We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Q&A: If God is So Great, Why Would He Care About Us?
Question: I’ve read that scientists estimate that the number of stars in the universe is 10 to the 24th power (10 with 24 zeros after it). I’m told that finding the earth amidst all these stars would be like finding one particular grain of sand in a sand pile the size of the United States piled 25 feet deep! Plus, the universe has been around for 13.5 billion years, while humans have only existed the last 10,000 years or so. This is a mere nanosecond of the cosmic clock. If this is all created by God, it seems far beneath him to care about us little — and very recent — humans on this little planet.
Answer: The question presupposes a dichotomy between greatness, on the one hand, and caring for little people, on the other. I would argue in the opposite direction, however. Rather than saying God is too great to care about us little humans, I’d say God is great preciselybecause he cares about us little humans. For the essence of God’s greatness is love, and love between unequals is greater than a love between equals. A story of a prince who willingly sacrifices his whole kingdom out of love for a peasant girl demonstrates a greater love than a story of a prince who marries the daughter of a king. In this light, the story of God caring about us little humans, to the point of becoming one of us and dying for us, despite the fact that we didn’t deserve it, must be seen as the greatest love story ever told. Calvary reveals the greatest, most beautiful, most loving conception of God humans have ever dreamed of.
In fact, I don’t believe humans dreamed this story up. It’s beyond what we are capable of dreaming. And, in any case, there’s a wealth of historical evidence that it’s actually true. (See P. Eddy and G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend [Baker, 2007]). Our most poignant love stories are faint echoes of the love story given us in the Gospels.
Related Reading
How do you respond to Malachi 3:6?
“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished.” Some cite this verse as evidence that God need never be flexible in his plans and change his mind. But this claim contradicts all the explicit declarations in Scripture which state that God does frequently modify his plans and…
The Incarnation: Paradox or Contradiction?
We’re in the process of flushing out the theology of the ReKnew Manifesto, and we’ve come to the point where we should address the Incarnation. This is the classical Christian doctrine that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Today I’ll simply argue for the logical coherence of this doctrine, viz. it does not involve…
Seven Lies
hobvias sudoneighm via Compfight Stephen Mattson has contributed for Relevant Magazine, Sojourners (Sojo.net) Redletterchristians.org, and studied Youth Ministry at the Moody Bible Institute. He is now on staff at the University of Northwestern St. Paul, Minn. Follow him on Twitter @mikta. Stephen recently published an article in Sojourners titled Seven Lies About Christianity — Which Christians Believe that we really…
What is the significance of 1 Chronicles 21:15?
“And God sent an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it; but when he was about to destroy it, the Lord took note and relented concerning the calamity; he said to the destroying angel, ‘Enough! Stay your hand.’” This powerful passage tells us why God sent the angel and why he changed his mind. If God…
“Whatever it means, it cannot mean that.”
pure9 via Compfight Roger Olson wrote a great article a couple of days ago entitled Why (High) Calvinism Is Impossible. He points out that there is no way to understand God as “good” while also believing in double predestination. The idea that God predestines some to heaven and a vast majority to hell for his “glory”…
What’s the signficance of Judges 10:6-17
The Israelites rebelled against Yahweh and worshipped other gods. As a result, Yahweh withdrew his protection of them and “sold them into the hands of te Philistines and the Ammonites” (Judg. 10:6-7). The Israelites eventually acknowledged their sin and cried out to God (vs. 10) but Yahweh, perhaps perceiving that their repentance wasn’t genuine, told…