God loves everyone, right? Red, yellow, black & white. Rich, poor, sick & healthy. Presidents, kings, dictators & terrorists. Prostitutes, rapists, murderers & child molesters. Oh wait, that's uncomfortable.
Some things in life we have no control over, like ethnic background or royal bloodlines. Some things we claim to have no control over. And sometimes, we just make bad decisions. It's this last category that I'm addressing today.
God hand-crafts every baby. The Bible says He "knits" them together in their mother's womb. As a mom myself, this is an absolutely beautiful truth. I love being pregnant for many reasons, but one is knowing that God is literally, physically working His art in my body. So mysterious and incomprehensible.
When I think about my children, I feel overwhelming, unexplainable love. Even my newborn. They do nothing to earn my love, and could do nothing to squirm out of its grasp. I simply love them because they're mine. They mess up. They hurt each other. They even hurt my heart sometimes. But on the days when I'm most irritated with them, my passion for them is no less than when they wrap their tiny arms around my neck and whisper "I love you Momma."
When I consider that analogy, it's easy for me to make the connection with God's feelings toward us. Actually accepting it is still difficult, but I'm better able to sort the intellectual knowledge of His unfading love.
He loves me. He loves all of us. We're all His.
But what about Adolph Hitler or Osama Bin Laden? There are people we naturally hate. Surely God has left a clause in there that if someone is "bad" enough, they're worthy of death, hell, and torture more than I. He couldn't have "knitted" them in their mother's womb. God has hated "those kinds of people" their whole lives, right?
What a contradiction to wrestle with.
Think once about Osama as God's created being. He crafted him with the same loving care that He did you and me. With excitement for the new life and hopes of one more human friend to share relationship with.
Think of the sadness the had to have wrenched God's heart as He watched His creation take turn after turn in the wrong direction. He watched him take the free will he was granted to hurt and kill others. I cannot begin to imagine the pain He deals with on a "daily," continual basis. I'd rather not think about it, to be honest.
The hard part is that we don't understand "bad" in the same way God does.
Because I've never stabbed someone in the heart and taken their life, it feels like I'm better than an imprisoned murderer. But He says in 1 John 3:15, "Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer." I personally know a child molester, and the child he molested. And I can tell you that until I was able to come to terms with real forgiveness, "hate" wasn't a strong enough word for my emotions toward him.
So the whole "I'm a pretty good person" thing? Yeah, that's out.
God's standard is perfection. One thing wrong equals failure. We all hit that before we could even talk. I heard it put this way once. In school, anything below a 70% gaves you an "F." So if you got a 69%, you failed. If you got a 69% and I got a 39%, would your F be any better than my F? Of course not. WE'RE BOTH FAILING. It doesn't matter that you're failing "less" than I'm failing.
We were invited to join a champagne/sparking juice "Osama is dead" celebration this evening. I thought that was an awesome, fun idea. But this morning, I was presented with this verse, posted by a Facebook friend:
Ezekiel 33:11
"As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live."
It's sobering enough to jolt me from my selfish place of small understanding and force me to see people just a little more like God might. I thought I'd send the challenge your way too :)
