’COURSE HE ISN’T SAFE . . . BUT HE’S GOOD
God is the only comfort—he is also the supreme terror. The thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy and Susan are sheltered by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who tell them about Aslan, the great Lion who is the ruler of Narnia and the son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Aslan, of course, is Lewis’s figure for Jesus Christ. Let’s listen in on their conversation:
“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”1
Mr. Beaver puts his paw on the first tuning fork–style paradox we will consider: God isn’t safe, but God is good. As with all biblical paradoxes, living within this tension is difficult and yet essential. According to A. W. Tozer, the God we envision determines the person we are becoming: “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” He continues, “Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes into your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”2
What happens to people who are primarily focused on a God who “isn’t safe,” or what the Bible speaks of as justice, judgment, or wrath? We already know. Those with the primary image of a wrathful God eventually become wrathful themselves. Those who believe only in a judging God easily become judgmental. Those who see God solely pursuing justice might end up like Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, a man so tragically consumed with exacting justice that he is unable to offer any mercy and, just as tragically, unable to receive mercy himself. None of these is a pretty picture of God, and folks who see God only in these ways are not endearing to be around. Since these judgmental caricatures are usually how Christians are portrayed in our media, who can blame churches for treating this unsafe God the way families deal with odd Uncle Harry: keep him in the background so he doesn’t embarrass us in front of the guests.
What about the other side of Mr. Beaver’s statement: “He’s good”? Even beyond good, doesn’t the Bible say, “God is love”? Unfortunately, we can subtly turn that biblical statement on its head until it becomes, “Love is God.” We then fall prey to the opposite caricature: God the benignly loving heavenly grandfather, who smiles on his children no matter what they do. If this is our mental image of God, we easily assume that any loving person is automatically a godly person or that any belief system with some love in it must also have God in it. Experience shows that neither is true. Though most of us are more familiar with the first caricature, I wonder if this second is not, in the end, more damaging. God is not only loving; God is also just. In fact, if God were not perfect justice, neither could God be perfect love.
Two Gods?
The biblical writers speak of God’s judgment often and without embarrassment. God judged Adam and Eve and expelled them from the garden. God’s judgment destroyed the world with a flood at the time of Noah. God judged the Egyptians with ten plagues before the exodus of Israel. God judged the Israelites who worshiped the golden calf in the wilderness, and they perished. God judged the nations of Israel and Judah when they worshiped other gods: Assyria conquered Israel, the Babylonians laid waste to Judah, and the famous ten lost tribes were never heard from again. God is not embarrassed to claim this judgment: “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things” (Isa. 45:7).
Some people think this Old Testament God of justice is just a warm-up act, preparing the audience for the real God of love to take the stage in the New Testament. The God of judgment steps aside while snare drums roll and an announcer’s silky voice booms out: “Now that you’re thoroughly frightened and feeling convicted . . . here’s the God you’ve all been waiting for . . . all the way to you from Bethlehem and Nazareth . . . the God who reeeaaalllly loves you . . . Jeeessssus Chriiiissssst!”
Yet no new God appears onstage. There is only one God. God’s enduring love is on display throughout the Old Testament: “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail” (Lam. 3:22). God lifts the yoke of Egyptian slavery from Israel and time and again fulfills his covenant promises even though his people forsake theirs.
Neither is God’s justice forgotten in the New Testament. As the incarnation of a loving God, Jesus spends an embarrassing amount of time talking about judgment. Many of his parables end with people being “thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). Justice is actually heightened in the New Testament, because the New Testament clearly looks forward to a final day of judgment: “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books” (Rev. 20:11–12). And who does the judging? Jesus says, “The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22, emphasis added).
A. W. Tozer writes, “The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.”3 An opiate is a drug that dulls our senses, makes us lose touch with reality. It’s a fatal notion that a loving God could never judge anyone. Why do we assume that love and justice do not coexist in God? C. S. Lewis says with wonderful understatement, “Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.”4 God is so good, God’s love is so pure, that nothing impure can stand before him. It’s the justice of God that shows us what terrible trouble we’re in, that makes us feel the heavy weight of wrongdoing that Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress carries on his back. It’s the love of God, through Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross, that allows Christian’s burden of sin to be released.
An Intolerable Compliment
Some of the most heart-wrenching counseling sessions I’ve had over the years have been with parents wrestling with how to be both loving and just with their children. Often the issue is substance abuse. A child steals from his or her parents to support a habit. “How can I kick my child out into the street?” these parents ask. “How can I see my child go to jail?” It was through such anguishing situations that “tough love” entered our vocabulary in the 1980s. We realized that sometimes love needs to be tough. Genuine love must be tough enough to allow loved ones to suffer the consequences of their actions.
In a far deeper way, God’s love is a tough love. The author of Hebrews proclaims, “Have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says, ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son’ ” (Heb. 12:5–6). Neither does God’s love cancel out clear teachings of the Bible that might not seem loving from our perspective (for example, the reality of hell). In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis says that God has paid us the “intolerable compliment” of loving us. Those two words, intolerable and compliment, are not often used together. What is an intolerable compliment?
Imagine an artist who loves a painting, the greatest work of her life. The artist lavishes it with care and often scrapes off the paint and starts certain sections over until she paints them just right. If the painting could talk, after being scraped and started over for the tenth time, it might say it would rather be a quick thumbnail sketch than endure all this revision. We might also wish that God cared less about what he is creating in our lives. But if we wish that God cared less about the person we are becoming, we are asking not for more love but for less. C. S. Lewis expands this idea: “Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”5
C. S. Lewis is saying, “You asked for a loving God, people. Well, you have one!” God’s love is all the more magnificent because it includes perfect justice. And this tough inner fiber of justice is what makes it perfect love! It is all a mystery we will never comprehend. But like Sesame Street’s two-headed monster whose “C . . .” and “. . . Ar” harmonize to become “Car,” so Mr. Beaver: “ ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
Reflection Questions
1. Do you agree with A. W. Tozer that we “tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God”? What evidence have you seen for this?
2. Which side of the paradox do you gravitate toward, a loving God or a just God? How about most of the Christians you know?
3. Does C. S. Lewis’s metaphor of God’s love as an “intolerable compliment” change your view of the love of God? Explain.
4. When we choose not to live within the paradoxical tension created by God’s love and God’s judgment, what consequences have you observed in personal, family, or church life?