Most of us like to box God’s love. Many of us have a check list on how God should love us. The check goes like, if God loves me then He should make me rich, famous, powerful, give me what I want and the list goes selfishly on. If God loves us in a way that is not in the “The-Way-God-Should-Love-Me” checklist, we feel that God as abandon us.
When God asked Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt, the Israelites was ecstatic. They have a preconceive notion on how things will work out. They thought that the path to the Promise Land was all sunshine. But it was not so. And so they complained. And complained some more.
What Israelites failed to understand that their time in the desert was something necessary if they want to reach the Promise Land. The Promise Land was God’s land and there are no other gods permitted on it. Because of the years they stayed in Egypt, the Israelites have absorbed the idolatry and pagan ways of the Egyptians. And they needed to be cleansed off it before they step into the Promise Land. So for 40 years in the desert, God cleansed the Israelites. And it was a painful cleansing for the Israelites was not as cooperative as they should have.
God takes us to our own desert. Not because He enjoys seeing us suffer, but because we need to be cleansed. We need to be cleansed of the idolatry of our own ego and greed. We need to be cleansed of our pagan ways, the ways of the world. Most of all we need to be cleansed of our sins. Sometimes taking us to the desert is the only way it can be done. For in the desert, we are free from distraction and superficialities. In the desert we are confronted by our very survival. There, we cannot run away from our demons. And like Jesus, in the desert, God shall help us defeat our demons.
Sometimes, God’s love comes to us in what seems to be pain and suffering. But that pain and suffering are sometimes needed to save us. A cancer patient needs to go through a painful operation to get the cancer out of his body. He needs to endure the pain so that he might be cleansed of the cancer cells. We sinners have something worst than cancer, we have sin in our being. Cancer kills the body, Sin kills the soul. The Divine Operation sometimes uses pain and suffering to bring our souls back to health.
Jesus can give us His crown of gold or His crown of thorns to us. Both of them come from His loving hands.
We should stop selfishly defining how God should love us. We should learn to see God and His love outside of the box. The box is a very small and dark place to live in.
There is no box can contain God’s love.
Let us let God love us the way He does and not the way we want to.
God loves us more than our tiny boxes can imagine.
Written by Daxx Bondoc
No comments:
Post a Comment