Title: Dilemma: How Might a Perfect God Accept Imperfect People?

Subtitle: Reconsidering how a perfect God can possibly offer friendship to imperfect people

Author: Christopher Travis Haun for http://rethinker.net/soteria

Draft Date: January 2009

Feedback: Feel free to email feedback of any kind to cthaun[at]hotmail[dot]com

Imagine that you’re minding your own business, living life as usual, when unexpectedly your heart stops pumping blood. It’s not a heart attack; it’s just that the electrical impulse which triggers the contractions simply ceases to fire for some inexplicable reason. You can’t even utter a word of explanation to those around you as you slump to the floor. Darkness closes in around you and you pass painlessly into unconsciousness. It’s one of those things where the doctor who pronounces you dead will just sign off on as “due to natural causes.”

What seems like might be only a moment later consciousness returns and you quickly perceive that you’re no longer in quite the same dimensions of space-time reality that you had grown used to in your previous life. There is still height, width, length, and a sense of time. Reality is now not less than this. But, then again, it now is somehow more than this and it’s hard to describe since neither of us have ever experienced hyperspaces before. Indeed things look and feel somewhat the same as before but also quite different.

In what might be described as “in the distance” (for lack of an applicable preposition in our language) you perceive what you intuitively recognize as the paradise many myths on earth were shadowy descriptions of. Able to see in ways you couldn’t before, you can tell from a distance that the world you came from is by comparison broken. You’re drawn towards it.

As you float towards this Paradise, a Being you recognize instinctively as “God” abruptly intercepts your trajectory. Your attention is seized. You cannot identify this “God” as Brahman, Allah, Yahweh, Zeus/Jupiter, Yeshua, Odin/Wotan, Ahura Mazda, etc. Indeed you’re so awed by the encounter that you don’t even think to ask such an otherwise sensible question. At this moment for you somehow names don’t seem important anyway. All you know is this thing we always wondered about--the thing some of us dared to hope might exist and the thing others dared to hope didn’t exist—exists. Not just exists but IS Existence its self. This is the I-WAS|I-AM|I-WILL-BE Being of such magnitude that our entire cosmos of fourteen-billion-light-years radius rests easily in the palm of his hand (if he had a hand) like a hen’s egg and yet so complex and invasive that he adjusts the interplay between gravity, electromagnetism, weak force, and the strong force inside the egg.

The mighty angels which hover around God are themselves of intimidating stature and glory. But they pale in comparison to the one whose dazzling glory they reflect. But somehow you cannot keep your eye on them for the gravity of the radiance of the Infinite Being. This God-Being however seems to transcend all these new dimensions of space-time into the realm of infinite. And yet there is something imminent about this Being which somehow pierces into your finite planes of existence.

He addresses you by name in a voice which is somehow both piercingly loud but also very quiet, terrifying and yet also somehow peaceful:

“Why should I let you into my perfect paradise?

Why should I let you in?”

The words strike with unnerving clarity. Indeed, why should a perfect and infinite being allow an imperfect and finite human being to enter into his realm of perfection?

The dilemma is simple. We know that even within the limitations of our finitude we are not morally perfect, spiritually pure, beyond reproach. But somehow imagine (never mind its degree of ludicrousness) that this extremely impressive Being seems sincerely interested in giving you a chance to try to impress him.

What can you say that might possibly impress him? What can you—and imperfect being—possibly offer as a reason for God to either overlook your imperfections or to fix your imperfection and admit you into his realm of perfect paradise? To put it another way, what can you boast in? What can you brag about? What can we finite and imperfect mortals boast about when attempting to get God to smile upon us favorably?

The natural inclination of many when posed with the dilemma is to pull out the scales and start piling up their good deeds on one side and their bad deeds on the other side to see which side is more massive. Do we not tend to assume that if we’re “mostly good” that we must be acceptable to God the Judge? And do we not also tend to assume that if we’re “better than most people” or “at least as good as most people” that we must be acceptable to God? This does seem natural because the most frequent answer I have heard to the question tends to be:

“I’d say to God that he should let me in because I’ve really tried to live a good life.”

The second most common answer I’ve received is:

“Awww, I’d just turn around and walk away. I know I can’t impress him. I’ve already ruined my chance at that.”

Almost every answer I’ve ever heard tends to fall into one of those two categories: either the “I am worthy” category or the “I’m not worthy” category.

I suggest that when we finally someday come face to face with the Being who designed and made us, we will all realize our finitude, our smallness, our imperfections, our failings, our shortcomings, our unworthiness, our unacceptability in the light of unfathomable perfection.

For those in the southern latitudes, you may, like me have to contend with fire ants. They’re a fairly nasty tempered variety of ant. If you’re barefoot and happen to step in the grass within a foot from their mound, there it is likely that you’ll get at least one sting. If you step on their mound, within seconds you’ll have hundreds of stinging ants on your foot.

When I am in my yard around my house and stumble upon a mound of fireants, I deal with them ruthlessly. I get the two largest cooking pots we have in the house, fill them with water, and put them on the stove top. While I’m waiting for the water to come to a boil, I find the sharpshooter shovel and carry it to the mound. When the water is boiling, I move it from the stove to the vicinity of the mound. I take my sharpshooter shovel and stab it deep into the earth beside the mound—fourteen inches perhaps—and then pry the mound open. As all the ants rush to the attack, I pour the gallons of boiling water into the crevasse, flooding the mound, eliminating the colony. I sink the shovel into the heart of the mound again and pour the second bowl of my wrath into the mound for good measure.

Yes, it’s merciless. After many years of being the victim of fire ants, I have no grace and mercy left for them. When I find them, I pour my wrath upon them—literally. But to other animals I’m actually a kind man. I don’t kill spiders I find—except black widows. I don’t kill good tempered ants. But as for fire ants, I have no mercy left.

As I imagine what it will be like for us mortals to see God at the end of our lives or at the end of history I imagine that we are to God something like ants are to a man. Of course the reality must be far more exaggerated than that since God is infinite and we are finite. But when attempting to find some analogy, some reference point we can understand, the ants-and-man image is one that works well for me in my limitations.

What if human civilizations are to God much like ant mounds are to me? The ants think that their mound and the yard they have dug into is rightfully theirs and it is their prerogative to attack the large foot that comes close. But the man owns the land and has lost his patience with those ants. We ants might imagine that we are benevolent ants that just go about our work in the grass never hurting the Man. But what if in the end we find that we are in fact proven to be fire ants? What if our sins are like the stings of the fireant to God? When we encounter the Man in a time of judgment, why should we assume that he will have any mercy for us then? Will he pour his wrath out upon us?

It is against a backdrop of pending wrath that the “good news” of the New Testament is set. It tells us that this present season is a time of patience and waiting, of mercy and grace. God is waiting patiently for those who will turn to him to do so. It is like God has two hands at work presently: he has a fist of wrath coiled and ready to launch to solve the problem of evil in this world; but the other hand is a restraining hand of love—for now.

But the good news is even more fascinating in detail. Were I God the Judge, I would have poured my bowls of wrath upon humanity long ago. But God does something so surprising that we would have never guessed it. He does something borderline insane by our standards. Imagine this. The man who could take shovel and boiling water to our civilizations does not do so at first. Instead the man tells his son that it is the son’s mission to go to the Ants and become their King. It gets more bizarre. The man tells his son that to do this he has to become an ant and live among them. The story gets worse, the man warns. He tells his son that he must lay aside much of his mannishness, be shrunken and stuffed into an ant exoskeleton, be limited to the finitude of an ant, offer himself to the ants as their king, be rejected by the masses and by the leaders, and even allow them to murder him. Also insane to our sense, the son agrees to this. But it gets even more interesting. After the son becomes an ant, lives among them, is killed by them, he organizes a very small community of ants to be a different, less vicious kind of ant. After a season of patience ends, the son-become-ant returns to the world of the ants, destroys the evil ants, and rules the ants that belong to him. But all the while, the man who became an ant remains an ant forever more.

But back now to the dilemma of what we imperfect ants can do to impress a perfectly holy God.

To be continued…