Wednesday, April 18, 2012

God's Bottomlessly Selfless Love


C. S. Lewis in the “The Problem With Pain” says, “God has no needs. Human love as Plato teaches us is the child of Poverty— of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, caused all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, love-ability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence if God sometimes speaks as though the impassible could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, this can mean only, if it means anything intelligible by us, that the God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created in himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of his own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely and in a humility that passes understanding” (pg. 50).

This is profound, let it challenge your mind as to your understanding of God's love.

1 comment:

  1. So good! The omnipotence of God is so mind-blowing! The fact that He is the Source, and yet, makes himself "lack" (according to our understanding of "lack"? Probably not, probably different...) is further evidence of the antinomy of God--seeming contradiction yet cohesion!

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