Hey, this is John overing. I’m glad you’re joining me. When I was a kid growing up, sometimes, uh, families would say a prayer before meal that went, God is great. God is good. We thank him for our food. By his hand, we all are fed. Give us Lord our daily bread. And I want to offer those two thoughts to go through the day that are the beginning of that very simple prayer. God is great. God is strong. God is powerful. God mighty. And then the second one, God is good. God is loving. God is kind. God has a gracious heart. I want to unload both of those through passages from our friend LUS Meads and his book. My God and I we’re on this journey. Passages to wisdom, passage to wisdom. I wanna talk about two different aspects of God and walk through lose words about them.
Both are really, really important. And Lou is a great thinker about the sorts of issues that are involved with these two thoughts that God is great, and God is good. Um, when he was doing his academic work, there were lots of different controversy about God. One of them was on the cover of time magazine many, many years ago was the idea that God is dead. And Lou writes about that whole conversation. He says, if anyone had died, I figured it could not have been God. And if he was God, he could not have died. That was easy. But then I realized the death of God was a theatrical, perhaps desperate way of accounting for where God was while Hitler was savaging Europe. The answer was that either God had died was not around to prevent the Holocaust or that the Holocaust killed God. It was my kind of question.
Where’s God, when suffering an evil hits just about my kind of answer, a more sophisticated notion of God came from what we still call process theology. You might have heard about this according to this kind of theology, as I understand it, God is in process. Not yet ripe, not come of age. And our expectations of him should take his immaturity into account. If we get discouraged with God, we should remember that as gods go, our God is still minor league. Almost not quite ready for the majors. He’s still growing in temple with the expanding universe. He cannot get out in front of the universe for the simple reason that he is still emerging from the universe. If there were no universe, there would be no, God, God, minus the universe equals nothing. And that’s a quick, pretty brilliant summary of, uh, whole stream of folks who have tried to deal with the problem of suffering an evil by saying there is a God, but like the universe, God is still in process and not yet able to make evil go away.
Here’s what Louw writes. I would rather have my problems with the God who created the world than solve my problems by trading him in for a God who is being created by the world. I cannot let God off the hook of human suffering by making believe he has not yet a grown up God. I would rather deal with a God who was there, full grown, ready to take charge. The moment he had gotten the good world made for me. If there were no God, there would be no universe. The universe minus God equals God. There was a very popular book. A number of years ago called um, why good things happened to bad people, uh, by, uh, rabbi Herald Kushner. And his response was along the lines that God is good, but he’s not yet fully great. He’s not able to make evil go away.
And Ellie Zel, the eloquent poet of the Holocaust said about that. If that’s who God is, he should resign and let somebody competent take over. And Lou insisted along with the writers of scripture, that God is competent. There were a couple of phrases in the old Testament scriptures that you might wanna watch for that emphasize. This one is very often, God is called the maker of the heavens and the earth. God created everything that is. And that’s an indication of the fact that there is nothing as powerful, nothing too great for God. And then he’s also called the living God. And that’s a real important phrase in the Bible. The idea there is God acts, God does stuff. God is constantly involved. God is constantly doing. God is not frustrated. And then one addition to that in the new Testament, I was just reading this, uh, it’s a phrase that you see often, but in particular, in second Corinthians where Paul is talking about the suffering he’s going through.
And he says that part of the reason or purpose or result for this suffering is that we put our trust, not in ourselves, but in the God who raises the dead in that passage, Paul’s talking about a disparate from our own life. And if you’ve ever been tempted by despair, you know what that feels like, but Paul says this happened so that I would realize I’m not the maker. I’m not the one in charge so that I would put my trust in the one who by the way, raises the dead and that’s Jesus. So whatever you’re facing today, whatever the problem, whatever the difficulty, whatever the pain you think about this, God is great. But then not just that God is good. And here’s a fascinating conversation that Lou had. Lou had a chance to talk with study under converse with some of the giant minds in the Christian faith of the 20th century, like CS Lewis for one, uh, when he was in Oxford and then Carl Bart.
And when he was with Bart, another friend was, uh, egging Bart on, uh, to try to get Bart to clarify something. Sometimes there would be, um, controversy about whether Carl boy, the great Swiss theologian believed in universalism believed that every human being would end up being saved by God. And so Lou and his pal and barter together, Lou says he egg Bart on until the folksy theologian fairly sizzled, put his face a few inches from mine, from Ludes and crackled Ikin. Uh, I think it is, uh, I bin kind Universalist. I am no Universalist, but he was not finished with me. He poked his finger into my chest and said to me, do you believe the Bible fine? Then believe this verse two. And he quoted St. Paul who said that Christ had died, not for our sins only, but for the sins of the whole world.
If you’re so worried about universalism, Bart continued, you would better begin worrying about the Bible. And then Lou goes on because one of the questions that we all wonder about is what will happen to people after they die. And what does God want to have happen to people after they die? Lou says, I do not believe any of us is good enough to buy a seat in heaven with the small coins of our virtue, seems to me that good and evil are so hopelessly tangled through all our spirits. None of us can get through security gates of heaven without a pass. I believe God will. In some way, I cannot imagine judge people, both for refusing his love and for abusing his children. So my hope is based neither on God’s soft heart, nor on our moral courage. Come to think of it. I have a hunch that I would be put out of certain notoriously evil people ended up nestled in the BOM of the savior.
Something in me does not want Nero, Hitler, Stalin, or other monsters of history to share the joys of heaven with St. Francis and mother Teresa. My moral sense demands that God require an accounting from them. And yet suppose we found Stalin’s diary and read his last entry. I repented my horrible sins. I’m the chief of sinners, but I have met Jesus Christ and cling to him is my savior praised the Lord. He promised to forgive me, even me of all my most grievous sins, would we not be thankful that Christ can save the meanest and worst of all, sinners, even if like the thief on the cross, he became a believer a few hours before he died. And then Lou goes on just to imagine now, imagine that he had not repented at all before he died, but that a few hours after he died, he was struck down by the light of God’s blinding grace and glory.
And that when he had gotten his sight back, he said that Jesus, I’m the chief of sinners. The worst of them all judge me, damn me, as I deserve. And imagine that Jesus said to him, I have already judged you and found you guilty, but I am willing to forgive even your most grievous sins. Would it make very much difference if instead of being saved just before he died, he was saved just after he died. And then Lou goes on, cuz obviously this is just sure speculation. I cannot be sure I do not have the faith to believe that Stalin can be saved. And yet I can hope that all people will be saved. In fact, I cannot not hope for it. My hope is a Spirit’s wish a mind’s dream and a heart’s faith that it never pairs. It never pays to underestimate God’s mercy, lot that we don’t know, but this is clear. God is great. God is good.