Understanding God (5 of a series)

In the most recent post I started the discussion of the second attribute of God that we are examining, which is God's love for all of creation, and specifically for humans. Remember that we are describing each of these "attributes" (for lack of a better God, since God doesn't really have attributes, since he is all Goodness, and all that there is, but it helps humans to study what they perceive as God's qualities) upon the foundation of his first attribute, which is being all-knowing. You must always keep in mind the model that I have taught you of God's all-knowing-ness in order to be able to understand God and his expectations of humans, as best as possible.



Remember that I've taught you to occasionally contemplate that God is fully aware of everything that exists or could possible ever exist, at all points in time, both real and theoretically. We use the example that even as you read this blogging, God knows the status of every subatomic particle everywhere in the universe, where they came from, where they are now, and what will happen to them. Thus if you look at the symbol "." God could tell you where the subatomic particles within the "." image, each and every one of them, will be in one billion years and what they will be "doing." Whatever you had for breakfast, God can tell you what subatomic particles comprise your food, where they each came from, and where they were, including in the Big Bang. This is not special "goggles" or some "power" of God; this is not knowledge or vision that is "learned" or "turned on and off." This is the essence of God and how God perceives all matter and energy all of the time. Only God can "do" that, obviously.



And so God loves every human, even if some of their subatomic particles came from a particularly un-illustrious bog a million years ago, LOL.



This brings us to the serious point I wish to discuss today, however. Both extremes (what one would call "left" or "right") do not accurately characterize the love that God has for humans. The "left" is too forgiving, assuming that God loves sinfulness, which he most certainly does not. The "right" is too strict, assuming that God loves those who "sign up" as being of his Son, Jesus, and that everyone else is dubious. This basic error comes from mistaking God's plan for salvation as being the same as God's love. Likewise, the left errs in assuming that God's love is the same as God's mercy, which it certainly is not. We will discuss mercy soon, but let's stick to the problem of "defining" and understanding God's love. If two people go to court, each about to receive a sentence from a judge, does the "defendant" (or convicted in this case) who the judge "loves the most" receive the lightest sentence? Um, nope. The judge may actually show the most mercy and leniency in sentence to the least likable defendant, if that is the merits of the case. Thus more "mercy" may be given to the lesser of the "lovable," not because love is either directly or inversely correlated to mercy, but precisely because they are "separate" qualities. God is merciful in general because he loves humanity, in general. Humans have access to God's mercy because God loves humans, but that does not translate into God's mercy, "his plan for salvation," being matched up to those individually that he most "loves."



So the "left" thinks that because "Jesus loves the sinners" and is "all inclusive," that somehow they can deduct that God has an "anything goes" attitude toward behavior, despite the fact that anyone with a child's level of reading ability can observe otherwise. That's the thing about the left that they share with the right. They quote the parts of the Bible that are easy on them, and when they reach the parts they don't like, they say that discriminating, angry, ignorant old fashioned white men "made up" those parts to "keep the others down." The right likewise likes to quote only the scripture that they like and their error is to use it to "categorize" people on "behalf" of God, rather than understand God's "point of view." Thus the right likes to be, to use a favorite left word, "exclusionary." As I pointed out, this exclusion comes from confusing God's plan for salvation and mercy with mercy=individual love for those who meet the "salvation" criterion.



Here's, for example, an unconscious assumption that the left and the right make in this regard. It is well known in scripture that Jesus spent time in friendship with "sinners." The left view that fact as some sort of "endorsement" by Jesus that everyone is "OK." The right makes an assumption that they don't even realize they are making. The right assumes that the "sinners" who were friends with Jesus "converted and were saved," and that this is the "meaning" of those parts of the Gospel. Is that not interesting? That's ex-Bible, though, is it not? The Gospel does not say that the sinners that Jesus dined with all converted and were "saved." Likewise, the Gospel does not say that just because Jesus liked and, on behalf of God, "loved" each sinner that he was friends with, or were of his acquaintance, that he was countenancing their behavior, or guaranteeing salvation. What both extremes miss is that God sent Jesus in order to announce and proclaim his Messianic role, the pathway to Salvation, and as a "face" that people can touch and know that they are "seeing" a presentation of God "through" Jesus, but that Jesus speaks for God only in his ministry, not as a judge of individuals. God continues to both love and judge individuals.



Thus the very people who often say that "if it's not in the Bible it's not correct" pack a lot of ex-scripture assumptions into the deeds of Jesus. Nowhere in the Gospel does it say that either 1) the nameless sinners who Jesus dined with and otherwise was friendly with all converted and thus were "saved" or 2) that those who were hospitable to Jesus, and who still could not take the step toward being "converted" from Judaism to Christianity are thus "not saved" and therefore doomed. Do you not think that Jesus would have "said so" if either assumption should be made? Instead, Jesus cautioned that final salvation depends on God. Just to give three examples, 1) Jesus told the mother of James and John that he, Jesus, could not "allocate space sitting by him in his heavenly abode of rulership," to paraphrase, since only God grants who is in heaven and what is their honor; 2) After the rich young man would not give up his riches in order to follow Jesus, and the Apostles ask "Who then can be saved?" Jesus answered that while it might be impossible for man to be saved, all things are possible with God; 3) Jesus told the Apostles he himself did not know the timing of the End of Time, the End of Days, and that only God himself knows that.



Those are just three examples of where Jesus is very crystal clear that one cannot surmise certain things about God simply by observing Jesus.



So, here it is in summary. While Jesus (and mercy) are signs of God's love to all of humanity, one cannot deduce from specific actions of Jesus God's judgement and love for individual humans. Further, the only insight one can glean in the Bible about God's love for humans is by, fancy that, actually studying what God, and his prophets and his angels, says and does!



Genesis in the Garden of Eden describes how God liked to walk in the garden in the cool of day in the company of Adam and Eve. In the time before videos, TV and football games, that is what friends, family and companions "did" together, they walked in gardens in the cool of the day. Now, consider these obvious conclusions. The first is that God simply enjoys being in the company of the humans that he loves. God is "companionable," as he later demonstrates with Moses, who I've recently written about extensively regarding his friendship with God. So God expresses love in the simple ways of companionship as he demonstrated with Adam and Eve in the very beginning. God took form so he could be with them as loving family, as friends, and this was outside of a structure of worship.



The second is that you must realize that as the all-knowing, God knew that Adam and Eve would sin and disappoint him, yet he still "lived for the moment" to use a secular human term. In other words, God's love for Adam and Eve was not diminished even as they approached the time when God knew they would fall and sin. Because God is the source of love itself, God is fully "capable" of loving the very humans he knows will disappoint him at some point in the future. And then, even after their fall, God continued to love them, but their relationship changed. This is, as I've pointed out above, an example of how judgement, justice, the facts and mercy result from the existence of love, but do not operate in "lock step" of simplistic formula applied by God to humans. To go back to the example of Jesus dining with sinners, consider how it is likely that many of the sinners Jesus dined with did not instantly become converted perfect proto-Christians. Yet they were faithful and amiable companions of Jesus and, very important in God's eyes, good hosts. Who can assume, as some at the right do, that those who did not change their sin profile sufficiently to become early proto-Christians, and follow Jesus, yet were sincere friends with him, are automatically "doomed," that is to say, "not saved" by God when it is their time to be individually judged?



God, throughout the scripture, shows his merciful variety of just response to those he loves, including those who disappoint him. King Solomon, the son of King David, despite being blessed with utmost abundance by God, fell into the worship of idols in his old age. God's response to King Solomon was not to say "well, you won't make it to heaven now," but rather, God did not allow King Solomon to have the length of years in life that he otherwise would have had. God "still loved" King Solomon, obviously. God alone knows that if he had allowed King Solomon to live to extraordinary long age, yet worshipping idols, how far King Solomon would have fallen and thus perhaps lost his place in salvation. So God punished King Solomon by not giving him an extraordinary long age, but did so from love, since clearly King Solomon paid his penance and thus found mercy from God.



Cain, who committed the first murder, of his brother Abel, in envy of Abel's goodness, was also an example of how individual to each human is God's relationship of love, mercy and judgment. Cain was exiled but protected from being harmed by other humans.



Would God have allowed Cain to continue to live, protected, if he did not have the hope of retaining some of God's love, and years of opportunity for penance and mercy? The Bible does not say, but that is why I explain to you that the Bible and God's word and works, all expressing his Will, must be taken as a whole and understood thus.



The third point about Adam and Eve is that you should notice that God loved them even though Adam and Eve did not have "a purpose driven life." LOL. I am being a bit droll here, but making an important point. Protestants introduced a mentality that somehow links God's love to someone's secular work and worth, and the new age twist on that is "having a purpose." Billions of people have lived and been loved by God, where they mostly don't even have a first name or last name, and whose "purpose" or to use an old fashioned phrase, their "lot in life" was simply to eke out a living for themselves and their family as best as possible. What is the "purpose" or "work ethic" of these billions who have lived in human history, being loved by God, "even though" they dragged themselves from rice field to hut day after day, surviving human war, famine, natural disaster and disease in order to do the best that they can at just simply "living" and being by their bodies "pro life?" The vast majority of humans that God has "loved" throughout history are exactly these people, the ones who continue to live and love, with that love being affirmation of family and children, even in the harshest of epochs of human history. I have observed a "categorization" by the Protestant side of Christianity of God's love which is quite inappropriate and downright unhelpful. It went from the kind of Calvinistic "work ethic" (God loves those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and scrubs the floor using toothbrushes) toward the modern view that everyone has some mystical-quasi "calling" to purpose that focuses on "categories" of people and purpose, rather than understanding that God loves those who simply "be."



Oddly, the love of God for the poor has been the most noticeable victim of this skewing of God's, and Jesus', exhortations about love. Moderns do not understand that pretty much everyone "is" the poor. The poor are those I described above, the billions throughout history who lived subsistence lives in order to survive and raise families, loving their children. Jesus was telling the "haves" their obligation toward the "have nots," as God has constantly instructed, in both the Bible and the Qur'an. Somehow humans in their need to "categorize" have created a "category" in their own minds called "the poor." What was meant as an admonition toward the minority rich or well to do to not forget the majority, the poor (what are often called the "working poor" today, see, humans love those "categories" and "classes"), has become a creation of the "poor" as kind of a gymnasium where "good Christians" do their exercise "reps" so that they count as "good deeds" and "charity." Instead of understanding that ultimately every "is" "the working poor," the Protestant side of Christianity has for some strange reason "definition-ed" themselves "out" of being the poor and, to be blunt, to be "above" the poor.



Jesus lived among the poor. Many Protestant Christians think that they are "emulating" Jesus when they allocate time on their time sheets for "the others," ie. the poor. When the Reformation "threw the baby out with the bathwater," they lost that Catholic (and Jewish, and Islamic) understanding that we are all "among" and part of the poor, not a separate class.



Think of the time that Jesus raised from the dead the young adult son of the widow. Why did Jesus choose him, as Jesus walked along and came upon the burial procession? Everyone present would have understood the mercy and love of Jesus perfectly, while today I find I have to explain it to just about everyone. Even a hundred years ago people would have understood without explanation. A widow who had a son had life. A widow whose son died went from being the majority, the "working poor" to devastation, having no one to provide for her. A widow could survive the loss of her husband so long as her son could provide her with food and shelter. A widow who lost her only son was doomed. Everyone who witnessed Jesus bring this young man back to life understood perfectly what he was doing. Jesus was also saving the life of the widow. This, therefore, is a statement of "ministering to the poor," and in this case, Jesus ministered by preventing her from becoming poor, devastated and likely dead. Remember, in those times many Jewish priests taught that illness and accident was "punishment" by God for sin. It's not like widows or orphans had the faithful to turn to, as they were viewed as consequences of sin.



Do you now understand the profound importance of Jesus, on the cross, giving his mother Mary to be the mother of St. John the Apostle? It is not only the culture of the time but reflective of God's "mindset" regarding love. When Jesus said that the poor will always be with humans, this did not mean they were a separate class to be managed. He meant that humans are insufficient and flawed so that they could never solve poverty on their own (and well Jesus knew how far humans would stray from God's help.) Jesus through his example was exhorting the prevention of poverty, of people falling into poverty, as would have the widow had he not raised from death back to life her only son. Jesus was likewise making that cultural and God-family-centric statement on the very cross as he was dying, giving John to Mary as her son, and she as his mother. This was not just the very genuine and true statement of the mission of the Church, represented by the giving of Mary to be the mother of all, but also the example of how, even in death, humans are expected not to sit around and watch the crisis happen; they are expected to provide for each other, anticipating and preventing hardship and aloneness. Geez, how people cannot see that, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I am sooooo sick of the categorization of the poor, and I must say, that is one reason I'm just not bosom buddies with "the poor as your work out room for charity" view of that segment of Christianity. No matter what I have earned in my secular life here on earth, I never once considered the poor as a separate class from me, one upon whom I should "work" my "charity" as if they were clay to be sculpted in art class to then receive an "A" from God. YIKES!



To summarize the points of this post, remember that God has demonstrated love for humans as a whole that can be understood through his works of mercy and provision of the pathway for salvation, but that God also has an all-knowing individual basis of love for each human that is totally beyond human determined merits, activities or perceptions. One of my favorite expressions that I use to describe this to people is to say something along these lines, "God is the fellow worker who is never bored at looking at pictures of your kids or the grandkids." God loves each individual within the context of ordinary, even subsistence, life. It is not a coincidence that much of the Catholic Church calendar is called "Ordinary Time." God has known and loved on a singular and individual basis the billions of individual humans who never had a "purpose driven life," who just eked out their living in the rice fields, planting potatoes, picking cotton, harvesting the corn or the wheat. When it comes right down to it, all of humanity are "the poor." It is a grave mistake to misunderstand the exhortations in the Bible to care for the poor as being some sort of mental separation where there is "everyone else" and there is "the poor." Like the widow with the son, who would have gone from life to poverty and death in a matter of a day had her son remained dead, Jesus preached God's will when virtually everyone understood and lived among those circumstances. Most families had multiple sons, uncles, many who could help a widow or orphan. Society has destroyed the family network and put everyone at the behest of the symbol of idolatry, the paycheck or the public assistance check, and removed the safety net between ordinary life and poverty. Wars and tribal oppression have destroyed what societal decay has not yet reached, as we see in Africa and elsewhere. It is opposite of God's perception of love to think of the "poor" as a category that one does not belong to, but manipulates, for "good deeds" or cynically, from within one's self satisfied "not poor" perspective. Thankfully, for all that one can criticize about the Catholic Church, in that I can give them the A+ of never having adopted that Reformation induced class elitism.



I hope that you have found this useful. As I have said, both the "non judgmental" left and the "moral" right have butchered the accurate understanding of God's love and the nature of individual love, mercy and justice that he dispenses as a result.