God suffers with us, though he doesn't have to, so that he might save us...this is Love

“The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become

And that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth,

And his heart was filled with pain.”

            Of the sixty-six books in the Great Story, it took exactly six chapters into the very first one for humanity to transform into something so wicked that it was beyond God’s ability to bear. Six chapters into humanity’s existence and we find ourselves in the present day; every thought, only evil, all the time. Six chapters into the Story and we are already completely ravaged by the toxic effects of Sin. Sin works fast…six sad chapters.

           

The curse, like blackness

Creeps up my arm,
Down my throat, lodges into my spine
Wedges itself into my heart
And slowly, yet with ruthless ferocity
Makes a home in me…
Until my eyes darken, my hands grow cold
And breathing becomes so…mournfully…hard.

            In the sixth chapter God decides enough is enough. He decides to send a flood and wipe out all life on the earth. Why? He is too grieved at what has happened. His very good plan of a joyful family sustained through love was destroyed in a matter of seconds, it seemed. We do not know if he planned to destroy only to recreate; the story does not say.

All we know is that our Father was full of grief—a parent’s grief.

            It does not matter if you believe there was an actual flood or not. If all we do is argue about whether or not the flood happened, we have missed the entire point of the story. That would be for the mother to finish her story, hoping her son had learned patience, and for her son to ask a million questions about the form, style and details of the story and yet not one about the virtue of patience…which was the entire reason she told the story in the first place.

            The story was written to tell us something about our grieving God, our hurt Father who was at a cross-roads in his relationship with his infected children.

It was written to tell us about our Father’s decision. We were lost in Sin, unequivocally lost with absolutely no chance of revival absent God’s miraculous intervention. The point of this story is to see what God would do. There was no hope for us…But what would God do?

What mercies are left? O Father

May I still address you that way?
Faithless, cursed heart, weakness agonizing;
I wither at blackness’ cold touch
Do not cast me away!
My Lord show grace, I pray
You remember unfailing love. As David prayed,
This day,
Evermore, forgive me Father, forgive
Though dust I shall eat, water I will never drink
Your love sustains, do not delay, lest I
Fade into abysses unyielding!
Lest I fade, Father, lest I die.
Pray my Father show mercy!
I wait with distraught, blighted hope
For I have been told of your mighty compassion
And it is this that makes your servant bold
Before your throne. My eyes cast down,
Still I lie, the Sin’s guilt streams forth from me
And still I lie, O Father, I shun myself,
I am guilty! Absolutely guilty!
But you are good!
That is what I have been told.
I have been told you are good and forgiving and boundless in grace! And,
It is to your nature, not mine, that I make this plea
Only let me love you, only hold me close
In my shame, send light to heal me, stamp out scars of fear.

            God, as a good Father, was devastated at the depths his children had sunk into the muddy earth. He longed for nothing more than to wipe all humanity away, to clear the tarnished blot from before his gaze which once was the divine image of himself. There was no hope left in the world. Six chapters and his dearly beloved children, those molded meticulously by his hands and shaped into his image, had abandoned their Father. His family was broken. They were no more.

            I imagine him unable to look at us, the agony far too raw. And with head turned and hand over his face, through tears he motioned to remove this excruciating stench which burdened his simple and beautiful nature. It is a crude metaphor but it is almost like the story of Old Yeller. Old Yeller contracted rabies and the boy in tears had to put him down. He did not want to. He so desperately did not want to! It grieved his heart to have to kill his dog. He adored his dog. But he had no choice.

That was no longer his dog…

            The dog he was about to shoot was not his…it was a monster.

            Or it is like a story I saw on TV. An ex-NFL star, a giant man, was describing the tragic death of his young son. He was stumbling over his words, unable to fully capture how deep, how agonizing the pain of his loss was, how scarring it still was. In mid-sentence, his voice suddenly broke off. He stared straight into the camera, unblinking, and little tears escaped from his eyes. His lips were pursed tight and his jaw was clenched while his face trembled slightly. You could tell he was trying to keep himself from crumbling to pieces in front of the camera and he was a powerful looking man. But that was not the worst of it. That was not even the heartbreaking part.

            With his giant hand, he would hold it over the place on his chest where his heart should have been. He would then proceed to open it and swiftly make a tremendous fist, his arm shaking from his constrain-less strength. And then he would rip his arm to the right of his body, grunting with his mouth to echo the torture of his soul and to describe the way his heart was ripped out of his chest. Open his hand, powerfully make a clenched fist, a sharp torque to his side as tears fall from passionate eyes onto his giant arms and grunts and moans escape his tight lips.

            Open, close, rip, unf! Open, close, rip, unf!

            I have never seen a more despairing description of the pain a parent feels in their soul after losing a child…I wonder if this is what God felt looking at his poisoned children, as they suffocated on his cursed earth.

             Love, such as we will never understand whilst we climb the mountain, was broken into an infinite number of pieces at the sight of his corrupted children. All was lost. All was hopeless. We set ourselves next to God and learned that we could not live as the sustaining source of our own lives; we were not created to do it that way and thus we were swiftly and irrecoverably infected by Sin. Everything in us that was made for good had been twisted and warped by evil. Our divine desires and joys were now distortions and perversions.

Six chapters into the Story, our Father wanted out, wanted this nightmare to be over, and to make it fast. We were no longer the child he created. We had become monsters. The next, and easiest, step was one shake of his head, one word from his uncreated mouth, and we are no more…

            But he didn’t…He did not act on his terrible grief.

He did not destroy us as he so badly desired to do.

            He wished to obliterate all wickedness for it was too great, too far-reaching and permanent, too costly. His earth was decimated and it was shredding him apart inside.

But he did not act on this desire.

He had created life and called it good. He had created us and loved us. He loved us because he created us. The firstborn had chosen the side of his Enemy. He could forsake us and try again with a second humanity.

            But he didn’t…Rather, he took all his grief, all his wrath, his pain and blood-red, infinite anger and he absorbed it into his own nature. Not to make a mockery, but it is like the cartoons where a character swallows a bomb and it explodes inside of their stomach so that it does not detonate outside and injure someone.

This is what God did.

He swallowed his righteousness; he turned his wrath inward and suffered the torturous presence of Evil on his earth and in his children; and he suffered it in his own being!, so that, looking out toward us, he could begin his plan of salvation.

He redeemed a remnant of the human race. He saved one family so that after the flood had subsided God might once again attempt his plan of oneness with his image-bearing children. Unity and oneness, God with us; this was still the desire of our Father.  

His love was too great to just cast us aside. He could not do it. He saved a remnant for he still harbored a nagging and insuppressible idea…that maybe, just maybe, we might be a family. He had not given up on us.

So he allowed Evil to remain for the time being.

And so he told Noah to build an ark, and Noah did.

            And God told the skies to open their gates, and they did.