I found myself the other day telling my youngest son (who can behave very poorly quite frequently!), “I love you even when you’re bad but I don’t love that you’re bad.” And I repeated that a few times. Did he get it in his 2 year old mind? Probably not, but he eventually will. But when’s the point that a kid understands higher thinking? I don’t know and that’s why I’ll speak over his mental capacity continually while directing it to him (I’ll also speak down to his level too!).
Isn’t that how the Bible is written to us? God speaks from the divine perspective quite often and we as His children argue and bicker, or at best, debate at what He means or how His words could be so (especially in terms of ‘election’ and things like that). Yet I find it increasingly and more apparently true in my life that we would relieve ourselves much headache if we would simply take His Word at His Word and not try to connect the dots or figure at “how!?” Well that’s quite hard for us to resist!
Perhaps one day we will get it, but maybe we won’t either. In our glorified bodies, perhaps we will just simply trust God and embrace Deuteronomy which says, “the secret things belong to God.” Isn’t there a reason that Jesus said in Matthew 11:26, “thank you Father for revealing these things to LITTLE CHILDREN.” What is it with little children that make up the Kingdom of God? We aren’t spoiled with too much learning yet. And in that way, our thoughts don’t get in the way of God’s thoughts. We don’t object because we don’t have a clue how to yet.
Then again, little children do at sometime grow enough of a head on them (like in their teenage years) to object to mom & dad’s authority. And if they press your buttons enough, you’ll respond by saying, “because I told you so!”
In Romans 9, God says just that, “But who are you to talk back to the Potter and ask, why did you make me like this?” That’s good logic, so good that every parent, if they don’t like what God says, cannot honestly object against it because they too have presented that reasoning to their kids! And it’s as if God says in Romans 9 & Matthew 11, “you need to play the role of kid, and stop pretending that you can play ‘parent’ on Me. Accept my words and decisions!”
What is my point in all of this? I learn a lot by being a parent. And one of those things is how much I overhear myself talking to my kids so naturally and intrinsically as an echo of how God speaks to me:
He tells me things too wonderful for me to comprehend yet! But as I grow, I’ll eventually understand these things more more and more.
And one of those grand realities is “I love you even when you’re bad but I don’t love that you’re bad.”
This is what it means to be a child of God. He loves us still when we’re bad by virtue of the relationship that He has with us in Christ. But that doesn’t mean that He approves what we’re doing! Yet He loves us so much that He would discipline us (Hebrews 12:3-11).
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