Looking for a Great and Terrible Love

Something that will give us the courage to do what we really want to do.

Who then are you, my God?...  Most high, utterly good, utterly 
powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful….--Augustine

Both inside and outside the church, people are searching for what I call a great and terrible love. 

By great, I mean it plainly, per the dictionary: “Beyond what is ordinary or usual; highly unusual or exceptional or remarkable.”  We long for a love that captures our imagination—and transcends it. The philosopher Anselm offered this proof for God’s existence: “God is that which nothing greater can be conceived.” We need a love that is greater than we can even conceive.

We are a desperately lonely people, in a life-long search for someone who will listen without judgment. Who will embrace without conditions. Who will give us permission to be who we are—sordid, sinful, lost, confused. Who will not interrupt when we admit our adultery or describe our schemes of revenge or explain the wicked intricacies of our motives. We don’t want more advice. We don’t want to be fixed. We don’t need a 7-step plan to a better life. We need a love so great that it just listens with an empathy and offers an embrace that says it’s okay to be “a miserable sinner.”

But I think we also long for what I call a terrible love. A love—again from the dictionary--that “causes great fear and alarm,” like a bolt of lightning. And one that is “extremely formidable,” like responsibilities that are terrible in their weight. A love that is intense and extreme, like a life that paid so terrible a price. And perhaps even a love that is “unpleasant and disagreeable” at times, like having a terrible time at a party.

We instinctively know we need such a love—great and terrible—because we know all too well that we are desperately inadequate to do what we’re called to do, what deep down we want to do faithfully, even joyfully--from the daily calls to change diapers and empty the dishwasher to taking a turn at the homeless shelter to campaigning for life issues.  Sure, we can do such things on the impulse of duty, at least for a time.  But we don’t want merely to be dutiful.  We want to give of ourselves to others in love and joy. 

And yet most days we don’t have the energy to love another minute. We need a love that will strike us like a bolt of lightning, to get the heart racing and the will to move. 

Sometimes the problem is acedia.  Often the word is understood as laziness.  But it’s more than that; it’s those  days we just don’t care. This is something that attacks me in this stage of my life.  I for one need a love that can help me carry the great weight of the responsibility to love with enthusiasm—en theos, in God, as if the love of God were driving me.

Sometimes we’re sabotaged by bouts of hopelessness--we have failed so many times in so many ways, we just cannot imagine that making another effort will do any good. We need a love that is so riveting it makes despair an impossibility.

A love like this will be unpleasant and disagreeable at times, to be sure, but readers of this newsletter know that the Kingdom party is not decorated in Mary Englebright motifs. We need a love that will not just implant joy in us, but will also brace us to do some of the unpleasant and disagreeable things we are called to do.

I once preached on that most enigmatic of passages, where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevents him from doing the very thing he commanded (Genesis 22:1-14).  I spoke candidly about the mystery of God’s sovereign will, about how difficult it is at times to discern what God is doing and why he’s doing it. I chastised the often weak attempts to explain and defend God’s inexplicable behavior, both in Scripture and in light of what were then recent world tragedies. I reminded the congregation that the Bible is less interested in justifying God’s behavior than in simply acknowledging his sovereignty: 

I am the Lord, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness,

I make weal and create woe;

I the Lord do all these things. (Is. 45:6-7)

The congregation was riveted, not because of my delivery but as I later found out by the plain description of the divine mystery that surrounds terrible moments in our lives. Afterwards some extolled my courage for broaching a topic that puzzled them, others thanked me for helping them break through a personal crisis, and others still said they were simply moved for explicable reasons. 

It reminded me that we are not attracted to a god who doles out sentimental love. We instinctively know we need more than a divine grandfather who pats us on the head, or a cosmic bellhop who fulfills all our wishes, or a buddy and traveling companion. There is also something strangely and fearsomely attractive about the One who forms light and creates darkness, whose love is not only great but terrible.

A.W. Tozer once lamented,  “The church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she had done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness makes her situation all the more tragic.”

Tozer was shaking his finger at the church, but today we don’t need a shaking finger, for we nod in assent when we hear this. We know from experience we are poorer as individuals and churches. The simplistic view of God, as Tozer suggested, “is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us,” including the loss of “our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.”

He penned these lines in his classic The Knowledge of the Holy more than 60 years ago. Another classic of the era, Your God Is Too Small, argued along similar lines. But author J.B. Phillips was thinking more evangelistically: “Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish, … but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough … to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.”

Both these authors were saying in their own way that what we need is not a warm and fuzzy God but one who offers a great and terrible love. They argued their point by writing about the attributes of God.  There is much merit to this approach, one I took in my book A Great and Terrible Love.  As soon as the book was published, I recognized a key error in my approach, and wished it would go out of print.  It’s one of the few prayers that was answered almost immediately. 

So for decades I’ve been pondering how I would talk about the attributes differently, in a way that would ground them not in abstract, philosophical terms—omnipresence, omniscience, and so forth—but in the life and ministry of Jesus, God with us.  One cannot avoid such terms, and in the coming weeks, you’ll see that I’m happy to use them.  But as much as possible, I want to look at them by looking at Jesus, who claimed to “show us the Father.” And it nearly goes without saying that Jesus demonstrates the great and terrible love on the Cross, which is the source and summit of all the attributes.  

So thus the plan for this newsletter for the foreseeable future…. 

Grace and peace,

Mark

Credits:

Image by Lurii Kuzo

Opening quote from St. Augustine Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), page 4.

Tozer quotes from  The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), page 6. 

J.B. Phillips quotes from Your God Is Too Small (New York: Macmillan, 1955), page vi.