And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can't, and life can't. The angels can't, and the demons can't. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, and even the powers of hell can't keep God's love away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Romans 8: 38-39
Image courtesy of ParanoidMonk
We don't believe that.
We believe that once God finds out something else that we've kept hidden from him, that we'll no longer be loved.
We think that we can possibly hide something--anything. That he hasn't seen everything from us personally. We think that if he really knew, we'd be rejected. We'd be cast out for what we've done.
We are scared to death that God's love works like our love.
That it's based upon give and take, getting what we deserve, perceptions, expectations and failure. That one day, we'll go to God for forgiveness and not receive it.
That we'll lay out all of our crap, failures, and heartbreak and get back a divine "I told you so." In some way, we think that God is just waiting to show us the error of our ways so that he could be proved right and we could be proved wrong, and we'll be left to wallow in our failures.
Because no matter how hard we try, we keep projecting our own understanding of human emotion onto him. We can't fully understand it, I can't, because we're not like him. We lack the capacity to see from the depths of our failures and pain; the love, forgiveness and restoration that is offered at every moment.
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"The Watchmen" is my 2nd favorite movie of all time. If you haven't seen it, do so. One of the things that I love about the movie are the theological implications that it presents.
By that I mean, it takes aspects of God and twists them around. It take truths and blends them with our self-made lies to create something that seems more real than what the truth actually is. It then takes these caricatured principles and character traits and puts them onto people--and you get to see the result.
What if God's love truly had limits?
What if there was a level that we could stoop to that would make him say "Ok, that's enough. I can't handle this anymore, you are on your own. I can't save you."
If you can't see the video, click here.
Despite our claims to the contrary, a part of us still believe God works like Rorschach (the guy speaking in the clip). And yes, Jesus has seen the real us, our true face, but that doesn't stop his love.
It doesn't make him look at our cries for forgiveness and whisper, "no."
It never will.
