Have been reading Steve Chalke's new book The Lost Message of Jesus (quick plug there...its very good!), and you know when something jumps out at you and makes you think?..well that happened! So anyway, I thought I'd blog about it...cos thats what blogs are partly for isnt it...sharing thoughts and stuff!
Ok, so the book suggests that if God is love, of the powerful, perfect, dynamic type rather than of the more valentines day-ish type, everything He does is motivated by and affected by this love. When we love, we have to allow for the fact that we may, in fact will at some point, get hurt because of this love - "Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken"(C S Lewis). So then...surely God hurts because he loves us. God loves more deeply and truly than anyone or anything; therefore does he hurt, or suffer, more than anyone or anything? A guy Wolterstorff suggests that God does suffer and hurt more than any of us could imagine, and creates an amazingly powerful image of God when he asks, "could it be that all the suffering that has ever taken place has been etched onto his (God’s) face?". In the bible, Moses was allowed to be in the presence of God, glimpsing something of his glory, but was told he could not look on the face of God and still live. Wolterstorff suggests that, contrary to popular belief, it may not have been the incompatibility of his sinfulness and God's holiness which prevented Moses from fully experiencing God's presence. Rather, to be in God's presence would be for us to know the full extent of His love, and therefore the full extent of the suffering caused by this love, a suffering that we could not bear.
This idea really made me think. The hurt that God must feel for us, with us and because of us is, like his love, too much for us to fully understand. To be followers of Christ means we have to try and love people like God loves them…how often we allow ourselves to forget just what this means, at least I do! How easy it is to become immune to the suffering of others…for example in our culture and society we are constantly bombarded with images of poverty, natural disaster and war - how do they make us feel? Angry, sad, frustrated, bored, fortunate, motivated…anything? How can we engage with God in loving with just a fraction of the intensity with which He does?