In his 2008 debate at the Oxford Natural History Museum, Richard Dawkins opened by describing how silly and cruel is was of God to kill his own son, putting him through terrible pain, when he could have simply forgiven us our sins without any special action. This, along with the other cruel things God does, seem to be Dawkins main issue with the Christian God.
I'm so glad he brought this up. You see, our sin is actually quite terrible and has real effects. God's not a cosmic loving marshmallow. He loves us and did real, painful things to be united with us forever. We should never put him 'out there' in cloudy neverland.
To bring this idea to greater development (that Christ did have to die for us), I have come up with an illustration/analogy. Please take it and imagine yourself in you place or Gods, adding background and environment, and let this glorious, real, hard part of the gospel truth sink in.
Short logical note: please see section 3 for the philosophical justification for this principle that God must incur pain in order to forgive us.
1) Spikeball
Let us say that you are the son or daughter of a loving parent. But you don't love them back. In your head, He doesn't respect you, He doesn't think you're a man. He's just tolerating you. You're inconvenient. He doesn't think you're beautiful. In fact, why should He care? You aren't. He doesn't think you're worth it. For all you care, He doesn't exist. Actually, you'd prefer that He doesn't. Often you imagine that He's not around, that your wishes are true. - But enough of in your head. He often tries to hug you. He loves you. So you test him. You make yourself look ugly. You get dirty. You get yourself sick and diseased. You run away. Most of all however, put on a vest that is coated with spikes. Touching these spikes is extremely painful. You even get hurt a little putting it on. No way can He touch me now, you think. He'd die, practically if he tried.
But lo and behold, as you sit under a bridge, thinking about how terrible you think he is, how terrible it makes you feel, He finds you. Oh great. Can I never run away? You shrink back a little. His hair and coat are wet, His face haggard from searching. He sees you and his face lights up. He also sees your coat of spikes. His sees and He knows. He knows if he hugs you he will experience terrible agony, possibly die. But you see nothing of this. You look down, sinking within the coat. His eyes are hard and warm at the same time. The next thing you know, he hugs you. You feel the warmth of him around you, his eyes full of love. Spikes pierce his body at every point. He is in terrible agony, but he hugs you harder.
Here now you have a choice, my love. He will continue to hug you all your life. He will continue to die for your sake all your life. There's no running away from that. But how will you respond? Sink deeper in the darkness of your coat, that shell, the brittle defense against the world. But oh would you break my heart. I ask nothing - I respect you. You are free to run away. But know, dear, I fight for you. Wherever you turn I will be there. All day long I hold out my arms to you. All day long I embrace you, taking in myself the pain of all the barriers you have put up between us. Nothing you can say will dissuade me, for it is true that you are my hearts desire. Nothing you can do - nothing - can make me love you less, for I have made you more worthy than the finest diamond the earth can provide and more. Do you think you can change what I have made? I'm God. I love you. Ask and I will shed your coat of death. Ask and I will give you the keys to the splendid kingdom. Ask and I give you myself. The choice is yours.
Note that to love you without invading and encroaching upon your free will, He cannot remove your coat and must hug you to His pain and death. This is the main point of the story. Naturally it's interwoven with other truth. Funny thing about God and the truth is that's it's kind of hard to isolate one bit of it.
2) Alternate mechanisms:
Essentially, to create an illustrative analogy for this principle, all you have to come up with is some way for the lover to get hurt in reaching the beloved. Below I list alternate mechanisms that might focus on slightly different points.
() Spikeball: The original story is sort of a mixture of setting up barriers to God, making yourself unappealing, and hiding.
() Disease: The beloved infects him or herself (or is infected by something else). By hugging the beloved, the lover becomes fatally diseased. This is to show that no matter how terrible you are internally (sinful) God still loves you and will take on the damage of the sickness in order to save you.
() Firewall: The beloved sets up a wall of fire around him/her to dissuade anyone from coming in. The lover nonetheless runs through the flame to win him/her, though badly burned. This is to emphasize any barriers you could place between you and that your lover is hurt and remains scarred from the rescue, burnt. Jesus will still have his crucifixion wounds in heaven (John 20:27 he had wounds in his resurrected body).
() Bus: A man pushes you out of the way of an oncoming bus, being hit and killed in your place. This is to illustrate how he took your just punishment on himself.
() Presidents son: This is a little complicated. The president of the United States has a son who curses the presidents name and hates his guts. The boy runs away and joins some military junta or crazy revolutionary group. You may include that the president searches for him, but that's not the point. Some time later, the son appears before the father with a gun (a traditional black automatic rifle thing). If you wish, the son may be conflicted about whether or not to kill his father and may or may not shoot him at some point in the ensuing scene. The main point is that the Secret Service has perfect right to fill him with holes. Knowing he cannot stop his snipers, the president runs to the boy and wraps his arms around him, taking the bullets instead. This is probably one of the best illustrations of the necessity of death. Naturally a man rebelling against the president and possibly assassinating him must be shot and all parties agree that it is a just thing for him to be shot. Nonetheless, the father kind of bends the rules and takes the hit.
3) Forgiveness
a) What Dawkins misses I think, is the true nature of forgiveness. He equates human forgiveness, which is virtually effortless and regards things that are temporary, with forgiveness for sins, which are committed in contradiction to the very nature of the universe, which is God. When someone commits a wrong against you, you want to hurt them back. In a sense, this is a perfectly natural and right way to feel. However, we are taught differently. This is sort of the difference between the old testament and the new testament (OT and NT respectively) "You have heard it that it was aid 'Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also'" (Matthew 5:38-39). The eye for an eye principle comes from the OT law where truly, in cases where one person injured the other, the offender was inflicted with the same wounds he/she incurred. This is just. However, in the NT, Jesus tells us to not resist. This is because God has given us himself, worth more than life itself. We need not be concerned about ourselves. Rather, we should demonstrate our self-security to the offender in hopes that he/she is inspired to believe as well. We take an opportunity for retribution and pain and turn it into an opportunity to show the love God has for us.
b) Human sin can be forgiven, and we feel in our conscience that it should be. So Dawkins feels that God could simply forgive us too. But see, we can forgive because Jesus already experienced the most terrible punishment imaginable (this is not theologically pertinent but makes sense for poetic license), however, no one died for God, no one can. When we forgive, we give up the right to retaliate (which we don't really have in the first place) because God made the hurt dealt to us OK by giving us something far more valuable. When we sin against God, he DOES have the right to retaliate, and the damage is real and cannot be swept under the rug. When you forgive someone you're saying "I'm OK with the damage you dealt me" because it really is inconsequential compared to eternal life. But when you sin against God, it isn't OK. He IS the eternal life and denying it deserves death. To ignore our sin would be to say that our sin really isn't significant, that killing people is really okay. Is it? No. You can't just contradict yourself. Killing is NOT okay. So instead of punishing the offender you punish yourself. We forgive and give up the right to retaliate, taking on the hurt because we have something greater. God forgives and gives up the need to retaliate, taking on the hurt by Jesus.
c) Does this make sense? Let's make another analogy. Let's say you're a toymaker. You make a toy solider that can walk around. The minute it can move it smashes all your fine china dishes and then heads for you. Do you not have all the right in the world to blow it to bits?
Rebelling against God is serious business. You're violating the law of the universe. Sin is any act or thought that is not in accordance with the fact that God exists. To hurt someone is to deny that they are made in the image of God. To have premarital sex is to say that Gods plan for sex is worse than your plan, that the way he designed it isn't the best, and that it's of so little value that it can be had without any serious commitments. To bring this home to our level is quite difficult because there is very little that we couldn't imagine we shouldn't forgive. Someone hits you, well...you're not supposed to hit them back. But see, in Gods case, you ARE supposed to hit them back. The best I can do is this: for you parents, imagine that a masked man barged into your house and murdered your entire family before your eyes. Imagine how mad you are. I think it would be hard to find a person who would not think you have every right to disembowel the man right there. Bam. On the floor. Pieces everywhere. This is what it's like to sin. You hurt the most important thing to him - his glory (and this is properly the most important thing) - and he is justified in just tearing you apart for it. In fact, he really should. It is not an entirely sinful thing to want to see an evil man punished. You are right to see a murder on death row and approve of it, but along with him you, I, and the rest of us deserve to die the most painful of deaths everyday of our lives as we reject the glorious one who created us.
Until next time -
nbowditch
Glory be to God
