Proof of Love

Dave Brisbin | 10.21.18 In one of our studies last week, someone asks the age old question—maybe first question we humans have asked about ourselves and life: how can I believe or trust there’s a God or any higher power that cares about me and my well being when there is so much evil all around? The oldest book in the Bible is focused on this question. An entire branch of philosophy focuses on this question. Polytheism and atheism are answers to this question because if you have many gods, some good and some bad or no god, problem solved. But for those who believe in one God, all good and all powerful, and yet evil exists—pick any two but you can’t logically have all three. Even Satan doesn’t get God off the hook. If God can’t stop Satan, he’s not all powerful, and if he won’t, not all good. Is there a way to understand God that maintains what theists believe about one God and yet never shrinks from the realities of daily life? If there was such a rational answer, we would have had it long ago, so any “answer” won’t exist in the form we’re expecting, but as we consider a quote from a second century church father, the lyrics of a popular song, the stories of the separation and reconciliation of two sets of biblical characters, and the dysfunctional marriage of one prophet, a way through begins to emerge. We can’t know God until we know why he won’t make us love him, that love is only love if it is freely chosen. And we won’t see God’s face until we allow ourselves to fall deeply into the risk of the pain of loving as he loves—by setting our beloved perfectly free to choose whether to love us back, to choose the “evil” that is actually the proof that such perfect love really exists.