

mental preparation, the young prince

approached the pretty young Scottish

lady the third time. In the meantime, she

had noticed how serious the prince was.

His love and determination to win her had

indeed been constant. She saw that the

great effort he made in coming the third

time, putting his pride in his pocket demonstrated

his singleness of purpose. And

she began to recognize something new in

herself. His undoubted love toward her

was beginning to kindle an answering fire

in her own heart. His warmth of love, even

though he was awkward and not very

good at courting a young lady's affection,

was beginning to warm her affection towards

him. In short, his love was beginning

to kindle her love, and she began to

transmit some of the love she received

from him. She began to feel she was able

to say that she loved and admired him in

his singleness of purpose and constancy.

Thus, the story goes, began one of the

really happy families in the annals of royal

households. This love lasted until the

king's death.

Love begets love. But it often has to be

very patient, longsuffering and kind until

the fire is kindled in the prospective

partner's heart. The Scriptures say that

God woos in one way or another every

man and woman ever born. Through the

circumstances of life, or through the

Scriptures, he quietly goes on as the years

pass, until we begin to return to him some

of the warmth of love which he has for us.

For we are told that God has his delight

among the sons of men.  He loves us,

indifferent or rejectors though we have

been of his overtures towards us. He is

working toward the day when we may

begin to return to him the same love, and

to delight in his friendship as he will

delight in ours.

Once kindled, this love must be regularly

tended in order to maintain the

warmth of the blaze which God intends

our love to be — warming and refreshing

to both partners, so that both can rejoice

in the happiness which love brings. God is

love and we were so constructed in his

image that we can only flourish when

bathed in such love—breathing it in and

giving it out.

But it would be one-sided to leave the

story here. All love stories do not end this

way. We must look at one other less

pleasant possibility.

The Final Refusal

There comes a time in every love affair

where a final answer toward the wooer

must be made. This final answer may be

either yes or no. One day the wooed one

may make a rejection which, although she

perhaps did not know it, was the final one.

It turns out to be permanent. In the one

case, she may, of course, die. That finishes

the wooing of a mortal man—when

immortality lays hold of the prospective

bride.

Another possibility is that the wooer

may cease to woo. The “wooed” is not the

only one who has a free will to accept or

reject the wooer. God as the wooer has a

free will too — to stop or to continue

wooing according to his infinite wisdom.

He can decide how long to woo and be

rejected and also when to stop wooing

altogether. Even this final decision to stop

wooing, will, we are told, be made on a

basis of love. It will, accordingly, be put off

as long as possible.

There is a third and last possibility. If

the wooed marries another, then further

courtship by the first suitor would be

thoroughly out of order and outside the

confines of love. The Scriptures say quite

clearly that this state of affairs may be

reached in the spiritual sense. There comes

a time when a man “marries this world,”

and after that God no longer offers his

salvation, his "marriage relationship" to

him. His Spirit strives with him no longer.

A man's spirit and God's Spirit become

forever estranged, for man's spirit finally

"marries another," selling itself to this

world and its rebellion against the Most

High.

We humans can seldom clearly see

when such a final act takes place. We

cannot determine when God's Spirit gives

a man up forever. But that such does

occur is perfectly clear, even though it is

invisible to man's mortal eye. We can give

ourselves entirely over to material things

such as a career, money or social standing.

It may be the love of things more

definitely sinful that cuts us off. In extreme

cases, we can "sell ourselves to the

devil'' quite consciously—as many Nazis

did when they knowingly cooperated with

Hitler in liquidating human beings in the

interests of their own promotion within

the party. Many do the same just as

effectively when they value promotion in

their jobs before promotion in the kingdom

of heaven. They do not seek "the

kingdom of heaven first.” Some men resolve

never to discuss spiritual matters

again because "they disturb." For them,

the courtship is over; they're married to

another.

The New Testament letter to the Hebrews

speaks of that cessation. "Today,

when you hear this voice, do not harden

your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day

of testing in the wilderness, where your

fathers put me to the test and saw my

works for forty years. Therefore, I was

provoked with that generation and said,

‘They always go astray in their hearts;

they have not known my ways.’ As I swore

in my wrath, ‘They shall never enter my

rest.’”

The context of this statement shows

that the Lord spoke and spoke again, and

wooed and wooed again, but the Hebrews

of that generation closed their hearts and

inward ears. In the end, God gave them up,

and that generation, except for Joshua

and Caleb, never entered the promised

land but perished in the wilderness. This

serves as a parable for us, to whom God

also speaks. We can be so occupied with

the joys and trials of this life that we, too,

do not hear. We, too, can miss the joy and

rest of his love by acting as did the Hebrews.

"For it is impossible to restore again to

repentance those who have once been

enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly

gift, and have become partakers of

the Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness

of the Word of God and the powers of

the age to come, if they then commit

apostasy, since they crucify the Son of

God on their own account and hold him

up to contempt (Hebrews 6:4-6, RSV).”

This warning is to those who have at

one time responded to God’s wooing, and

have therefore tasted his goodness, and

then cease to respond. A time comes when

it is impossible to renew them, for the

striving of God’s Spirit with them ceases.

Another Scripture passage speaks in

exactly the same tenor: "For if we sin

deliberately after receiving the knowledge

of the truth, there no longer remains a

sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of

judgment, and a fiery fire which will consume

the adversaries... How much worse

punishment do you think will be deserved

by the man who has spurned the Son of

God and profaned the blood of the covenant

by which he was sanctified, and outraged

the Spirit of grace?.. .It is a fearful thing to

fall into the hands of the living God

(starting at Hebrews 10:26)."

I take this warning for myself, believing

that I can learn from all Scripture. The

point is, God can and does speak to men;

he does woo. If they respond, he allows

them to taste in this life the things of his

kingdom of love. But his wooing is dynamic,

and it is dependent on our daily

response. Continual spurning may end in

our "marrying another forever." Then his

wooing stops. Rejecting God’s grace in

Christ simply means declaring ourselves

as candidates for no grace, which is the

same thing as being ripe for judgment.

This raises the whole question of

judgment at the hands of a so-called

loving and gracious God. Can we accept

this? Is all suffering a judgment? Or must

suffering and judgment be kept apart in our minds?

Here is a link to a page where you will find a PDF of the entire book for free:
http://ph16.blogspot.com/p/free-books-good-ones-you-can-read-right.html

PART 1: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/02/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt1.html

PART 3: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/04/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt3.html

Guest Post: The Love of God and Suffering- Pt1

Excerpt from the book Is This A God Of Love, by A. E. Wilder-Smith

Chapter IV

The Origin of Evil

Difficulties of the type discussed in Chapter 2 led Baudelaire, the French art historian and poet, to exclaim, "If there is a God, he is the devil!" Such a statement is the direct result of believing that man has always been as he is, good and bad, and was so designed originally. This is the Muslim position.

Theistic evolutionists cannot avoid the same difficulty when they maintain that God used evolutionary processes to produce the world of nature as we see it today. If he did, then his methods made the bad with the good, as Baudelaire maintains, and he therefore must be the devil as well as God. Everything pivots on whether we believe nature was once "good" and then subsequently ruined, whether we believe in the fall of man as laid down in Genesis. By tampering with the structural details of Genesis, we are likely to garble the whole reason for the present state of man — and the whole plan of his salvation which will take him out of the present disastrous mess. Genesis presents an integral whole on which the total plan of Scripture is firmly founded.

Let us return to the cathedral illustration of Chapter 3. It is superfluous to point out that all illustrations and analogies are imperfect and have their weaknesses if pressed too far. Our illustration of the cathedral is no exception. One of its imperfections lies in the fact that the architects who designed and built the cathedral are long-since dead and therefore could not prevent the bombing of their masterpiece. Then is God dead, too? Was he dead when his masterpiece, nature, was "bombed” into ruin?

Today many assume God to be, in fact, dead and resolve the question that way. But this is a doubtful escape exit for several reasons. Although it might explain God's creative work in the past and its subsequent ruination, it would never explain the present maintenance of nature and creation. No dead God could take care of that. Christians rightly believe that he is not only the living creator, but also the living maintainer of nature — and of us. By very definition, the "God is dead" theory will not fit in here, for maintenance implies activity and life.

Thus the question now becomes: Why didn't an almighty God who made, maintains and presumably loves his masterpiece, creation, prevent its "bombing?" Here the parable of the cathedral can do us no more service.

People who continually ask the question, "Why doesn't God stop it?" are often those who don't bother to ask what "stopping it" would entail. Some specific details must be examined before attempting to solve the greater principles involved.

Consider any virtue of which a person is capable; love, kindness, honesty, faithfulness, chastity, or any of the traits named in Galatians 5 will do. Select a virtue which pleases us all—love—and ask the following question: "What is the nature of love in particular, and virtue in general?"

Nature Of Love And Virtue

This subject of the nature of love and virtue is vitally important because the Christian way of life maintains that God himself is love. Christians in the Western world often do not realize the tremendous import of this statement. I have given other religions, including Islam, some thought, and have studied Islam's Holy Book, the Koran, which designates Allah as the compassionate, forgiving one. As far as I know, nowhere in the Koran does Allah figure specifically as an embodiment of love. He may threaten, may be merciful, omnipotent compassionate and omnipresent. He may offer the faithful a place in the gardens of paradise with as many dark-eyed hour is as they wish. But love never figures in the Koranic "revelations" of Allah's nature. A designation of God as "love" stands unique in the Bible.

Right in the center, then, of the Christian position is this virtue we call love. It must be of vital importance for that very reason. Nevertheless, I find myself at an extreme loss when I am asked to rationally explain anything at all about God's love. I know that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." But God, even though loving, is also infinite. Therefore, he exceeds anything my thinking apparatus can handle. So I do not pretend to be able to plumb the depths of either his love or character. To think rationally about that love is far beyond me.

I suspect it is for this reason that when the Scriptures speak of God and his love, usually man's love to a woman and vice versa is used to drive home the point at an anthropomorphic level. It is like using real-life illustrations to clarify abstract and abstruse points of chemistry non-scientific people. Thus, God provides information on himself and his love in a human setting in order to really communicate with us. The information we thus obtain by "cutting down the high voltage of God's love" to the "low voltage of human love,” we will then apply to our main problem.

The first question in analyzing human love is: "How did this love between bride and bridegroom originate?" The history of most such relationships provides the answer. The young man met the young girl one day and sooner or later began to feel attracted to her. The attraction is better experienced than described. Very often the girl feels attracted to him at the same time, although she might at this stage be more hesitant to display her feelings. Often, he begins the action side of the relationship by looking for suitable ways to court her. But until wooing is begun, the whole affair is lopsided. A one-sided relationship in which attentions are not returned can be extremely painful. Certainly it is neither happy nor satisfying to either party.

At this stage there is one burning question which every prospective bridegroom would like answered as soon as possible: "Does she love me?" Is my attraction to her reciprocated?" One purpose of courtship is to give the girl a chance to settle the question in her own mind. For, once she notices the man's attentions and, therefore, attraction towards her, she has to make a momentous decision: "Can I return his affection?" If she thinks that she may do so, then she must decide if she can love him. Here she must rely on her own heart as well as on her common sense and the principles of life to which she adheres. After due consideration, she may decide she does. An understanding is reached between the two. Aradiant couple emerges, and great are the happiness and joy of two hearts that have entrusted themselves to one another in mutual love and faithfulness.

In order to answer the question why a God of love just doesn't "stop it” we must analyze this process of falling in love more closely in order to draw some reason out of what often appears to be an entirely unreasonable happening.

First the young man must court the girl of his choice. She will be unhappy if he doesn't and he will be unmanly if he doesn't know how. Now, courtship is a very fine art besides being a very necessary one. Some of our finest poetry, music and art have arisen as its by-products! Most important perhaps, is that it is a so called gentle art, which brings us to a cardinal point in our analysis.

The moment force takes the place of wooing, both love and the joy of love cease. They are often replaced by hate, recriminations and misery. For the whole structure of love is built on absolute mutual consent and respect for the character and sovereignty of the loved one. In other words, the structure on which human love between a bride and a bridegroom is squarely based is freedom to love.

Most civilized societies recognize precisely this structure in their marriage services. The two persons intending marriage are both given the public opportunity of making a free-will consent in saying "I will" before the assembled congregation. Old Testament cultures stand for exactly the same principle, as the following well-known story emphasizes.

Rebekah

When Eliezer, Abraham's servant, asked Rebekah to become Isaac's wife (Gen. 24), he became so assured that he had found God's choice for his master's son that he was ready to cut comers in the process of taking the bride home. The evidence that Rebekah was God's choice was so overwhelming that he wanted to speed things up, intending to take off immediately with the girl and forget about all the formalities or ceremonies.

However, Rebekah's relatives saw immediately that this was no basis for marriage, even though the Lord might be in it. What a good thing it would be if young couples saw this point too, instead of just starting to live together with no ado or ceremonies. It is to emphasize the necessity of mutual public consent before love and lifelong married joy, the greatest relationship in our earthly life, that Rebekah’s relatives got together and said that even though God might be in it all, Rebekah must first be publicly questioned on the matter. She had to give her own decision and opinion before they would let her go to Isaac. So they called her in before the family and their friends to ask whether she wanted Isaac. Only after she had given public consent based on her own free-will decision, did they agree to marriage. They knew that no other basis was good enough, even though it was obviously God's will even without such public decision-making.

The Amnon And Tamar Affair

Thus, the first point arising out of this analysis of the basis of bride-bridegroom relationships and love is that such a partnership is based firmly on public mutual consent or free will.

The second point deals with the consequences of neglecting the above point. The shocking “love affair" between Amnon and Tamar (2 Sam. 13) illustrates this danger in a crass way. Amnon fell madly in love with the king's beautiful daughter Tamar. He was so infatuated with the fair girl that he just could not wait to woo her and win her consent. By guile, Amnon arranged to be alone with the girl. Feigning sickness, he received the king's permission for Tamar to come and cook for him in his apartment. Having got rid of everyone else, he proceeded to force the poor girl because he was so madly "in love" with her. "Love" that cannot wait to woo is abnormal. It often metamorphoses before our eyes into “lust.”

The consequence of this haste and trickery was that Amnon’s "love” turned in a twinkling into hate for her. The eventual result was murder, for her relatives had Amnon murdered later for his brutality and treachery. Tamar suffered heartbreak and "remained desolate in her father's house" (2 Sam. 13:20).

Free Choice

In order to love in this sense — not merely physical union, which can result from lust—we must experience the mutual attraction and union of body, soul and spirit in an exclusive personal relationship.

If the basis of mutual consent in the love relationship is removed, if there is no freedom to love, if freedom is replaced by force, then all possibility of loving is removed. Love can be replaced then by its opposite — hate. This implies, of course, the further step of logic: Where there is true freedom to love, there is also freedom not to love. If this freedom to say "no" were not really present, there would ipso facto be no freedom to say "yes" and to love. The ability to say "no" must be just as genuine as the ability to say "yes" if true mutual consent is to be achieved as a basis for love.

As we have seen, the Bible teaches that God himself is love, and his love is often likened to the bride-bridegroom relationship. Our third conclusion is that, if his love to us is to be compared in some way with our human nuptial love, then the principles governing the two loves can be expected to be comparable in some ways. We should expect God, on this basis, to be the grand wooer. That being the case, we should expect him to be awaiting our response to his wooing. To receive and experience his love we should expect the mutual-consent basis to decide everything — my consent to him in answer to his "attraction to and love for" me.

Thus, we conclude that if God is love in this sense of the word, he will be looking for answering love from me. Love is only satisfied if it is returned. He woos us by many means, mainly by having sent his Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, to justify us by dying and being resurrected for us.

Being love, we would not expect him to demand or attempt to force love. That would be a contradiction. The very attempt to do so would destroy the basis of all love. As our true lover he does everything to show the true nature of his love— even to becoming a fellow man, heir to our lot as well as bearing our sin. Jesus was serious about his love — serious even to death.

The Case Of The Robot

Consider one more vital point. What would have happened if God had so constructed man that he could not make a true free-will decision himself, but was only capable of automatically doing God's will, just as a lock opens when one turns the correct key in it? If man had been so constructed that, when a certain "button" in his mind was depressed he delivered "love" automatically, would real love be in fact delivered? Of course the answer is negative. Such a person would be "congenitally” devoid of free will and therefore incapable of love and virtues in any real sense of the word.

None of us would be interested in "loving" the outward form of a partner who, every time we touched a certain "button," put chocolate in its mouth or stroked its hair or automatically intoned the sentence "I love you." If such a system were conceived or constructed, it would have to be subhuman or machine by nature. For to try to construct it so that it delivered "virtue" or love" on command would of necessity mean that it be devoid of humanity, and therefore personality, and as a result it could deliver nothing of the kind. Assume that God, in order to be sure of our love and to make sure that we were "virtuous" in every way, made us like marionettes. He would have taken from us the possibility of really exercising our free will in order that we might not exercise it wrongly. Wanting to be so sure that we loved him and our fellow men, he would have made us so that we could not do otherwise. Whenever he pressed a button we would "deliver the goods," just like a vending machine. How could such a setup involve real love in any way?

The Grand Risk

This brings us right up to the great principle. If God wanted creatures that really loved him and their fellow-beings, then he was, by the very intrinsic nature of love, obliged to recognize the fact (though it sounds strange to us to use such phraseology and maintain that God was forced to do anything — his own moral nature brings with it the consequence that he will or must act according to that nature) that love and virtue demand absolute freedom to love and exercise freedom. Such a necessity lies in the very structure of love and, indeed, of any other true virtue. Thus, to create the possibility of love, God had to create free personalities just like himself, for he is love and he made us to love.

For God to plan at all for true love involved the built-in risk of the proposed free partner-in-love not loving at all. To have built the love-partner so that he would be congenitally obliged to respond would have been to destroy the whole purpose of designing a creation where love could reign. God wished—and still wishes —to set up a kingdom of love on earth and in heaven. But to do so involves the above outlined risk of the free partners choosing not to love, but to do the opposite of their own free will — or even to hate. The practical result of being indifferent to or hating is the same from the divine partner's point of view. For there is no positive response to his love in either case. And love aims at a response of love. Thus, either love grows by responding, or it dies.

Almsgiving And The Socialist State

Exactly the same risk is involved in planning any and every virtue. Take, for example, the virtue of almsgiving. In Turkey one sees hundreds of needy beggars. There are the blind holding certified photographs of their suffering wives and children needing support. There are those lying in the gutters, with their misshapen bodies uncovered so that all who pass by can see they are not counterfeiting. There is the poor man who has his feet where his shoulder should be, loudly and slowly repeating selected passages from the Koran. There is the old man suffering from Parkinson's Disease, whose saliva continually runs over his poor old dirty face as he holds out an empty trembling hand all day long. Seeing this misery causes one to exercise compassion and give a coin so that they can eat a slice of good Turkish bread. Naturally one is convinced that something much more fundamental should be done for these thousands of people so representative of suffering humanity. But a coin will at least guarantee that the immediate plague of gnawing hunger will be assuaged.

So one gives something to the poor mother sitting in rags underneath the mailbox at the post office, with her week old, unwashed baby on her ragged lap. In so doing one exercises a virtue — that of almsgiving. The immediate reward is an extra-fervent prayer to Allah for the giver's salvation. The joy on the recipient's face would be reward enough. To exercise any virtue is a free-will operation which brings joy to the giver and to the receiver.

If, however, beggars are cared for by taxes, and the city authorities send me a tax bill to help support the poor and needy, then I must pay. It may be a good thing to organize matters in this way. Many maintain that this method is less degrading for the poor and that the burden is more equally distributed. I agree with them in this respect. But let us be clear about one of the overlooked consequences.

In paying my taxes which are used to support the poor and the needy, I no longer exercise the virtue I did when I gave the alms to the poor young mother. I might have paid about 10 dollars in taxes for the poor, or I might have given the young woman 10 dollars to buy her baby something better than dirty rags. The sum of money involved is irrelevant. In one case I exercise the virtue of almsgiving (and reap a blessing) while in the other case I must pay my taxes, grumbling perhaps about the waste perpetrated by the bureaucracy of the tax office, with no consequent blessing, even though I may be perfectly right.

In one case I exercise no virtue. In the other case, where I give of my own free will in almsgiving I exercise a virtue—simply because I do not have to act. Therein lies the difference: “forced charity" is no charity—and "forced love" is no love. Love and virtue melt in the grip of force just as ice melts under the pressure of a vice.

If I force my children to be "good" when we are out visiting, they may be outwardly exemplary — sometimes they are! I am thankful for this, but I recognize the fact that most parents will be familiar with — that this "goodness" may not be even skin deep! Force itself, unaided, can make no one good and virtues tend to fade away in its presence.

These considerations disclose one of the fatal weaknesses of our increasingly socialized world. All "charity" and "works of love" tend to become organized by the state, which rightly wishes to eliminate the humiliation to which the poor are subjected in accepting certain kinds of "charity.” The joy and virtue of true charity and love disappear immediately when the forced tax replaces the free-will offering. The Lord Jesus Christ himself remarked that it was more blessed to give than to receive, thus emphasizing the "blessedness” or happiness accompanying the free act of giving.

The exercise of any real virtue ennobles and enriches the character, giving real joy and radiance to those practicing it. Thus the socialized state often robs its citizens of the flights of exuberance to which free exercisers of love and charity are heir.

George Muller's Orphanages

Over a century ago in Bristol, England, George Müller set up his orphan homes which were run and staffed entirely by the free-will offerings and services of Christians in sympathy with his aims. Witnesses of Muller’s work said that these homes full of the victims of suffering were real havens of love, joy and rest to thousands of orphans. Today many such orphanages (not Muller's) have been taken over by the state. The state institute is often merely a matter of rates and taxes, and the person in charge is sometimes a career person who makes no attempt to be a "mother" or a "father" to the children. Often the atmosphere of such an institution is as cold and devoid of love as the concrete bricks of which it was constructed. Scientists have shown that children in such institutions die from lack of love as often as they die from disease.

The welfare state, in taking over everything to remove a few real abuses, too often kills love and the other virtues which make up the atmosphere of a home. Removing the freedom of service, the voluntary basis, causes love to evaporate. Not only do the children or inmates of these institutions suffer. The ennobling of character which the voluntary staff members would themselves receive by free-will service is lost by their becoming merely career people. The more the world loses this right to freely exercise true charity, the harder, colder and more bitter it must become.

This disastrous effect is seen in the character of most socialized nations. In fact, it is producing just what Hitler produced in Germany by the same means: de-personalization—people who may do their duty, but who will not raise a finger to help close a concentration camp if it involves personal risk. Their characters have not experienced the ennobling, strengthening effect which results from the exercise of freedom. Hitler was a living example of a man naive enough to attempt to demand and command the love and affection of his people. He may have realized at the end that love evaporates under just such pressure. The strength of character necessary to withstand any tyrant is not likely to be built in any generation without the ennoblement of character resulting from long exercise of the various human virtues we have discussed. Such strength will also overcome the various vicissitudes of life which often complicate the career of anyone strong enough in will to be ready to suffer for his own conscience's sake.

The tendency today is to push everything onto the community, resulting in private character impoverishment. We all know the person who "doesn't want to get involved." The second tendency, contingent partly on the first, is to bring up every child to conformity, so that only the will of the community and majority counts. Thus the steel of a private conscience, independent of conformity to the mass, does not develop. In Hitler's Germany, this was seen at its extreme development. People saw corpses dropping out of vans coming from a concentration camps as they passed through a big city. But fear had so eroded characters that no one did anything — it was too dangerous to get involved!

In Chicago a few years ago I was walking from the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Station as I saw a man in a car literally plow his way through a group of old ladies as they crossed the street on a pedestrian crossing with a green light. He knocked one old lady down, injuring her. I took the license number of the car, which did not stop, and asked for witnesses. Many young women and men going to work in a neighboring shoe factory had seen the incident. But all backed away, muttering something about not getting involved. I didn't get a single witness.

The idea of the community providing for everyone's need "from the cradle to the grave" may be excellent from a purely humanitarian point of view. But, insofar as it takes away personal initiative, the realization of the scheme will never provide sterling characters ready and willing to suffer for conscience's sake and to stand alone, if necessary.

The Creation Seen And Unseen

The Bible reports that when God contemplated the creation of the worlds seen and unseen he wished to construct them so that they reflected his very own nature and character. To do this, he had to build on freedom of action. He is free, so he had to make man and angels free too. Man was made “in his image"—that is, as a free personality, just as God himself is. For even "his service is perfect freedom” and therefore founded and maintained in love. Accordingly, the angels who serve him, including their chief Lucifer, the light-bearer, were given natures capable of genuine love to their Creator and toward their fellows. They were capable of wooing his love and being wooed by him so that the perfect joy of love could reign in that kingdom. But this very possibility had to include the option of rejection. They were no puppets.

The Bible reports, quite as a matter of fact, that a large proportion of the unseen host showed that it really was capable of the joy of that kingdom of love and—by a very real proof— of rejection! Therefore, Lucifer did, in fact, show that he could love, in that he began, for reasons of pride, to reject the one perfect lover, his Creator. Turning his back on Him, who is the sole good, Lucifer became the epitome of the bad. So arose the cursed, loveless and hateful ones who, in the exercise of their characters now turned away from the good toward the bad and proceeded to destroy the good creation. Men become "devils" by exactly the same process. Obviously God, his nature being love, did not immediately take away all freedom of action and choice from his creatures, thus removing the possibility of our turn to love. He allowed them still further freedom of choice, which meant in their case, still further destructive activities being permitted. If he had taken away this possibility of freedom of choice at the first sign of rejection of love, he would have destroyed any further possibility of a return to love. So he has given us all a long time of freedom of action, that is, freedom to love, so that the kingdom of love can still begin again to rule, if man and angels want it. To have "stopped it all" at once by the strong hand of "dictatorship" would automatically have destroyed the very purpose for which the Creator had created his universe — in order to set up a kingdom of love in the seen and the unseen.

Therefore, this very existence of evil in a world created by an almighty, but also a loving God actually illustrates that the good and the virtue in it are genuinely good. Love in such a kingdom really is love and not anything else. Sometimes it is taught that love is a covert form of egoism, etc. The state of our fallen world really shows this to be impossible — the love of God in a world of blood is genuine enough!

Destroyers and haters usually want company in their activities. So when the chief, Lucifer, the light-bearer, had become the destroyer and the hater, he immediately approached Eve to make her and her husband become a part of his company of destroyers. The pair was also capable of true love. They possessed true freedom of choice, as is shown by the actual choice they made. They, too, turned their backs on the good, automatically becoming polarized to the chronically bad. So the whole seen and unseen creation of love became a creation of the wrong choice —the choice which turned its back on the source of all ultimate good. In leaving open a chance for seen and unseen creation to return to the ultimate good, God did not "stop the bad.” The free choice was still left open, leaving ruination and its cause still intact. That is the reason why God allows it — to provide a genuine chance for the return of love in general.

The Dignity Of Man

But does not all this lead to one main conclusion? Does it not all go to show the truly high esteem in which God holds his creatures, man included? It means that God really takes our decisions, our thoughts and our selves seriously. He even goes to the lengths of wooing us to make our decisions ourselves. He does not so construct us that we are puppets who have all decisions programmed — even though many physical processes within the body are pre-programmed. True love is, in this respect always the same—it always esteems and respects its partner. It takes the partner seriously.

The same thought also expresses why God bothers to woo men by the “foolishness of preaching" and not by sending, as he could, mighty angels with his message. Perhaps they would only succeed in terrifying poor humanity if they appeared in their supernal splendor. God's purpose is to win man's simple trust and confidence, to win our devotion and genuine love. Therefore, he uses the natural methods available to win our decision for him. If he overawed us in any way, that might make craven slaves of us rather than wholehearted sons. If he were to browbeat us into submission, he would only gain what Hitler did — the abject, groveling fear (if not secret hatred) of his would-be partners.

Thus a God of love avoids like the plague the dictator's methods in dealing with man, the object of his love, and uses the lover's better method. It is very fundamental to see that one cannot terrorize people into love. Consider the miracles Jesus performed in this light. He never used a show of divine power in healing to frighten people into belief. In most cases, after doing some mighty healing deed, he admonished those who had seen the deed or experienced it to keep very quiet about it Jesus' warning "tell no man" is almost proverbial in this respect. The fact is, God does not wish to force our intelligence or our will to reduce us to the state of cringing slaves. He wants redeemed sons, who, of their own free will, love, respect and gladly serve him.

The Degree Of Man's Freedom

Thus we conclude that man must be free indeed if he is ever to be able to love indeed. There is a consequence to all this which the reader will have surely noted already. It is this: Is man so free that God has abrogated all authority over him? Can man do exactly and precisely as he likes as long as he likes so that he can be said to possess a totally unfettered freedom in all directions as far as he himself chooses? Need he never fear that his Creator will intervene — all in the interests of man's ability to love and exercise virtue?

Although the Bible teaches that man has a bona-fide free will and can certainly say no to his Creator's will and plan (the very state of our poor world shows that this is de facto the case), yet it teaches too that there are limits to that freedom just as there are limits to God's wooing activities of man. These wooing limits, it will be remembered, were founded in God's counsel from his side and, in time, from man's side. In the first place, God in his inscrutability sets a time limit for his wooing of our free will. Thus it cannot be said that we have perfect free will to accept or reject his wooing at any time. Our free will interacts with his free will to woo us and if he chooses to stop the courting process, our free will can do precisely nothing about the new situation. Here it is no longer unfettered. Second, repeated rejection of the goodness of God's courting sears the psyche of man, rendering it less and less receptive. This, too, is a process we cannot alter; it is like the second law of thermodynamics at work in our inward man, and our free will cannot alter it.

The same principle applies throughout man's kingdom in its relationship to man's Creator. Man can say no to his Creator for a certain time by expressing free will. But this process of saying no of our own free will to God interacts with God's free will and may produce a no from his side. For us dependent creatures this is the same thing as judgement supervening after grace. We all can turn our backs on him and run away from him and his goodness — until we reach what may be looked upon as the end of our tether. The tether represents the change in God from grace to judgement. How long that may take in each individual case of God's dealings is unknown to his creatures. This state of affairs is well seen in the case of the apostle Paul on the Damascus road. Paul had enjoyed perfect unfettered free will to rebel against Christ and had done so very successfully, until even he reached the end of the tether God had allowed him. Then God intervened severely, blinded him and reduced him to the dependence of a child in his helplessness. But even in a drastic intervention of this type, the judgment of God was mixed with great mercy and it led to Paul's seeing the grace of God in restricting his field of unfettered free will. But perhaps his free will in the strictest sense of the term was not touched. Perhaps his knowledge was increased.

If we do not recognize some definite limits to our freedom, we risk abrogating God's ultimate authority and, indeed, sovereignty. Yet these limits in no way alter the conclusions we have drawn about the vital nature of freedom if we are to be able to love — or to rebel. One reason for this fact is that we ourselves do not know where the limits we are talking about lie. Therefore we are, to all intents and purposes, unlimited in our freedom from our own perspective. From our own point of view we are free to act wander, rebel or love as under-sovereigns within a small area of God's sovereign kingdom. It is just within this area of real unrestricted freedom that real love and virtue can and do rule in us. Outside these unseen limits are areas of judgment and no-freedom. But since they are unknown to us, they are, for practical purposes, fictitious for us and thus of no concern in our decisions to rebel or to love.

The very fact that man has never succeeded in devising a formal proof of God's existence shows how completely God can and does hide himself and his limits from our eyes. This being the case, most men act within the area of their own lives as completely free agents as far as their intelligence is concerned. This makes their decisions in that frame of mind completely free will and therefore valid from the point of view of exercising true virtue. We conclude, then, that the limits God has set for all mankind do not alter our decisive free will and its accompanying power of love or rebellion. These very limits maintain God's sovereignty while allowing man free agency in the area of his own consciousness.

One more thing deserves mention at this point. The "tether" we have referred to as God's restricting hand on our free will should not be regarded as something fixed or static. It is not of a set permanent "length.” It is my belief that the more devoted a man is to God's will for him, the longer the “tether" will become. That is, the greater will be the radius of freedom of action. To stick to our analogy of a tether, we might say that its elasticity depends upon our will being congruent with his divine will. To use the words of the apostle Paul, to "win Christ" and to attain to his confidence in us is the same thing as saying that the more we attain to the width, depth and breadth of God's will, the more we attain to his sovereign freedom too. As one prayer book has it "His service is perfect freedom.”

Here is a link to a page where you will find a PDF of the entire book for free:
http://ph16.blogspot.com/p/free-books-good-ones-you-can-read-right.html

PART 2: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/03/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt2.html

PART 3: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/04/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt3.html