God Over Good By Luke NorsworthySample

Day 7: To the Moon and Back

My middle daughter likes to do what she calls a “fall cuddle.” She stands on the end of her bed with her back toward me, arms stretched out like a T, then blindly falls toward me. She doesn’t know when I will catch her, how long I will let her fall, or how close to the ground she will be. The only thing she knows is that she can trust me.

If God isn’t trustworthy, then we can’t be at peace with falling into the unknown. The more trust we have, the more at peace we can be with the unknown. For some of us, our inability to trust God in the unknown comes from our understanding of God. Perhaps God is more monstrous than trustworthy.

When God is a monster we can’t trust to be around in this life, or one we can’t depend on in the next, we need hard lines and clearly defined edges to make sure that we are on God’s good side. When we don’t know if God is for us, we have to protect ourselves in case God is against us. When we’re in the hands of an angry God, we are always on edge, like the children of alcoholic parents. The uncertainty of how we will be treated creates perpetual anxiety.

In Christianity, Jesus is the one who performs the herculean task of destroying the idea of a monstrous God by showing that God is trustworthy, not a terrifying deity who strikes down sinners with lightning bolts. The clearest picture of God is Jesus. God isn’t too holy to be around sinners now, because Jesus wasn’t too holy to be around sinners back then. We see in Jesus that God doesn’t choose the way of distant power but the way of intimate vulnerability. 

God’s love is big enough for God to love who we really are. And God’s love is big enough for us to hold on to when every belief and every certitude have slipped away from us. 

Is God good in the sense that God lives up to every definition we have of what a good deity should be? No. 

Is God good in the sense that God is benevolent and loving? Yes, and that’s what I hold on to. 

God, may I walk in awareness of the magnitude of your love.