More on “Is there any bad news with God?”
Lots of response to the "Is faith fun?" post. Thanks!
Most of you had sympathy with the question—largely taking it to mean "Is 'fun' a category you experience (a) in a church setting or (b) with people of faith? And you either felt "touché!" or you talked about settings you've found where "fun" is very much on the table. (At the Center City Summit, for example—bless you for that comment—or hanging out with folks for a cold beverage after an intriguing evening session.)
Brian took us a different direction, back towards our exchange of posts a few weeks back in which we talked about whether God ever brought bad news to anyone. I thought it might be worth a revisiting, because this really does seem like a biggie to me, and a point in the conversation where it can be easy to talk past each other.
So my take is that, according to the Bible and to my own experience, there's no downside with God. There's no person on earth who would not be advised to experience God (or, if you prefer, Jesus) as fully as they possibly could. If you're suffering, far better to suffer as one who knows and experiences Jesus. If you're far from God, there's no downside to getting close to God. As Psalm 119 tells us about God, "You are good and you do only good." If God did evil, he'd cease being the god under discussion and, of course, we should all run away from that god as fast as our little legs could carry us. Happily, the Bible is at pains to say—and my own experience confirms—God, in fact, is good and does only good. I don't believe this is a controversial point.
The sticking point for some folks is that we can read the Bible as presenting bad news to bad people. If we're…greedy, exploitive…oh, disrespectful to parents (which gets quite a bad rap in the Bible—my kids should take note)…and (and this is the one usually brought up to me) sexually immoral, there's only bad news waiting for us. Not addressing this is willful blindness to many texts in the Bible.
This is where it seems to me we're talking past each other (though perhaps many of you can help me out). Maybe it's that I'm putting the emphasis on the "with." There's no downside "with" God. There's abundant downside apart from God. Apart from God there's pretty much nothing good to report. But the reason this seems worth chatting about, to me, is to make the point that the person who's most distant from God of anyone on planet Earth would only find good news with God. For some folks, as I said, the first place they go with that thought is to imagine someone they know—or can conceive of—who's sexually involved with someone else in a way the Bible wouldn't encourage. Clearly, it might seem, for them it would be bad news!
But my thought is: how is God ever bad news? A concept of God might be bad news, for sure. But the actual God, whom this alleged person would actually encounter? Would that God treat our hypothetical friend poorly? Would that God offer anything but hope? In yesterday's post, I talked about the challenges my own mess brings me in life, and how God—or so it seemed to me—treated me so gently, with such encouragement that my problems wouldn't sink me, that there was a lot of encouragement right at the place where I have wounds and need growth. I hear that a lot from people.
Now I suppose I could imagine a scenario where I said back, "Phooey on you, God!" I suppose God could tick me off and I could leave in a huff. But then we're back to the "apart from God" scenario. Sticking close to God, I don't see the downside.
How do you all interact with these questions?
