Comment on Rachel Held Evan’s posting about the God of Love

These questions are old, hard and multi-layered. They involve:

1. Agency: Did God “cause” this storm, earthquake, virus, cell mutation, car accident, war? Does “allow” feel any differently?

2. Taking Sides: Germans prayed for the Allied bombings to stop. The massacre at the Red Sea left many Egyptian families fatherless and likely destitute. OT prophets who cried out for justice understood Assyrian and Babylonian conquest to be God’s judgment against Israel, which despite covenant failure were likely still morally superior to their conquerors. We must assume these conquest involved the expected amount of slaughter, rape, theft and slavery.

3. It’s convenient to attempt to divorce our God of love from the God of the Bible. Marcion and others certainly felt the difference between Jesus and Jehovah and opted for a skinnier canon. Such a move usually tempts us towards the self-righteousness of having a purer god than thou. “Our god has no blood on his hands.” Moral purity by association.

4. A closer reading of Genesis 3 reveals (see the NET bible notes) that Eve had her suspicions about her creator’s intentions that the serpent fanned into flame. Judgment always requires a point of view and is most often determined by one’s sense of win/lose. This outcome math was done in a “perfect” garden. Were the curses meted out subsequently confirmation or consequence?

5. There is much we don’t know. Surely the ravages of tsunami are not simply the tears welling up in my child’s eye as he realizes I’m consenting to the needle violation of his vaccinated arm. At the same time care of one’s soul often requires the difficult binary choice of whether or not to trust THAT God is as powerful as the canon implies AND that he is as good as Jesus says. We usually don’t get to far beyond this.