From Before the Beginning--April 26, 2023

From Before the Beginning--April 26, 2023

"[Christ] was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God." [1 Peter 1:20-21]

Before God said, "Let there be light," God had already decided to set aside our sins and not to hold them against us.  From the instant creation began, God was already committed to setting us free from the power of sin and death, even before we had gotten around to getting ourselves entangled in their grip.  And when the Big Bang itself was still only a gleam in the eye of the Divine, God knew the worst we would do and forgave it all in advance through Christ.  The ransom was pre-paid, so to speak.

To take that idea seriously--that God knew what we would do and was prepared to go to a cross for us in Christ from the foundation of the world--is really kind of mind-blowing.  We have to stretch our imaginations to conceive of God's existence "before" there was a thing called "time," so a time before time... or perhaps outside of the way we experience chronology. And the idea that God, whose Being is outside of time as well, knew even prior to our existence how we would break God's heart, harm one another, and wreck God's creation, and still went ahead with making the universe and loving us unconditionally?  That is just more than our brains can bear.  Imagining God existing outside of time and space strains our ways of thinking like reading about Einstein's theory of relativity and string theory and black holes and quantum mechanics.

And yet... in a way, it is so utterly simple and relatable, too, that it makes perfect sense.  When my daughter comes to me, having calmed down from an outburst earlier in the day, and says, "Dad, I'm sorry--do you forgive me?" my answer is always, "Yes, I have forgiven you already."  In a sense, to be a parent is to make the choice to forgive the meanest words, the most hurtful actions, and the gravest wrongs our children can commit against us, even before they have done them.  From the first night they are laid in their cradles and cribs, you make the commitment to love your children unconditionally and to be a safe place for them to land, risking that they might make terrible choices or break your heart repeatedly.  And you forgive it all in advance, just as our parents did for us when we were still in diapers... and just as God has done from before that first flash of light when darkness gave way to dawn.

That is simply the way unconditional love works--that is part of what makes it unconditional, after all.  There will certainly be mess-ups, and there will need to be correction when those mess-ups happen. But the choice to love means the choice from the beginning not to let those mess-ups be the last word with the beloved.  God's kind of love sees the heartache in advance, rather like any parent can see in advance that the innocent faces of infants will grow up into mouthy teenagers who will hurl cruel words, or lie to their parents, or get themselves into trouble and need to be bailed out.  And love chooses to endure the pain of it anyway, not to hold those future wrongs against the beloved [even though we know they are inevitable], and still to remain committed to us.  That is the way God loves us, every instant of our lives, and indeed from beyond time itself in eternity.  

So let's be clear about the story we tell: the Christian gospel is NOT that after God made the world and we sinned, God had to then decide if we were worthy of saving until Jesus came along and persuaded God to accept his death instead of ours. No--God never needed persuading. The choice to love us, even if it came through a cross, was made from before the beginning, and God decided not to hold our worst actions or choices against us, but rather to set us free from being trapped in them.

I wonder what would happen if we saw one another as people who are so fiercely loved.  It wouldn't excuse the rottenness we do to one another and perpetrate against each other, but it would remind us that our worst is never the last thing to be said about us.  God's determination to redeem us from the foundation of the world means that God has gone through with loving and liberating us even knowing our worst actions--and yet that God wouldn't let that be the end.  It's not that the wounds we all inflict on one another [and which others have inflicted on us] are insignificant--it is that God refuses to let them be the end of any of our stories, and God has been committed to that promise from the beginning.

At least part of what that means is that none of us is reducible to our worst actions or biggest mistake, and that God has been forever committed to loving us despite our greatest and gravest sins.  It is worth remembering that before any of us writes someone off forever as beyond forgiveness--ours or God's.

After all, God has decided that you and I are never beyond forgiveness, either.  I suppose that means nobody can really "fall from grace," because grace is the word for God's commitment from the foundation of the world to catch us even before we've begun to teeter, and God's refusal to let the fact of our failures prevent God's hand from swooping underneath to bear us up.

What if we treated everyone we met as someone so pre-emptively loved by God?  And what if we had the confidence of knowing we are so loved as well?

Lord God, enable us to believe your promise to love us and your commitment to redeem us even in advance of the heartbreak we cause you.