God Went for the Jugular

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A couple of days ago I randomly found myself reading an article online by some agnostic about how if there is a God of the Bible he must be evil because of all of the killing and rape condoned in the Bible.  And it shook me.  I thought about how as a reformer, I believe that God does whatever He wants to and is right in doing so because He defines right.  He made the clay and can do what He wants with it.  And I asked myself, "If God decided to send us all to hell someday, despite everything in the Bible, would that be good?"  As you might imagine, I found myself in a worrisome place, considering whether my faith was not largely brainwashing.   

I prayed that prayer from Mark 9, "I believe!  Help my unbelief!" and was called upon to move on with my day.  Finn has been extra clingy the last couple of days for some reason.  8 month developmental leap?

Anyway…  Then this morning I was doing my Bible study homework (Idol Addiction with Julie Sparkman), and it instructed me to meditate on Romans 8:1-4 in The Message.  And these words hit me in the face:

God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son.  He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant.  In His Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all.

Jesus is the answer.  Yes, God could choose to do whatever He wanted to with us, and He could choose to call it good, because He's the Creator and can do what He wants, but we know He's good because He chose to enter our struggle and condemn His son to death for us.  God the Son personally chose torture, rejection, loneliness, and death.  For us. 

I've often wondered at the way God chose to do things.  It seems that if He is going to make us all perfect one day, and live with us in a perfect place, then He could have started everything out that way.  And if He can ensure that we won't make wrong choices in the future like Adam and Eve did in the garden, then surely He could have done that for them as well.  We could have all been born into the garden and never had to deal with any of this mess!  But then Jesus would not have died, and we would not know His goodness as we know it now.  Maybe we will appreciate the righteousness of God more because we have known unrighteousness. 

So I'm still unsure about how to justify some of the "awful" things that happened in the Bible, and I will have to pray the prayer of Mark 9 often, but for now at least, I am satisfied in the knowledge that God must be good - because of Jesus.  And Jesus offers a hope like none other, that every person on this broken planet needs.