When God Grieves

by Steve Cornellwww.thinkpoint.wordpress.comIn the early days of human existence, God observed and testified against the pervasive evil condition of the human heart. The first occasion is recorded in Genesis 6:5-6 where we learn that, "The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain."To grieve and have a heart filled with pain might seem an unusual description for God. Certainly all humans share this type of experience in common. In technical terms, some call such descriptions of God anthropomorphisms: human characteristics ascribed to God for the benefit of our understanding. But, technical terms aside, this is a clear window into the heart of our Creator. He is not indifferent to things on earth. He grieves and feels deeply about human conditions.The emphasized condition that caused God's grief and sadness is the corruption and violence that filled the earth. "Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. (Genesis 6:11-13).Familiar themes:Corruption and violence are sad and continuous themes of our history. Each day most newspapers run stories on these interrelated themes. Why are we so bent on corrupting our ways and doing harm to each other? Ever since the early days of human history, the earth continues to be filled with violence. The examples from the 20th century alone are staggering and contradictory to the naive notions of progress some wish to believe. Consider: The Ottoman massacre of more than a million Armenians, the slaughtered of nearly two million people by Cambodia's communist leader Pol Pot, the murder of an estimated thirty million Russians by Stalin, Mao ZeDong's unimaginable destruction of sixty-five million Chinese and Hitlers extermination of millions of Jews.In America, the later portion of the 20th century witnessed dramatic increases in violence. Most Americans do not realize that from 1960 to1993, violent crime increased by 560 percent. In 1987, the Department of Justice estimated that eight out of ten people will be victims of violent crimes at least once in their lives. Even more alarming, violent crimes committed by children ages 10 to 17 increased 400 percent since 1960.How much more violent will things become?One should pause over the words of Jesus concerning his second coming: "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the son of man" (Matthew 24:37). It is frightening to think that the days Jesus speaks of will be more violent than what we have already witnessed. Perhaps nuclear holocaust of some sort will contribute to this reality.Back in Genesis, the Lord declared his intention to wipe man from the face of the earth and to show grace to Noah and his family. After God executed this judgment, one might expect him to say, "There! We got rid of that problem-washed it from the earth!" Instead, after promising not to subject the world to this same type of judgment again, God made a very sad concessionary observation about the unchanged condition of the human heart. "The Lord… said in his heart: 'Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.'" (Genesis 8:21).Why does the world continue to be a place filled with corruption and violence? What is the true cause behind it?Answers to perplexing questions:"All traditional Christians agree that human beings have a biblically certified and empirically demonstrable bias toward evil. We are both complicitous in and molested by the evil of our race. We both discover evil and invent it; we both ratify and extend it…. By disposition, practice, and habit, human beings let loose a great, rolling momentum of evil across generations." (Not The Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.)Words to describe our condition:A primary biblical term for evil is sin. But where did sin come from and how widespread is it? According to Scripture, "…sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned." (Romans 5:12). One does not need gifts of observation to agree that, "….all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).A closer look:"The Bible presents sin in an array of images: Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it-both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance; even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways." (Ibid.)"….sin perverts special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician enjoys a spasm of sweet satisfaction over a sour review of a colleague's recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans to snag a fresh customer, when a teenager reviles his confused grandmother, when we put other people on a tight moral budget, while making plenty of allowances for ourselves-when people do these things, they exhibit a corruption of thought, emotion, intention, speech, and disposition. By such abuse of our powers, we creatures of dignity and responsibility evoke not only consternation, but also blame." (Ibid.)Reference to God required:It is not possible to understand sin apart from reference to God. "Sin is a religious concept, not just a moral one. Sin is lawlessness, culpable folly, moral wandering, faithlessness, and much more. But, we call these moral misadventures sin because they offend and betray God. Sin is not only the breaking of law, but also the breaking of covenant with one's savior. Sin smears a relationship; sin grieves one's divine parent and benefactor; sin betrays the partner to whom one is joined by a holy bond.""All sin has first and finally a Godward force. Let us say that a sin is any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed-or its particular absence-that displeases God and deserves blame. Let us add that sin is the disposition to commit sins. And let us use the word sin for instances of either. Sin is a personal affront to a personal God."The Remedy: Difficult-even for God!"At the center of the Christian Bible, four Gospels describe the pains God has taken to defeat sin and its wages. Accordingly, Christians have often measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of death on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives--these things tell us that the main human brokenness is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that, while annoyances, regrets, and miseries trouble us in all the old familiar ways, none of them matters as much as sin." (Ibid.)