Salvation: Did God make rules too strong for God to break?

Now I saw it. As I sat in my bed in the middle of the night, lights on, clothes on, scattered papers with urgent scrawlings on them, I saw it as clear as day—as clear as the moment when the detective sees the clue he was missing when it was in front of his face the whole time. As clear as an apple falling off of the Tree of Knowledge onto Isaac Newton’s head.

The problem was salvation itself.

I had lived with this particular picture of salvation my whole life. It had always seemed perfectly reasonable: God expects this behavior from us, we are fallen and deserve punishment, he took our punishment for us, and now we can be saved.

I had wrapped all of my hopes and fears around this idea. I had been willing to sacrifice my life itself at its altar.

But now I had to ask, did it really make any sense? Was it just? Was it good?

The questions were flashing by so quickly in my head. I turned over a fresh page in my legal pad and tried to capture them in some kind of reasonable order. My heart beat fast, but I tried to slow my mind enough to make sense of the ideas as they revealed themselves.

The first question was:

Why was God angry with us for just doing what we were created to do?

Already, the voices of the many teachers and preachers from my youth were swarming all over this question like fish in a koi pond, racing to gobble it up before anyone saw it. Of course we were not created to sin, the voices said. We were created to love and worship God. That was the path that Adam and Eve were on when they decided to go their own way. Following their own desires instead of the will of God was a choice, not how they were made.

Really? Do you really believe that God envisioned a scenario in which Adam and Eve were totally obedient and did not touch the forbidden fruit, and that, even knowing their weaknesses—because God created them—that our omniscient, omnipotent God somehow expected them to be good, and that the first sin was a surprise? Knowing what we do about human nature, would we have expected them to do good? Certainly not. And isn’t God infinitely more knowledgeable about the future than we are?

I have a hard time believing that God didn’t know what was going to happen.

As such, being that God knows all and does all, that means that God created humans knowing that we were going to sin, and did nothing to prevent it, meaning that God basically created us to sin. So, knowing that we were going to sin, and having the power to have created us a different way and NOT doing so, why was God so angry about it?

And really, in most cases, are the sins we are talking about really so egregious to earn us a place in eternal Hell? Like who we sleep with, or what we smoke or drink, or even how we envision the incomprehensible God to whom we pray. Sure, there are some big things—really bad things that humans have managed to do—slavery, genocide, rape and murder, and so on—but for the most part, human foibles are pretty minor infractions. I don’t want to say that God is petty, but keeping tabs on every little white lie or stolen hotel towel seems kind of extreme.

But back to the point at hand, no matter what our sins, God knew this was going to happen. God created this situation. Not to take away any of God’s power, but does God really have a right to be mad about our sins, when God is ultimately responsible for creating beings who cannot help but sin, and a set of rules which we could not possibly follow?

The next question was:

If God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t God just do it, instead of concocting this elaborate plan of incarnating Gods’ self as a person to then kill God’s self to satisfy God’s own need for justice?

Being the Creator and ruler of the universe, God of course has every prerogative to be angry at us, even if the situation in which we screwed up is one that we were born into, and which could not have played out any other way even if we wanted it to.

But if God was so mad, but then loved us so much that God wanted to forgive us for our crimes, why didn’t God just do so?

If we think of God as this regal sovereign in the sky, why didn’t God just make a universal proclamation, via a booming voice out of the sky or the spontaneous babble of a thousand prophets here on earth, that God had decided out of God’s goodness to declare universal absolution? We would all cheer, be eternally grateful, and go on with our lives in godly harmony.

Or, if we think of God as an intimate parent, why didn’t God approach us, in our hearts or minds, as a kind parent with an arm around the kid’s shoulder saying, look, I know you feel bad about screwing up, but I love you and this does not change our relationship—just try to do better next time. And we would smile and hug, and live on in familial comfort.

But no. For our sin—from the most egregious war crime to the crime of thinking about the girl in front of us in English class with lust in our heart—we have to pay a price. According to the various scriptures on the matter, we owe God a debt. We have earned our wages, and our wages are death. Not just death, but a “second death” that is being alive for all eternity in fiery torment. Some transaction has to happen for us to make things right.

At first glance, this made perfect sense. But when I dug deeper, I had to ask, to whom are we paying this price, this ransom, this sacrifice? To God? If God in God’s love already wants to forgive us, why do we still have to pay God? Can’t God just forgive the debt?

Some would say that God is bound by justice—God is not only infinitely loving, but is infinitely just, and justice demands recompense. Some would say that God is bound by holiness—that despite God’s great love for us, God is so holy that nothing that is UNholy can be in God’s presence.

I looked at both of these scenarios and said, wait a minute. If God is the omnipotent creator and ruler of the universe, how can God be “bound” by anything? Didn’t God create Justice? Didn’t God create Holiness? Saying that God is forced to follow these rules despite the fact that God indeed wants to break these rules and fast-forward us to forgiveness is to say that God somehow has to OBEY SOME OTHER RULES, even though they are rules that God created.

There is an old philosophical thought experiment that asks if an omnipotent God can create a rock so heavy that even God could not lift it. It’s logically incoherent, but presents the same problem as a God who creates Justice so just or Holiness so holy that God can’t forgive, without conducting some kind of transaction—basically putting himself out there as a bargaining chip to serve the needs of these abstract concepts over which God is ultimately the ruler.

In the end, we have God sacrificing God in order to pay God because God created rules that keep God from just doing what God wants to do to rectify a situation that God is mad about even though God created the circumstance in the first place.

I believed there had to be a simpler solution than this.

And the third question I wrote was:

If God really did go through all the trouble of incarnating as Jesus and dying for our sins to give us the free gift of salvation, how is it that there are still people who can somehow miss out on it, just by not believing it or committing some small sin that isnt’ forgiven at the time of their death?

If God went to all this trouble to save us, including coming to earth, suffering human existence as Jesus Christ, enduring the torture of being beaten and crucified, dying and being resurrected on the third day, and people are STILL able to go to Hell because they believe wrong or they do the wrong thing, isn’t that a waste of a perfectly good Messiah?

Why would God go to so much effort to save us, and as John said in his Gospel, God’s goal was to save the entire world so that no one would perish, how is it that we are still able to slip through the cracks and into the eternal flaming concentration camp of Hell?

It just seemed like a damned shame.

And more than that, it simply didn’t make any sense any more.

After this feverish fit of writing, exhausted, I finally gave up for the night.

I had neither solved the problem of salvation, nor had I proven that it was so absurd that it had to be wrong.

But I had shaken the ivory tower enough to make cracks in the walls where light could start to shine through.

This theology business wasn’t as simple as I thought. To follow any path deeply enough was to uncover questions that did not have easy answers.

Maybe it was time to stop pretending that the Bible was this easy book that clearly laid out our rules and what God had in store for us.

Maybe it was time to approach with a little more humility, and a sense of mystery, and be open to the fact that there may be much more here, more than my limited, illogical, childish view allowed me to see.

As I drifted off that night, all of this got me thinking even more deeply about the question my friend had recently asked me, about whether a loving God would send God’s children to Hell.

This led to thinking about one of the most loving people I know in the whole world, my mom.

I knew—without a doubt--how much she loved me, even when she knew I was doing the wrong thing. I knew that she would do anything for me, whether it meant sacrificing the long hours of her day to make sure she could afford the best things for me, or whether it meant staying up with me all night when I was sick, or it meant driving down to the police station with gritted teeth to pick me up after I’d gotten in trouble, or it meant laying in bed at night praying for my safety when she had no idea where I was.

I knew that there was nothing I could do to make my Mom stop loving me. And I certainly knew that there was nothing I could do that would make her want to send me to eternal punishment for something I had done wrong. If anything, she would be the one standing at the gates of Heaven, demanding that God come out so she could defend me and make the case for my defense.

So if my Mom had that much love for me, wouldn’t it be ridiculous to say that the God of Love would love me less than that? In other words, if my very human mom, in all her weakness and fallenness, according to this theology, would never cast me away, are we then claiming that she loves me more than God does?

And if not, indeed, how could a God who loved me more than even my own mother did bear to send me to Hell?