Tough Question

Malakar said:

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements. Ultimately I've come to the realization that I will follow God no matter what people say, and I will follow him even when I don't understand his ways. But we shouldn't ignore an argument like that, because people who make this kind of argument will only be confirmed that Christians are closed minded.

I do believe that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than our strength, so we won't understand the reasons for the things he does until we go to Heaven.

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Does Being Loved Mean Being Made Much Of?



For many people, this is not obviously an act of love. They do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees.



This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God – and savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors.



Pathological at the Grand Canyon



The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but of self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves. And each of these rare and precious moments in life – beside the Canyon, before the Alps, under the stars – is an echo of a far greater excellence, namely the glory of God. That is why the Bible says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).



Sometimes people say that they cannot believe that, if there is a God, he would take interest in such a tiny speck of reality called humanity on Planet Earth. The universe, they say, is so vast, it makes man utterly insignificant. Why would God have bothered to create such a microscopic speck called earth and humanity and then get involved with us?



Beneath this question is a fundamental failure to see what the universe is about. It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself. And he says it for us to learn and enjoy – namely, that he is infinitely great and powerful and wise and beautiful. The more the Hubble Telescope sends back to us about the unfathomable depths of space, the more we should stand in awe of God. The disproportion between us and the universe is a parable about the disproportion between us and God. And it is an understatement. But the point is not to nullify us but to glorify him.



Loving People Means Pointing Them to the All-Satisfying God.



Now back to what it means to be loved. The idea has been almost totally distorted. Love has to do with showing a dying soul the life-giving beauty of the glory of God, especially his grace. Yes, as we will see, we show God’s glory in a hundred practical ways that include care about food and clothes and shelter and health. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).



Every good work should be a revelation of the glory of God. What makes the good deed an act of love is not the raw act, but the passion and the sacrifice to make God himself known as glorious. Not to aim to show God is not love, because God is what we need most deeply. And to have all else without him is to perish in the end. The Bible says that you can give away all that you have and deliver your body to be burned and have not love (1 Corinthians 13:3). If you don’t point people to God for ever-lasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life



Is Eternal Life a Heaven Full of Mirrors



Now think what this means for God’s love. How shall God love us? Mere logic could give us the answer: God loves us best by giving us the best to enjoy forever, namely himself, for he is best. But we are not dependent on logic alone. The Bible makes it clear. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). What is eternal life? It is to know God and his Son, Jesus Christ. No thing can satisfy the soul. The soul was made to stand in awe of a Person – the only person worthy of awe. All heroes are shadows of Christ. We love to admire their excellence. How much more will we be satisfied by the one Person who conceived all excellence and embodies all skill, all talent, all strength and brilliance and savvy and goodness. This is what I have been trying to say. God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever.



Or consider the way the apostle Peter says it. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Why did God send Christ to die for our sins? “That he might bring us to God” – to himself. God sent Christ to die so that we could come home to the all-satisfying Father. This is love. God’s love for us is God’s doing what he must do, at great cost to himself, so that we might have the pleasure of seeing and savoring him forever. If it is true, as the Psalmist says to God, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11), then what must love do? It must rescue us from our addiction to self and bring us, changed, into the presence of God.



Are You Being Used?



So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into this world’s distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making much of him forever?


Suppose you answer, “I want to be free from self and full of joy in God; I want to enjoy making much of God, not me. And I want the fullness of joy to last forever.” If you responded this way, then you will also have an answer to the fear I mentioned earlier, that you are just being used by God when he creates you for his glory. Now we see that in creating us for his glory, he is creating us for our highest joy. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.



God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act. Anyone who exalts himself distracts from what we need, namely, God. But if God exalts himself, he calls attention to the very thing we need most for our joy. If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, “Look! Look at me. I am the reason you are here.” And when you look and exult in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy would be full. You would not complain that the paintings should have kept quiet. They rescued you from wasting your visit. In the same way no child complains, “I am being used” when his father delights to make the child happy with his own presence.



(“Don’t Waste Your Life,” John Piper, Crossway Books, 2003, pgs 33-36)

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Malakar said:

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements.

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God's egoistic tendencies are something that I find quite absurd. I'm not clear why such a conception of an all-powerful being would be so full of itself and have such strong desire to be praised, worshipped, and feared by relatively insignificant and pathetic human creatures from a tiny blue dot in the outter edge of this little galaxy. It just doesn't make sense to me, and I smell a rat here. It seems implausible, and sounds fabricated to me, so much so that I have a hard time anyone could fall for it.
There is a part that has been omitted here, and that part is that God wants our voluntary love and worship. That is why God created a creature that has free will as well as the redemptive ability to be reconciled to God without a concept of love, but simply by fact... that one places their hope in Jesus Christ.




... But why would a god show such tendencies? Shouldn't a god be above such egoistic desires? I would think that it would be.


God has no "needs" from humankind. He created angels to administer to all of the "needs" of heaven. It isn't about "power" but about achieving those things which are eternal.


If there were a god, one with the ability to spawn universes and forge life, it *knows* it's god, its got to be secure in its own power and godliness (there is nothing greater than itself), so what sort of gradification could such a powerful being derive from the coerced devotion and admiration of us little humans on this relatively insignificant rock floating around this insignificant little star?

Free will is not coerced devotion... but voluntarily recognizing the Creator as the Creator.



And why would it feel the need to create humans in the first place just so they can glorify its ego? Could a "god" really show such human-like pettiness and egoism? I find that extremely hard to believe


Angels glorify God, therefore, the worship is not about "ego".... which is an earthy concept. With God, everything is spiritual... off the plane of earthly concepts.

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Malakar said:

No I have made a strong point to never ignore peoples arguements. Ultimately I've come to the realization that I will follow God no matter what people say, and I will follow him even when I don't understand his ways. But we shouldn't ignore an argument like that, because people who make this kind of argument will only be confirmed that Christians are closed minded.

I do believe that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than our strength, so we won't understand the reasons for the things he does until we go to Heaven.

Click to expand...