How can a perfect being like God Almighty be so patient with people?
Imagine a being so perfect in everything, in telling the truth, in justice, in peace, and in grace. Imagine him to be a God who needs nothing and no-one: self-sufficient. Imagination need not go far. This is reality.
The creator of the Universe, The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is perfectness…. Meanwhile, here I am messing things up…again. If I were God and I were to witness one of my creatures disobeying me, or lying, or being selfish,ungrateful, prideful, or unmerciful toward others, I would be quite strict. Yet, God is so patient. At times, I don’t understand why.
He is perfect in his justice. To be perfect in justice, I would think he would be just in punishing those who do wrong and rewarding those who do right.He would wield capital punishment out and maybe lesser degrees of punishment according to each-one’s wrongdoings.
He is perfect in truth. To be perfect in truth means that he never lies, EVER. It would be impossible for God to lie, to defraud, or to deceive.If there is one thing he cannot do is lie. It is completely out of his character.
God is perfect in grace. What is grace if not unmerited love, unmerited favor? A free gift of protection and love.
How can a God with perfect standards give unmerited love to people? How can God be both merciful in his love and punishing in his justice at the same time? Because to be just, someone needs to be punished and to be graceful someone needs to be forgiven.
Have you ever thought something like this? “I am sure it’s not me who needs the punishment. I am a good person, I’ve done nothing wrong or really bad except….”
Yeah. No! My arguments just won’t do. My excuses don’t hold. He is holiness. God is a blinding inapprocahable light. Pure perfection. And somehow we have found a way to mess things up as if our cells held secret information that contain codes of rebellion and disrespect. Our flesh is imperfect.
So, if not me, who is going to be punished for my rebellion? That’s perfect justice, isn’t it? I do the wrong, I get punished. It’s simple, I may not like it but to his objective eye-IT IS JUST. But I don’t get the punishment I deserve because he is also perfect grace.
What he does is, he conjures up this crazy idea to create a piece of his very essence in a human form, aka Jesus, with the hope that he can show us/me what it means to be forgiven and loved.
How does he do that? Jesus is perfect and sinless and that’s the justification part in his character. Jesus is merciful too and ready to lay down his life for a humanity that hates him. Indeed they killed him because he said he was “The Messiah.” Yet his death means my receipt for perfect grace. Someone had to take the blow. And he didn’t want that person to be me or anyone else. He knew only a perfect being could bridge the gap between a holy God and imperfect humanity.
A SELF-PUNISHING GOD!
This should be headlines in a newspaper and this should make breaking news titled: THE GOD WHO PUNISHED HIMSELF HAS SHOWED US HOW TO LIVE!
Here’s the catch-I struggle with the idea of perfect grace.But who doesn’t? Deep inside we know we are broken; we know no matter how much we try we have failed at redeeming ourselves and it seems an impossible task to attempt to do that. It would be as if a monkey could live underwater. To live forgiven and redeemed is so foreign to us. It is in fact, other worldly. We think in terms of an eye-for- eye and tooth-for-tooth. If you do me wrong, I’ll see to it you pay it back. To refelect our true nature, maybe I should write we are an eye-for-the-whole-head type of race.
But not so with Jesus. He became for us something we never imagined. He became for us a reality we always have a hard time wrapping our heads around. Christ became someone through whom I can say confidently in the face of a Consuming and Holy Fire, “I am enough, I am loved and I am at peace.”
And this very consuming fire? I can call him “Daddy.” He became the bridge connecting over the painful chasm of separation between the Beloved and the Lover. For us, he became our feet, our hands and our will when we were too weak to stand. Scripture defines God as an everpresent help in trouble, our servant and our leader and our lover.
And this was made possible because God punished himself for us.
