SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF A PATIENT GOD

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Let’s think about God as patient.

I have been writing about love as Paul expressed it in 1 Corinthians 13 by identifying love with God. This will be my last entry about, “Love is patient…”

I know in the Bible God appears to certain individuals or he sends residents who live up in the sky with him as messengers to guide people below.

Both happen with Abraham at the Oak of Marme. Yahweh strolls into town and has a picnic with Abraham and Sarah. With him are two messengers. After making Sarah laugh Yahweh decides to tell Abraham of his plan to nuke Sodom.

We know the story. Abraham haggles with Yahweh. If there are fifty righteous people, will he spare the cities?  Yes, if there are fifty. Well, no one says the town is so bad there are not fifty righteous people, but Abraham seems to know there aren’t that many. So he haggles down to forty-five, thirty, and so on until he gets Yahweh to agree to spare the city for the sake of ten righteous people. The writer tells us that Yahweh goes his way, presumably back up to the sky, and the messengers go to Lot’s home where every single male in the town surrounds Lot’s house and demands his visitors be sent out so they could rape them. When we read about a town like that we’re supposed to feel that they got what they deserved.

In reality, these are stories imagined about a god, told about a god for many years before being written down in a more fixed form.

We know that this Yahweh is a god of love, but he loves a nation. I cannot recall a single individual whom Yahweh loves in the Jewish Bible.

His love is not the most patient love in the world nor does it make sense. All the tragedies that could happen to a country could happen whether a sky dwelling god existed or not.  In Israel’s case, the nation was blamed. The tragedies that happened were Yahweh’s punishment for their disobedience.

Read the books of Joshua and Judges.  There does not have to be a sky god winning battles in heaven for Hebrew invaders to win a few battles on earth against a stubborn, homebound foe like the Philistines. It might be a nice explanation to explain defeats like that.

Blame the nation’s disobedience. It makes the priests happy, I suppose. However, heaping guilt upon the shame of defeat has a way of making a peoples’ devotion to their god go in other directions over time.

Ditto for a city like Jerusalem that happens to be on the way to Egypt when a conquering army from Babylon invades them. That sort of thing happens whether there is a sky god or not. In this case, when the Hebrews returned as Jews, some of them became more exclusive, but others became wiser. They wrote books like Job and Ecclesiastes. Surely, the thought had occurred to many Jewish people that they had been faithful, like Job, but Yahweh stuck it to them anyway via the Babylonians.

It’s like rainbows and lightening. They occur because of natural law. They would happen whether there was a god deliberately steering the sun’s rays through rain or not.

It appears painfully obvious that people have imagined gods badly in the past. Their imaginations have only glimpsed our God of love.

We make believe better than they did. Hence, a Christian way to view these stories is to see them as expressions of the wondrous salvation that happens during any natural disaster or invasion. Many perish, but some are always saved.

There is another way to see this imagining of God. If we want to say our God of love is patient, then we should do as the ancients did and imagine God’s patience being similar to ours and then imagine our God of love’s patience moving beyond it.

For example, when a baby screams an abusive mother shuts the baby up inside its crib. A cruel mother shuts the baby up inside a box. A loving mother holds the child and loves it even more for having held it, than punishing it for having heard it squall.

If ours is a God of love, our God must be at least as patient and humane as that mother or that father. The good news is that God’s patience is even more so than theirs.

Another example: few things can feel more annoying than an unruly, argumentative, and negative teenager high on hormone smack and candy, but if she is your child and you love her, you are willing to pass through those irate times for the sake of her pain that she is expressing. It ain’t a whole lot of fun, but the temper does not define who she is. Your love does that. Your love makes patience possible.

Now, imagine the most loving person you know. Imagine being unable to imagine the infinite wonder of God’s patience toward us because it is greater than can be conceived. Combine those two. Quantify them with some imaginary number that represents the sum of mortality plus eternity, and you approximate our God of love’s patience.

Love is patient. God is love. Therefore, God is patient.

Blessings…