Stephen
Terry, Director
God
Is Passionate and Compassionate
Commentary
for the January 25, 2025, Sabbath School Lesson
"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out
of Egypt I called my son. But the more they were called, the more they went
away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images.
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not
realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with
ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and
I bent down to feed them." Hosea 11:1-5,
NIV
While I was a student at Walla
Walla College in the 1970s, I was elected president of
the Theology Club during my senior year. I did not realize when my name was placed
in nomination that becoming president meant that other theology majors would
seek me out to discuss things that were on their minds. Most often this was to
discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of questions. These
are the kind of questions where everyone has an opinion even though no one has
an answer. I suspect these still go on half a century later because they are
impossible to resolve. Few took these discussions seriously, and they were friendly
conversation starters that sometimes resulted in life-long friendships. But one
conversation I have never forgotten.
At that time, we had very few
female theology majors. It was almost impossible then to receive a call to pastoral
ministry if you were a woman. I am glad that has changed since then. We still
have a long way to go in that direction, but we are making progress. One
evening, after a prayer meeting, one of those young women came to me and wanted
to talk. She said she was having trouble understanding the love of God. She
related that she had been severely abused throughout her childhood by her
father. She found it hard to disconnect the word "father" from abuse. This made
it hard for her to pray to God as a heavenly father. As a young, inexperienced
theology student, I did not have an answer for her. Those who may be more
experienced than I was then may know exactly what to say. I did not. However, I
think just having someone to talk to about it may have been enough. She seemed
to feel that the burden she was carrying was a little lighter for having shared
it with someone else. I have wondered how her walk with Jesus and her life
later turned out. That is the kind of knowledge that may have to wait for
heaven. I do know that there were few calls to the ministry that year. All the
women and even some of the men who graduated with theology degrees found
themselves unemployed after graduation. Sadly, gender and race played a key
role in those outcomes.
Another encounter that has
remained in my memory occurred after I left the pastoral ministry. My wife
became seriously chronically ill, and I had to leave the pulpit to care for her
and our young son. We eventually settled in Spokane County in Washington State
as the climate there was more endurable for someone with Multiple Sclerosis
than the humidity in Kansas where I had been pastoring. It gave her a longer
life than she otherwise would have had. At one point, her condition had
stabilized enough that she was able to attend college at Eastern Washington
University and completed two years toward a teaching degree. This is how the
encounter came about. I would drop her off and pick her up from her classes.
One afternoon I was a little early and I noticed a crowd gathered in the quad,
so I went to see what was going on. When I arrived, I saw a young man in his
twenties haranguing the students who were passing, telling them that God was
going to burn them forever in hell if they did not repent and give their lives
to him. Most were scoffing at or ignoring him, but a few were listening. I was
shocked at such a mischaracterization of God. I shouted out that "God is love."
At that, two individuals came over to me and acted like they wanted to hear
more, but their actual purpose was to try to pull me away from the area so I
would not interfere. When I realized that, I returned to proclaiming, "God is
love." This caused them to change their tactics, and they began to shout me
down. I could not remain indefinitely as I had to pick up my wife, but I was
shocked that there were those who drive people hard toward God through fear
instead of drawing them with love. I suspect that those young men drove more people
into rebellion against God than were ever saved by their fear-induced message.
There are three primary sources
for our understanding of God's character. We bring those with us when we read
the Bible, when we pray, and when we attempt to live out our understanding of
the Christian character. It is important to realize that our understanding of those
sources evolve as our understanding of God's character evolves. As that
happens, our own character evolves. The first source is our understanding of
loving or non-loving relationships we experience as children. We can emerge
from childhood as very loving people, people who have a distorted idea of love,
or people who have little to no understanding of love, depending on what was
modeled to us as children by our parents mostly, but also by peers and
siblings. As we enter our teens, we seek to break off parental dependence and establish
our own identity. As the saying goes about birds of a feather flocking
together, we tend to find common cause with other teens who have similar
experiences and therefore similar character flaws because we understand why
those flaws exist. This reinforces those perceptions, making it hard to get derailed
character development back on track.
A second source is school, where
a child often spends the most hours apart from those spent with family. The public
school system is intended to eventually produce adults that will have
employable skills and a nationalist, patriotic relationship to government. The
purpose of this is to achieve a properly socialized individual that will support
public programs, pay taxes, fight in wars if necessary, and raise families that
will do the same. The implied social contract is that if this socialization is successful,
then the family can expect to own a home, and an automobile, and be properly
fed, clothed, and entertained. Love experienced in this milieu tends to be
contractual. I will love my country if it continues to provide for my needs and
those of my family. If scarcity of resources threatens that outcome, that kind
of love can quickly evaporate, threatening societal stability and subverting
any resistance to societal ills. Those affected can devolve into drug and
alcohol abuse to avoid the reality of the contract's failure or crime to make up what was lost when the contract
collapsed. The irony is that the social contract can collapse only partially as
happens when wealth disparity becomes too great. This causes society to become
fear based. The wealthy become fearful they will lose what they have to those
who have little, and the poor, whom the wealthy feel are society's failures,
fear that what little they have will be taken by the wealthy who never seem to
have enough. Contractual love is fear based, relying on the inviolability of a
contract that is dependent upon the good will of the participants. However, as I
previously pointed out, those who have dysfunctional characters may have difficulty
understanding that, and wealth is no indicator of healthy character.
A third source is religion. When
properly characterized, it can go a long way toward ameliorating the failings
of the other two. However, religion is also dependent upon the character of
those involved. As with the young woman mentioned at the beginning of my
commentary, her father was religious, but he justified his abuse with religious
teachings he found to be supportive of his abusive relationship with his
daughter. As horrific as that sounds, it is not uncommon, especially in the ranks
of adherents to fundamentalist belief systems. Should we try to sound a
different note, those who find that such dysfunctionality meets their needs
would join to shout us down as I experienced on that university campus. Entire
sects and denominations exist to propagate fear-based religion and submission
to those in control of such perversion. They can become very skilled in manipulation
of those fears. They may say things like, "Don't harden your heart towards God!"
to get a person to submit to "God's will" which is really the will of the one doing
the manipulating. For these reasons, those who propose parochial schools or
even home schooling as an alternative to the issues I raised about public
school may simply be perpetuating dysfunction in another generation that they
experienced in thiers.
So, what are we to do given such
dysfunctionalities? Martin Luther, living in the late 15th and early
16th centuries concluded that there is no mediator appropriate to
stand between us and God other than Jesus Christ. His perfect love makes him
the defining example of love. Because of the inherent failings of the three
foundations I mentioned, no human being is capable of adequately representing God's
character and thereby passing on that character to others. That is why, when we
give our lives to Jesus and are baptized, we receive the Holy Spirit. (Acts
2:38) The Holy Spirit becomes our teacher, revealing the truth about God's character
to us. (John
16:13) That truth is that God is love. (1
John 4:8) It is only when we encounter that love that we learn what love
truly is and not the dysfunctional idea of love we have learned from the failures
of others. Instead, God's love sprouts in our hearts, replacing the stone-like
hardness this world gave us with a vibrant, glowing creation spawned from God,
the source of that love. (1
John 4:19) Only then the shriveled-up, fear-based plant the world has tried
to sow in our hearts can be swept away, for fear and love cannot coexist. (1
John 4:18)