God Ain’t Easy

Lincoln knew. In his Second Inaugural Address, he spoke of the Civil War’s bloody opponents:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

1. As then, so now.

I worship the Lord, like some of my conservative friends. Liberal that I am, I believe that for several months in 2012, every time someone said "God bless America", whether they knew it or not, they were praying for the defeat of Mitt Romney. My religious-conservative friends might think the opposite.

The Lord, as I understand him, takes the side of the poor, and he is pleased when the government of our country helps to control AIDS in poor countries, and he is pleased when the government of our country helps the legions of our hungry to buy food. But some of my friends know that the Lord said to help the poor and feed the hungry, but they point out, quite rightly, that he never said that the government should be a means of that.

I might be right or I might be wrong; likewise my friends might be right or wrong.

But right or wrong, it’s safe to say that all of us are so vastly thick in our knowledge of the depth and height of breadth and beauty and glory and love of the Lord that compared to what we don’t know, what we do know is very small. And what little we know is often wrong.

 2. Not looking, not seeing.

We like to know things. If mysteries don’t provoke us to seek answers, then they discomfort us. They make us feel small, and we don’t like that. So if we don’t chase knowledge of the Unknowable, we shrink the Unknowable to a size that suits our minds, we compress the glory of the Lord to a shape that fits our ideas . We don’t plead with God to impress his image on our souls; we look for his image in a mirror.

Idolatry is a way to shrink the Lord to the size of our minds. The ancient Israelites made a golden calf that they could see and touch, a golden calf with finite qualities. Know the calf: know the Lord.

3. The mystery.

Meanwhile, Moses was on the mountain, learning from God how to make burnt offerings, the smoke of which would rise into the sky, where God resided above the Israelites, un-seeable, largely inscrutable.

Moses pleaded to see God; God put Moses in the cleft of a rock, and he put his hand over the cleft while he passed, so Moses would not see God’s face and be destroyed. Moses saw only God’s back, and he lived.
 

To Job, God was in the wrong. Job accused God. Then God revealed something of his vastness to Job, and Job put his hand over his own mouth.
 
Sometimes desperate men of God have lifted this deep question:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?/ Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? [Psalm 22:1 (NRSV).]

This, in fact, is the mystery that, in one form or another, unbelievers sometime consider the summit of proof against a loving, powerful God. The lack of a satisfying answer to this question is, to them, the answer to every question about God.

 

Jesus, as a man, is accessible to us; but, like God, he is deeper than our understanding. And, as with God, we tend to project our ideas and attitudes onto him.

 

4. Unexamined ideas.

The glib is the enemy of the deep. We often fail to examine received wisdom. That’s as true of me as it is of anybody. But since I’m ignorant of my own error (if I knew it was error, I wouldn’t cling to it), I’ll pick on other people.

I learned as a young man that salvation was simple. Just say "Jesus Christ, come into my heart", or some version of that, and salvation is a done deal. Some of my friends believe that today. It’s their interpretation of what Jesus said to Nicodemus, about being "born again":

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." [John 3:3 (KJV).]

I wonder how many of my friends who have produced a child think that birth is easy?

I won’t say that there’s an easy answer in the Bible about what it takes to be saved; I admit that if you're willing to isolate some verses, the answer can seem easy. There are arguments on the side of easy grace. But people who believe in that might reckon the parts of the Bible that suggest that salvation ain’t easy.

 

For example:

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. [Philippians 2:12-13 (NRSV).]

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. (1 Peter 2:2-3 (NRSV).]

[B]ut those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. [Luke 20:35 (NRSV).]

 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." [Matthew 24:41-46 (NRSV).]

And "If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinners?" [1 Peter 4:18 (NRSV).]

I’m not trying to plant panic. I’m just taking the wisdom received from some preachers and from people who approach us in parking lots with invitations to be "saved" and saying that they might be inviting us to adopt a simplistic, if not an entirely wrong-headed, understanding of God.

And I'm not pretending that the passages that I've quoted are a complete answer. There are comforting passages about salvation. Rightly or wrongly, I think that much depends on who you are. Rightly or wrongly, I think that God means to comfort the broken hearted and those who struggle and those who suffer; he means to goad toward love those who prosper and think their prosperity is for themselves only.

5. Paths to take.

"[W]hoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him." True for the audience of the book of Hebrews; true for us. We are called to seek the Lord.

To seek the Lord, we can test what we know about him by reading the inspired words of those who knew the Lord better than we do – the Bible.

Sometimes I wonder, too, if prayer isn’t more important than reading the Bible. For most of history most people could not read; that's still true in large parts of the world today. But almost everybody can talk to God.

Good preaching lifts the soul.
      
God is love; to love is to know God.

Or maybe, because God is deep and vast, there is no one way and no one combination of ways to journey toward knowledge of him.

6. Journey.

But it is a journey. No journey is more worthwhile. People spend years learning law, medicine, music, football, poker, Mark Twain, or art. People spend decades learning their spouse and discovering their children. These are all good things.

But none of them is, by itself, a path to a joy beyond our imaginations, which we’re called pursue piece by piece, piece by piece, day by day, day by day. The journey can start at any time; it should end when God says.

And this I also trust: God helps along the way.

7. Prayer.

Lord, please un-satisfy us with our present knowledge of you, and make us yearn to know you better. Give us the means to know you. Along the way, call to us toward the direction we should go. Reward our seeking with understanding. Give us strength to persist until we come to where you want us to be. In Christ’s name, Amen.