By William B. Refvem

Staff Writer

What strikes me is not what the Bible says about morality but what it doesn't say; or, rather, how little it says. You have the Pentateuch; you have the Sermon on the Mount; you have Paul writing frustrated letters to the Corinthians regarding what he thinks ought to be spiritual givens. It is no great surprise that much of the current conversation about religion is permeated by a wariness of Christianity, past and present. Every religion in the world teaches essentially the same ethic, love your neighbor as yourself. Who would study morality would do well to become a student of world religions and not limit herself to Christianity, because Christianity does not have, nor does the Bible claim to have, a monopoly on moral wisdom. No religion survives very long that is a heresy against humankind.

What makes the Bible perhaps the most interesting book ever written is statements like the one God makes in Isaiah: ``For my name's sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, so that I may not cut you off. See, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tested you in the furnace of adversity. For my own sake, for my own sake [note the repetition], I do it, for why should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.'' To those who casually sneer ``Old Covenant'' at any troublesome Old Testament passage, I offer one from Hebrews: ``Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy set before him endured the cross.'' (Emphasis mine.) Or, if you're still skeptical, I would point you to the first chapter of Ephesians, where Paul says three times in verses 3-14 that God's plan of redemption is ``to the praise of his glory.''

At one point in my life, I struggled with the necessity of Jesus' death. I heard that oft-repeated maxim, Jesus died for our sins, but that always seemed somehow inadequate to me. Why couldn't God just forgive our sins without Jesus? He seems to forgive lots of people in the OT, so why can't he do that now? The answer relates to glory. A crucial aspect of God's glory is His justice. It is simply unjust to forgive sins, yet God does so over and over again. This seems to turn God himself, who speaks often of His own justice, into a liar.

Paul seems to have wrestled deeply with this issue, and the result is a gem of a passage in Romans: ``God presented [Jesus] as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.'' A better answer to the question, why did Jesus have to die, would be ``to display the glory of the justice of God.'' Humanity is certainly in the picture, but only as an instrument for the glorification of God.

These Scriptures force us to face the reality of a God-centered God. Last week I attempted to show that God's seeking His own glory and loving the world are not mutually exclusive. I think the reason that this is such a difficult thing for the contemporary mind to grasp is that our conception of love has been severely warped. We think of love as an affirmation of ourselves, which it is not. It is the pursuit of the unspeakable pleasures that come from investing your joy in the good of another. True love has the audacity to wear its ``selfish'' motivations proudly because it stakes its joy in the glorification of the beloved. It never ceases to amaze us because it turns our notion that our joy and the good of another are mutually exclusive on its head and makes the two coincide.

This is the real beauty of love. It's the one area of life where you can have your cake and eat it too. And human romantic love is a one-dimensional ink drawing compared to the Technicolor reality of God's love. Sounds clichéd, I know, but reconsider it in light of everything else I have discussed. With human love, our fallenness is always messing things up. Lovers betray each other almost daily, and our capacities for forgiveness, which is the lifeblood of human relationships, are finite indeed. They might be quite large, but eventually, at some point, even the most forgiving person says, ``enough is enough.''

There are two beauties in our relationship with God that make all the difference. The first is that God will never betray us. ``He will never leave you nor forsake you.'' We are never in the position of having to forgive God. I find it hard enough to forgive the person in front of me going 25 mph in a 35 mph zone when I'm late for work. Can you imagine trying to forgive the creator of the universe? Imagine God's power put to evil use! I would never forgive Him. The second beautiful truth is that God will forgive us infinitely. The flipside of the idea that God sent Jesus to justify Himself is that God never even considered getting out of the forgiveness business. And Jesus loved us so much that he died so that God's glory and our forgiveness would coincide.

The conclusion? Jeremy Rifkin paraphrased the Second Law of Thermodynamics thus: “You never win; you always lose; the question is when you pay the bill.” A reverse corollary to that is, With God, you never lose; you always win; the question is when you cash in your winnings. We were created so that our greatest joy would be the glory of God, and God has spared no expense to preserve that joy for us, in spite of all our sins.