Loving And Severe

 An important step to spiritual maturity is to see G-d as He is, not as we want Him to be. If you are just engaging in wishful thinking, just seeing what you want to see, that is not real religion. G-d does not exist to fulfill our wishes. We exist to fulfill His. He wants us to come more and more into His image, which is both loving and merciful and at the same time severe and unsentimental. G-d does not spare His children; who G-d loves he prunes and admonishes. Like a wild vine, He prunes off the unproductive branches in us and strengthens the productive ones.

Yes, G-d is loving, more so than we can imagine. Whatever your sins in the past, all you need to do is sincerely repent of them and see that you were wrong and resolve not to repeat them, and your sins will be forgiven. G-d wants to move past your previous shortcomings and embrace your future improvement and reconciliation with Him. G-d is so loving that He sent His own Son to this heck of a planet to die in order to save us. We low-lifes, you and me. In fact if you are His, everything He sends into your life whether it seems good or bad to you, is actually for your improvement. Some of those things are very unpleasant at the time.

And G-d is also severe. He is severe to his own to raise them up right, and he is severe to the unrighteous. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament is also one of the hardest. In Leviticus 10 two of the sons of Aaron offer "strange fire" before G-d's altar. This might have been unauthorized incense or it might have been because they kindled their own fire rather than using fire from the altar. Whatever was the case, G-d consumed them both with fire. And then He says a very hard thing to Aaron:

"Do not cry."

Aaron was forbidden to weep. Man! He just lost two sons at once, burned to a crisp. But Aaron was no ordinary man. He was the High Priest of the Nation of Israel. He above all had to put G-d's interests first. And the sanctity of G-d's presence had just been violated. This was a very severe thing that nevertheless had to happen.

And you may find G-d removing people from your presence, if you are G-d's. If you are G-d's, you are His temple, His holy place. Profane people do not belong trammeling the courts of G-d. For myself, I became a hermit, among other reasons, to be separate from the profane human world and I find G-d removing the World's people from my life on a repeating basis. If you are His, He will do the same to you. This will be hard, and also necessary.

The benevolence and forgiveness of Jesus in the New Testament is mentioned frequently, sometimes at the expense of the many occasions of Jesus also being severe. In the Old Testament, adultery carries the death penalty. Yet Jesus saved the life of a woman who violated this Commandment and forgave her. Just as he will forgive you if you truly repent, no matter what you have done.

He also said this:

“Go in through the narrow gate, because the gate to hell is wide and the road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it. But the gate to life is narrow and the way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it."
~Matthew 7:13-14

This is a hard saying! He is saying the overwhelming majority of people won't be saved. Which means the odds are that most if not all of your friends and loved ones won't be either. Most of the world and most of its people are headed to the ash heap. Now, people follow a sinful way because they want to and they are free to make that choice. But it is a bit like some fish who lay millions of eggs so that only a few will survive to adulthood. Most people are like those million-minus-a-few who get gobbled up by other fish.

This is a profoundly unsentimental worldview. This is not intended to make us feel good, because it sure doesn't. It is intended to tell us the hard truth about being saved. We are supposed to feel chastened by this statement. Most will not make it. Will I? Better get serious.

This is also the same Jesus who went violent against the money-changers in the Temple. This is the same Jesus who told the Pharisees they will die in their sins. They're doomed. The same Jesus who said that anyone who leads one of his little ones (the context was children, but he means us) to sin would be better off drowning themselves.

G-d will not fit into our categories. He doesn't live to accommodate our wishes. He is more loving than we can know: indeed the nature of Heaven appears to be unity in love since the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in us; we are united in love. He is also at the same time very unsentimental in a human sense, and severe. Our job is to come to know the only true G-d, not to try to squeeze Him into our wish-fulfillment knapsack.