If God is love, then how come...?

(I promise the picture will make sense later.)

We all have tragedies to finish that question. I don't know the answer. But I'm starting to think that, fixated on our tragedies, we often miss the heart of God that peeks at us through the veil of Scripture, because we have a paltry idea of how much God loves us.

I have, since I was eight, looked on the Bible as sacred material. But I'm starting to think God wrote it with one hand tied behind His back, using a rope He gave us - our free will. Bubbling up inside me is a bigger way to see the book on which my world-view is based, and the God it portrays.

Scripture is a sixty-six volume endeavor to show God's dealings with people. It's messy, because He lets us live our lives, and we very seldom let Him help. The record shows that. Fixated on our own concerns, we miss the ways in which He would love to love us, all the while stumbling into the messes that are inevitable because humanity's fallen nature has generated a world that generates tragedies.

So in the Old Testament He set up the Law, so people (who tend to love rules) would have rules to follow, but more often than not, His people broke His laws. Then He sent His Son, and He didn't stop people from killing Him.

It makes for a string of messy stories, unvarnished by heavenly PR. God does not seem to exert Himself on behalf of His own image, or that of His followers. Heck, in the book of Esther, God isn't even mentioned! In many places, He doesn't step in to rescue when we think He should.

And the stories of impossibly bad behavior by some of God's best people are rampant on the pages of the Good Book. The number of Biblical heroes who leave us scratching our heads include, well, pretty much everyone except Jesus. (Can you say Samson? Jonah? even King David? certainly Solomon! And so on.) If Bible books written by murderers were removed, at least thirteen would go missing, including the Pentateuch, the Pauline Epistles, and Psalms.

Yet, I see, bubbling up in the story of God's interactions, His love trying, trying, to break through humanity's resistance, distraction, and general cussedness. In between the messy stories, golden moments shine, where God's love transcends every expectation, breaks every rule, and goes light years beyond what seems reasonable or possible. I made a little list of favorites:

• Exodus 24:10 Just a couple of verses tell us that, along with Moses and Aaron, some seventy-odd elders of Israel SAW God, and ate and drank, at a banquet laid out by God Himself. What?!? (Not long thereafter, some of the participants asked Him not to speak to them directly. Then they went and made a golden calf.)

• Job 42:15 The book of the long-suffering Job ends on an enigmatic note: in a complete departure from custom, he gives his three beautiful daughters an equal inheritance with his sons. Job did this only after his encounter with the Lord. And the fact that it merits mention may give us a glimpse of God's perspective on women. Hmmmm?

• Joshua 10:12-13 The sun stood still for Joshua, so he could win a battle, and not even the Battle of Waterloo, or Gettysburg, or Armageddon. An earth-stopping miracle for a somewhat minor cause. The reason seems to be that Joshua had the temerity to ask! What did he know about God's bigness, that maybe I have yet to learn?

• I Chronicles 4:9 The prayer of Jabez became a viral awareness, a few years ago. But look at the heart of the writer, including, in the midst of an endless genealogy, the prayer of a man who dared to ask for divine looking-after. The personal nature of the requests he made touched the heart of God enough to tuck them into the genealogy. Is the prayer included to show how much He cares about us as individuals?

• And let's talk about those genealogies, shall we? All those polysyllabic names! Included because they mattered enough to preserve. As do, I posit, yours and mine.

• Space fails me to explain the Tabernacle of David, but let me just say, this tent of 24/7 worship and relaxed access to the Father pleased God mightily, and did so in the Old Testament, before Jesus came to open wide the door. Seems this special window was made possible because of God's response to David, the "man after God's own heart." Enigmatic references to this tabernacle crop up later in Scripture, like God fondly thumbing a favorite snapshot.

Then we get to the New Testament, and the Gospel of John. Which he wrote, history has it, in his 90s. In other words, decades after the other three gospels were written. He had the benefit of perspective when he sat down to write, and he wrote about things the other gospels never so much as mention:

• the water turned into wedding wine - an extravagant first miracle! For those who see God as a heavenly party-pooper, here we see the Lord of Celebration. This should give us pause to think.

• Jesus revealing His identity to the Samaritan woman at the well - in a day when it was scandalous to have any conversation with a woman, let alone a world-view shattering one. Another glimpse of His all-inclusive view of women.

• forgiveness and redemption for the woman taken in adultery - another gesture of God's heart toward a woman. No evidence of second-class citizenship in the Lord's ministry.

• sight given to the man born blind, a mind-boggling healing never done before.

• the resurrection of Lazarus after three days in a dank grave. (!)

• Not to mention John's cosmic approach to starting the book: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God..." Who, before this, had seen the scope of Jesus' life this way, this big? Only someone well-acquainted with the Lord's heart, whose perspective had aged and matured like that good wedding wine.

All of these are astonishing extensions of grace, perhaps more grace than Matthew, Mark, and Luke could comprehend, back when they wrote their excellent accounts. After all, when Jesus ascended to Heaven, His apostles were still expecting His immediate return to establish an earthly kingdom. Perhaps seeing the scope, the huge-ness, of what He did in His time on earth required John's seasoned perspective.

These examples make the point that the love of God, given the ghost of a chance, is unimaginably bigger than our ideas about it. The bulk of the Bible is Him, painstakingly providing for the frail reality of our sin nature, but in these instances and others, His love breaks through. The Old Testament Law was written to codify how His people could engage with Him, but His heart was
always so much bigger.
                      

(I lettered this verse for my grandfather in 1980, before the internet, so I didn't know to give credit to Frederick Lehman, the author, which I do now.)
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My son and his girlfriend took in an abandoned pit bull puppy a year ago and named him Tom. Then, last month, they took in a tiny stray kitten. Tom's first glimpse of the kitten caused his knees to shake, his legs to tremble, and from that moment, he acted, and continues to act, as the kitten's mother, with his nose seldom more than an inch from the kitten's tiny rump. Rob and Sarah's only concern, at first, was that Tom's love would swallow the kitten whole, but that has not occurred.

I wonder if our Heavenly Father's love for us is like Tommy's love for the kitten - overwhelming in its intensity, almost too much to contain. How would my life be different if I allowed myself to approach my Heavenly Father with that in mind?

Has our idea of our God been too small?

Much of the thought behind this post was stirred up by teaching from John 17 Ministries.

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