Our God is a positive God
One day, as we were chatting over the latest depressing news, a sister in the Lord sighed and said: “as one gets older, you start to see that life on earth is nothing but corruption and sadness.”
The sister who said that wasn’t casually nagging about something negative. I can sense the kind of pain she suffers seeing the sins of this world, just like the kind of pain Lot suffered while he lived in Sodom. “For that righteous one living among them, in seeing and hearing, his righteous soul was tormented from day to day with their unlawful deeds.” (2 Peter 2:8)
However, the Holy Spirit will not be pleased by our pessimistic and negative attitude like this, no matter how righteous it may seem.
Feeling the pain of corruption of the world is one thing, but seeing corruption and sadness to the end in a fundamental sense is another. Sometimes our attitude can be so negative that we are effectively (usually unconsciously) pronouncing that it would have been better that God did not create man at all. But this attitude displeases God, because we are essentially saying to His face that He had made a mistake from the very beginning. Thus it does not glorify our God who is not only a God of purpose, but is also a God of glory who never makes a mistake and will always bring to a glorious end to what he has started.
Let’s look at the very beginning of God’s work.
“[1] In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. [2] And the earth was without form and empty. And darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:1-2:
We know that there is a mystery that is hidden in between verse 1 and verse 2 of Genesis, the very first two verses of the Bible. But that is not the focus of the Spirit. The dominating condition after verse 1 is emptiness and darkness. And that was before the man was created, and certainly before sin corrupted man and the earth.
If we imagine ourselves being brought to that scene in Genesis 1:2, are we to counsel God that he should not do what he was about to do, because it would be a mistake? After all, seeing all the corruption and the pollution of sin, we might wish to advise God that even emptiness would have been better that all this corruption we see today.
But how foolish we would be if we were to do that. We let our self-righteousness overtake our understanding and acceptance of God’s purpose, God’s power, and God’s wisdom. Sometimes we may even think that we know sin better than God because we are the ones that actually suffer from sin, both our own sin and the consequence of other people’s sin.
But we are in darkness if we think that way. We forget that our Lord Jesus is the only one who truly suffered the consequence of human sin. He was the only one who had to bear the real and ultimate consequence of our sin, like the scapegoat in the Leviticus, all the way to the cross to take the terrible judgment of God the Father in His righteous wrath toward sin.
And also consider the suffering of God as the Father because of what His beloved Son had to suffer.
Do we understand in the slightest sense of what Genesis 6:6 refers to? “And Jehovah regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was angry to his heart” ( Genesis 6:6). We sometimes think that God was angry because he was like a rule maker who hated to see the rules he made being broken. But that’s not what the heart of God is.
We simply could not appreciate the effect of sin on God’s heart unless we start to understand what Jesus has to suffer on the cross.
That the Son of God shall suffer because of the sin of man was agreed upon in the Counsel of Godhead before the creation of the world. The Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. But in Genesis 6:6, we have a glimpse of God’s heart toward sin. The Father hated sin, not only because He was righteous and sin is unrighteous, but also because God the Father knows that His beloved Son will one day bear all the unrighteousness of sin.
But thank God for His faithfulness and steadfastness, the salvation was carried on through Noah.
God did not and will not make a mistake. God had full understanding of what was going to happen when He started His work on earth and created man. For as much as he hated sin, he hated lifelessness and emptiness even more. This is because sin is a problem that can be solved (although at a terrible price paid by God’s beloved Son), while lifelessness and emptiness is Satan’s way to attempt to say God’s purpose has been defeated and God is frustrated.
May we never be lured into a conclusion that even emptiness is better than sin. Let us bear with sin but never agree with it. Suffer along with our Lord Jesus until the day he returns. Although the suffering is real, it is nothing compared to the glory at the end, because our God will accomplish what He has set to accomplish.
