Many people struggle with the idea of God and His love, simply imagining God to be a ‘bigger version’ of humans and His love to be a little bit bigger than ours. The truth is that we are made in God’s image (not the other way round!) and His love is vastly different to ours in scope, depth and continuity.
The Bible tells us that God is love (1 Jn 4:8) and that He is motivated by love in everything He does; it affirms His love as everlasting, never-ending and persevering. Yet so often, we harbour nagging doubts about God’s love and goodness and must wrestle with the question ‘If God is loving, why does He allow…?’ Stephen Fry believes God is cruel and mean because bone cancer in children exists; many people feel uncomfortable with the idea that if God is all-powerful, why does He not intervene to stop terrorists or prevent murders or natural disasters? They affirm that God is either all-powerful and ‘capricious, mean-minded’ or downright cruel, or loving and weak, unable to prevent disasters in the same way we often feel powerless to intervene.
These difficult questions are not without answers. The Bible affirms that God made a wonderful creation, perfect in every way, and made man in His image, which included the capacity for choice. Free will means that we can choose to obey or disobey, and so often, we choose to go our own way. This capacity for choice has huge impact not only on our own lives, but on the lives of other people as well, and included in love is this freedom which so often leads to trouble (see this clip from ‘Bruce Almighty’). It is also at the heart of what is wrong with the world (and why natural disasters, disease, injustice and death abound in our world), since all problems can be traced back to the choice of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to go their own way, rather than God’s.
Stephen Fry asked the question of God, ‘How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?’ We may never know why God chose to give us free will (though a creature without free will would simply be a robot), but we have to come to terms with the effects of our choices, and then we also discover that God Himself loves us so much He gave Himself to provide a way back to Him. Our choices are crucial. Will we choose God’s way over our own?
