God's love

Walter Russell Mead writes,

...God has a problem. It’s us. We keep messing things up.
Over the past few days, we’ve been delving into the meaning of Christmas; it’s led us into a discussion of the Christian concept of God. There are many qualities that can be used to describe the Deity; Muslims often speak of the “ninety-nine names of God,” and it’s an instructive and beautiful list on which any monotheist can profitably meditate.
But at the end of the day, for Christians, the heart of the matter is this: God is love. Love doesn’t just describe God’s relationship to the creation; it describes God’s essence—his inner life and being. This as we have seen is the origin of the Christian idea of the Trinity: Love is so intrinsic to the divine nature that we cannot conceive of his unity as solitude.

From a Christian perspective, God’s act of creation is an expression of love. God made the world because He wants an abundance of beings and sensibilities to love, to be with, to share life with, and to make happy.

...But people have a special place in the Creator’s heart. Made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, we were created because God wanted beings with whom he could share the kind of love that animals and plants can’t give. Strange as it may seem, the Maker and Ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company and has made Himself vulnerable to us; we can please God and we can hurt Him by the ways we treat Him, treat ourselves, and treat one another.

...Yet at the same time, like many angelic-looking children, we’re a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester.

Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods, and among friends. Abused children grow up to repeat the cycle. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings—and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs.

This flawed race trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong is what, and who, God is bound and determined to love; the question is how can He do it?

...God is so loving that He can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied. Yet at the same time, God is too just, too all-seeing to overlook what’s going on.

Think of a God’s-eye perspective on someone who beats and abuses a child. God sees the helpless victim and burns with anger; yet He also knows that the perpetrator was once an innocent victim. He felt all the fear and pain of the young child who has grown up to become an abuser, feels all the pain of the adult who has grown up twisted. Knowing the future, as God does, He perhaps can see a time ahead when today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully. He can see the fanatical Nazi as a child growing up in a culture wrenched out of shape by defeat, inflation, and change. He can see the Ukrainian mafioso as the product of a society that suffered genocidal violence at the hands of both Soviet and Nazi oppressors. He sees the genocidaires of Rwanda and Darfur as victims in their own way of societies gone deeply wrong, yet He also hears the cries of their victims.

...Christians believe that God refused to choose between his love and his justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren’t, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.

...God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love. That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.

He came to show and live out God’s radical commitment to his creation. People aren’t just a hobby to God; the universe isn’t a diversion for Him. Infinite Love made us to share an infinite intimacy and will go to infinite lengths to restore that bond no matter how deeply or how horribly we have failed. That love is not blind; it knows what messes we make of our lives and how we wound and damage others. But even so, God is determined to be with us.

That is why there was a baby in the manger. That is why we celebrate this time of year. God knows exactly who we are, loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to make this relationship work.

Read more here.