Thought of the Day 04.28.09

It’s pretty clear from the Bible that the one single good thing in the universe which we need is the love and companionship of God. Everything else counts for nothing when compared with that one need. If so, then God’s parental love for us should mean that He would be willing to do whatever is necessary to bring us that one thing.

Consider the implications of this for pain and suffering. Adversity usually drives people to seek God, and even if they’re seeking Him for those reasons rather than to get the real blessing of Himself, well at least they’re seeking Him, right? The uncomfortable corollary to this is that when things are going well, we often neglect God because we feel we can do just fine apart from Him, an error which inhibits our faith.

But if it’s true that frustration drives us to seek God and satisfaction makes us indifferent to God, then we might say that the real challenge in theology is not in explaining the existence of pain and suffering, but rather in solving the problem…of prosperity.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think it might be a problem of how we view God. If we see Him as the ultimate source of wisdom and power, then we are likely to look to Him for help with our problems that we cannot solve. There's no problem with ascribing to God these two ultimate characteristics. The problem is when we forget that God is also ultimate love and the source of all good. When we are prospering, we forget that our prosperity finds its ultimate source in God, not in us. This is in part due to pride. Perhaps it is also due in part to a wrong perception of who God is and how He wants to function in our lives. Many see God's primary role in our life as the way to avoid hell--eternal suffering. He will get us out of quite a jam. We mistakenly presume this to be the primary function of God or at least put way too much emphasis on this function. This leads to us seeing God as the ultimate/best way to help us out of our various "jams". This mindset is incomplete because it neglects to view another of God's functions: to love us and fulfill us with His perfect love. When we assign due emphasis to this function of God, perhaps we view God as not only a problem solver for us, but as much more--ultimate fulfillment. When we "get" this, perhaps becoming prideful on what we believe to be our own accomplishments will be less likely to occur. We would know that anything we can accomplish will do nothing to satisfy us, that real satisfaction comes from experiencing God's love.--BA

April 28, 2009 at 5:24 PM

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