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God's Love

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

One of my struggles with this passage is that it doesn’t explicitly include “us” or sin in the list of things that can’t separate us from the love of God. Implicitly, we and sin are part of “anything else in all creation,” but if I’d written it, I would have wanted to be more explicit on those points. The problem with thinking that anything can separate us from the love of God is that whatever can separate us from His love is more powerful than He is.

A second preliminary remark is a response to the “How could a loving God send people to hell or make them suffer in this life?” Dallas Willard said that Hell is the best God can do for some people. After all, if they want nothing to do with Him, they would not want to be in Heaven. Hell is as absent of God as it is possible to be. And God assures us that the suffering we endure is meant for our well-being, just as a medicine we don’t like is meant to address our illness or its symptoms. And again, if we are the ones who set the standards by which God must act, then we are omnipotent, not He.

But now that we’ve established those things, what does this passage have to say to us today? It may seem silly to point out that it means God loves us. Some say that He’s “crazy” about us, but that suggests that He’s foolish and out of control. His love for us isn’t the sort of infatuation that blinds Him to our failures and frailties. It doesn’t make Him lower His standards. He loves us. He wants what is good for us even if we don’t.

More than that, He wants us. This is what astounds me. I can understand that God is God. He is the Creator. As such, He has certain responsibilities. A man who doesn’t care for the children he sires is considered a “deadbeat father,” but a man who pays the bills and fulfills whatever other duties he may have as a father may not enjoy his children or want them around. Such “distant dads” are often seen as very good fathers, but they don’t have relationships with their kids.

This is not the way God prefers to work. Our relationship with Him and His with us is the key and the point. It is a relationship with some definite boundaries. There are things God doesn’t do to us or for us, and there are things we are not to do to or for God. There are other things that God will or must do to us or for us, and things that we must do to God or for Him – not in the sense that God needs our help, but in the sense that it is the right thing for us to do. And again, that relationship is somehow, astoundingly, ridiculously, unbelievably,  and terrifyingly important to God. 

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