During the month of April, I am occasionally sharing some brief excerpts from my new book coming out May 3 about how encountering God’s mystery actually helps us grow as human beings and followers of Jesus Christ. Today we touch on one of these mysteries–God is both perfect love and perfect justice.
Some of the most heart-wrenching counseling sessions I’ve had over the years have been with parents wrestling with how to be both loving and just with their children. Often the issue is substance abuse. A child steals from parents to support his or her habit. “How can I kick my child out into the street?” these parents ask. “How can I see my child go to jail?” It was through such anguishing situations that tough love entered our vocabulary in the 1980s. We realized that sometimes love needs to be tough. Genuine love must be tough enough to allow loved ones to suffer the consequences of their actions.
In a far deeper way, God’s love is a tough love. The author of Hebrews proclaims,
“Have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says, ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son’” (Heb. 12:5–6).
Neither does God’s love cancel out clear teachings of the Bible that might not seem loving from our perspective (for example, the reality of hell). In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says that God has paid us the “intolerable compliment” of loving us. Those two words, intolerable and compliment, are not often used together. What is an intolerable compliment?
Imagine an artist who loves a painting, the greatest work of her life. The artist lavishes it with care and often scrapes off the paint and starts certain sections over until she paints them just right. If the painting could talk, after being scraped and started over for the tenth time, it might say it would rather be a quick thumbnail sketch than endure all this revision. We might also wish that God cared less about what he is creating in our lives. But if we wish that God cared less about the person we are becoming, we are not asking for more love but for less.
C. S. Lewis expands this idea:
“Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”
C. S. Lewis is saying, “You asked for a loving God, people. Well, you have one!”
God’s love is all the more magnificent because it includes perfect justice. And this tough inner fiber of justice is what makes it perfect love! It is all a mystery we will never comprehend…Mr. Beaver [in his classic Chronicles of Narnia comment about Aslan] captures it well: “’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
