I’m old enough to remember the black and white test screens that would interrupt the TV program to say this is only a test of the emergency broadcast system and is not an actual emergency. Well I think I had one of those the other day as I was watering the shrubs as a Mexican man approached me about needing to use my electricity for about an hour and as I began to contemplate the inconvenience of running his extension cord through my house, I initially responded, “I don’t think so,” and then in a flash I remembered I had an outside outlet and so I agreed. Well at first there was no power and I was looking on how to get him some juice when I realized that the GFI had tripped. After I reset it I could hear his electrical device start up and then only seconds later the power come on in his house and so it turned out that they didn’t need my electrical anyway.
When I went back into the house I began my reading for the day and one of the first things I came across was an article on selfishness, as essentially making ourselves the center of our lives, at the expense of God and others, thus it seemed providential to what I had just experienced.
Now some may claim that this is a moral dilemma for God in asking us to do something that He’s unwilling to do in seeking His own glory in what my nephew might refer to as something akin to a hero complex. But when you think of the ontological application of this term in its most supreme context, it can only truly apply to how beings of a creaturely nature are to respond, who are lesser than (God) or equal to themselves (human) as even extending to their earthly role of stewardship. This isn’t a matter of exempting God by an executive order as God overruling his own ethics as the very nature of such behavior is love, of which God is, and to whom other should such love be ultimately directed, considering we owe Him our very existence, and furthermore He has no equal, outside the persons of the Godhead, nor is there anyone greater than Himself as He is the only one qualified to be the center of everything. This reminds me of the movie in which George Burns played the role of God and when he was brought under oath He could only swear by himself.
However, God’s character is selfless, not only through His interrelatedness among the Godhead, but also towards His creatures as with the supreme act of His love by means of the incarnation as leading to the sacrificial redemption of all mankind as well as His created order. You may think this was all just a set-up to make Himself look good as causing people to fail so that He can save the world but to make such a conjecture would be a violation to the perfection of His moral character in which He can not sin nor does he cause others to sin accordingly, James 1:13. Just because that’s how we may see a corrupt world behave through the abuse of leadership, as with the failures of human governments and false man-made religions, does not justify projecting this same error onto God.
What He could have done is just decided not to create at all at which point such an ungrateful argument would not even exist in order to be made and still His unselfish love would be sustained through the interactions between the members of the Trinity, but instead, such love came to include others to join Him in the fellowship of everlasting life. Finally, this salvation is something we didn’t even have to earn, but receive, and no wonder they call it Amazing Grace.
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