Spiritual Hiccups - A Compassionate, Gracious, Destroyer

Reading Psalm 145 this morning, I saw that "The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made."  A little later I read that the LORD "is gracious in all his deeds."  I was feeling pretty good about God and then came the end of the psalm that assured me that "The LORD watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy."

Good to all, compassionate to all that God has created and gracious in every deed, yet God destroys the wicked.  God seems conflicted.

I don't know that there is a conflict within God, but there is certainly a tension in the pictures of God the Bible gives us.  The Bible certainly plays up the compassionate and gracious side, in both Old and New Testament.  But there is no denying the judgment side, in both Old and New Testament.  And I sometimes think that the popular conflict between "the God of the Old Testament" versus "the God of the New Testament" arises because people resolve the tension in the Bible's picture of God one way for the Old Testament and the other way for the New.

We humans have difficulty with tension and paradox, and so we tend to resolve them.  Some folks tend toward the judgment side.  God weighs the evidence and rules.  Measure up and it's great; fall short and too bad for you.  And despite the Protestant emphasis on grace and faith, a surprising number of Christians still seem content with an image of "the good" in heaven and "the bad" in hell.

But others tend to focus more on the grace and compassion side.  My own tendencies are in this direction.  God forgives.  And what with God being love and all, perhaps God simply forgives everyone. 

Problem is that resolving the tension in either direction requires ignoring large parts of Scripture, having certain Scriptures trump others, or utilizing some sort of cumulative weighing of judgment texts versus compassionate texts.  But to my mind, none of these methods really work.

Instead, we need to live with the tension that is given us.  I'm not talking about a biblical literalism that takes every sentence of Scripture to be factually, historically accurate.  Rather I'm talking about reading of Scripture that takes seriously the fact that it consistently pictures a God of love, grace, compassion, and judgment.  And when we opt for one picture over another, we may simply be flattening our image of God into something that suits us.  That's why people with my tendency can fall into the "cheap grace" problem that Dietrich Bonhoeffer so elegantly critiqued in The Cost of Discipleship.

God loves us, cares for us, forgives us, and goes to unbelievable lengths to draw us back into right relationship with God and one another.  But God also cares deeply about how we live, about whether our lives conform to the true humanity and community God intends for us.  God is no doting grandparent who pats us on the head and gives us ice cream no matter what we do.

I don't know precisely how to fully integrate this tensions within these truths about God.  So I think I'll simply insist that both sides of the tension are somehow true, and let God sort the rest out.

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