Friday, August 17, 2007
Judgement
Church Geek has been preaching his way through the Apostles Creed, and in this post looks at the idea of God's judgement
We have developed such a warped concept of what love actually is. Instead of wanting the best for the other, something that sometimes requires that the other experience pain, we seek simply to protect them from pain.
I had a teacher in 8th grade that believed that we "young men and women" were old enough to discipline ourselves. The result was chaos, and your humble author was on of the chief chaos producers. It's funny, I have no fondeness for this teacher - I remember him only as an oddity, and as someone that I tried to push as far and as fast as I could. It was a challenge to see if I could get him to chastise me somehow, anyhow.
The teachers I remember with fondness, esteem, and respect are the ones that demanded of me, the ones that gave me low grades, knowing that it would spur me to do better - even the coaches that drove me to pain to improve my conditioning and my skills.
Love is not expressed in the absence of demands, but is defined by demands. Not demands for the sake of the lover, but demands for the sake of the loved. God loves us too much to let us wallow in this pile of garbage we call a world. his love for us demands that He make it better.
Related Tags: judgement, love, Apostle's Creed
This video comes to us from the fine folks of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. I’m sure some of you have heard of this church before. These are the same folks, who led by their pastor Reverend Phelps have been staging what they call “Love Crusades.” These are demonstrations at memorial services for soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. Their point is to blame the deaths of these soldiers on our country’s immoral behavior which has angered God.This is one of the better things I have ever read on God's judgement, and I fail to understand why that is so. I know of no parent that that has not experienced the necessity, born of love, and the accompanying regret, of either punishing a child, or allowing that child to suffer the consequences of one of their actions.
Unfortunately - for many of those outside the church - this is the only message they hear about our faith. They look at us Christians and they think we are an angry, mean, judgmental lot of people. They think we worship a God who is the same.
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The world is not a fair place. All around us is pain and hurt, innocence lost, human rights denied, lives abruptly taken, force brutally applied, towers tumbled down. I don’t have to go on for you to get my point.
It’s only natural to hope that justice is served. We cry for judgment to be meted out. We desire for the guilty be punished. When we or others we know are wronged we scream; someone has got to pay for this!
Our cry for justice is important. It should not be denied, because it means we are wrestling with the reality of a world that has gone awry
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Now, having said all that, the place of love of doesn’t exclude the place of judgment. Love and judgment are not mutually exclusive.
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As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, it’s as if God’s love is a burning, purifying fire that tests us, that reveals in the end what we are truly made of. That fire will burn away everything within us and everything within the world that “needs to be exposed as empty and worthless
[...]
God does not hate the world. God loves the world. And it’s out of that love that the entire world – both the quick and the dead - will be subjected to the burning fire of God’s love.
We have developed such a warped concept of what love actually is. Instead of wanting the best for the other, something that sometimes requires that the other experience pain, we seek simply to protect them from pain.
I had a teacher in 8th grade that believed that we "young men and women" were old enough to discipline ourselves. The result was chaos, and your humble author was on of the chief chaos producers. It's funny, I have no fondeness for this teacher - I remember him only as an oddity, and as someone that I tried to push as far and as fast as I could. It was a challenge to see if I could get him to chastise me somehow, anyhow.
The teachers I remember with fondness, esteem, and respect are the ones that demanded of me, the ones that gave me low grades, knowing that it would spur me to do better - even the coaches that drove me to pain to improve my conditioning and my skills.
Love is not expressed in the absence of demands, but is defined by demands. Not demands for the sake of the lover, but demands for the sake of the loved. God loves us too much to let us wallow in this pile of garbage we call a world. his love for us demands that He make it better.
Related Tags: judgement, love, Apostle's Creed
