When we talk about the "love of God" what most of us actually mean is His kindness. Kindness is the desire to see others happy. Not wiser or stronger or better off financially - just happy. Imagine telling your friend you hope she loses her job, because you think the hardship will make her a better person. You'd probably have one less friend after that! After all, what a horribly unkind thing to say.
What we want from a "loving" God is one who says, like so many parents to their grown children, "I'm happy if you're happy, kiddo." We don't want a Father in heaven, we want a grandfather - one who takes us to Disneyland after school and lets us eat ice cream for dinner.
No one wants to admit to a theology built around a heavenly grandfather, but it's there, lurking in our minds. I'm guilty of it, too. I would love to live in a world where God smiles down at everything I do. But since it's obvious I don't live in that world, and since I still believe God is love, then I have to assume my definition of "love" needs work.
There is kindness in love, of course, but the two aren't one and the same. Kindness without love has a certain indifference, even contempt, for its subject, because kindness demands the absence of suffering at any cost. A perfect example is PETA, People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals. How often does PETA, out of kindness, advocate putting animals to death? PETA vastly prefers the animals they fight for be killed rather than to endure suffering. This is kindness without love.
Kindness without love doesn't care if its subject becomes good or bad, weaker or stronger, lives or dies. Kindness without love simply demands that its subject not suffer. "I'm happy if you're happy, kiddo."
In Hebrews we read that the illegitimate sons are spoiled, but the children who carry on the family name are disciplined. If we couldn't care less about a person, then it's easy to wish them happiness at any cost. With the people we truly love, however, we'd much rather see them suffer - through surgeries, marriage counseling, getting fired, rehab, etc - than be happy while doing horrible things. We want our loved ones to be better, stronger people. We want them to grow and learn and try again after they fail. We want more for them than happiness, because our kindness is bound up with love.
So if God is love, then He's also more than kindness. He wants more for us than to escape suffering at any cost. Like the heavenly parent He is, God will discipline us, but He never regards us with indifference or contempt. He cares, more than we'll ever understand. God has given us a terrible, glorious gift: His all-encompassing, unconditional love.
When the Bible says that God loves us, it means God loves us. Not in the disinterested, contemptuous way that demands an absence of pain at any cost, but with the all-consuming passion of a personal Creator who wants us to reach our full potential and find our true purpose. You want a loving God? Here He is. Persistent, absolute, jealous, and yes, demanding. Like Loki, we are "burdened with glorious purpose," and God will pursue us with His demanding love even when we'd much rather settle for mere "happiness."
Suggested Reading: Hebrews 12:4-11
Study Questions:
1) Think of a time when someone showed you kindness without love. In other words, a time when someone did something to make you happy, but not a better person. Maybe it even hurt you somehow in the long run. What did that look like? What was the result?
2) Now think of a time when someone showed you love that required you to be unhappy for a time. What did that look like? What was the result?
3) Kindness is often easy where love is tough. Love sticks around through the hard, unhappy times. When was the last time you did something kind, trying to make someone happy? When was the last time you did something loving, trying to make someone better?
4) We want people to be kind, because we want to be happy and escape suffering. How might your life change tomorrow if everyone you encountered showed you LOVE instead of mere kindness? How would your life change if you showed that kind of love to everyone else?
5) Sometimes making another person happy is the easy way out. Is there anyone in your life you're trying to make happy - saying what they want to hear, doing what they want you do to - because doing things that might help them be a better person is just too hard?
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1) Original Text: "A Good Time Was Had By All"
By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His
lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context,
most of us mean kindness - the desire to see others than the self happy;
not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really
satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like
doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in
fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a
senile benevolence who, as they say, "Liked to see young people enjoying
themselves", and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might
be truly said at the end of each day, "A good time was had by all". Not
many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those
terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many
minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to
live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is
abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe,
nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love
needs correction.
- The Problem of Pain
2) Original Text: More Than Mere Kindness
There
is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and
when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other
elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its
object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very
readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose
kindess to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they
should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object
becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As
Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitamate
sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. {Heb 12:8}
It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on
any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting
and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and
estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, someting more
than mere kindess. And it appears, from all the records, that though He
has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with
contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the
deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
- The Problem of Pain
3) Original Text: "Amazing Love, How Can It Be?"
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves
man: not that He has some 'disinterest', because really indifferent,
concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are
the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The
great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is
present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy
in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious
magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort
of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the
worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a
man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a
child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this
should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any
creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so
prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory
not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace,
beyond our desiring: we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play,
to deprecate the love of Zeus. But the fact seems unquestionable.
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