God is all-powerful & loving
A quick scan of the headlines will remind you that there is plenty of suffering in the world– if you haven’t experienced it more personally this week. This reality rightly causes many to wrestle with their faith. Some conclude that suffering is evidence that God does not exist. The shortcoming of this conclusion is that one needs an eternal source of goodness to find God false to begin with. Others conclude that because God is all-powerful all that happens in the world is a direct result of God’s will. If this is true, the world reveals God as the perpetrator of evil. A third view is that God is loving but not all-powerful and thus doing the best God can to defeat evil and sin. Each of these views leaves us hopeless. Thankfully, none of these is who Christ reveals God to be. Instead, we see that God’s power and love will rescue creation, is unconquerable, and is even able to bring grace from evil (which God does not cause).
Here are three thoughts that help us understand God as all-powerful and loving.
Sin is a cancer not caused by God
God donates life to creation, granting it freedom and existence, designed to find its fulfillment in God, the ultimate source of truth, beauty, and goodness. Sin is creation turning back on itself like a cancer– attempting to find life in things that bring death, such as war, hate, betrayal, and selfishness. Cancer is the body attacking itself through replicating cells. Humanity, and subsequently the world, is in bondage to decay because it has turned away from God and against itself (Rom 8:21). This is not caused or willed by God but born out of the freedom given to creation. Therefore sin is a shadow, perversion, or corruption of creation, not a primary cause. Understanding sin as a cancer is encouraging and hopeful because it frees us from finding a deeper meaning or justifying the world’s brokenness. We don’t have to wonder why God caused the experience of loss because God did not.
God’s power is God’s freedom to be love
Freedom for God is not the ability to choose but the inability of anything to alter or prevent God from being who God is. God is love (1 John 4:16), and no force, contingency, being, or event can thwart God’s love. God is perfect love in being and action. God is Father, Son, and Spirit existing in an eternal community of love. God’s action is always love because it’s who God is and why Paul is confident that all things can work for good and nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:28,38). We can delight in God’s freedom and see that in the cross God is not accepting evil and death but overthrowing them because they are God’s enemy, not God’s work.
We are the Priesthood of the resurrection
As David Bentley Hart writes, to see the world as both fallen and indwelled by goodness “requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain.” Maintaining this vision is the vocation of the royal priesthood that Peter articulates (1 Peter 1:9). We are to be people who hate the brokenness that destroys people’s lives and live pointing to the love and power of God to rescue creation. This vocation requires us to pursue a life of prayer to renew our vision, a commitment to be present in the world God loves, and faithfulness to reflect the grace of Christ to all people. In your moments of weariness, rejoice in the God who is all-powerful and loving, who brings grace and restoration to the creation God loves.
