“…this particular ‘natural man’ had pretty much given up on the idea that God could be anything but a hostile dictator, before seeing this cartoon.”
Funny, as an adolescent growing up in a traditional Catholic family where there were pictures on the wall of humans crying out with uplifted hands from the fires of purgatory to a glorified woman and baby sitting on a cloud and flanked by bodyless (read ‘heads only’) angel babies, I had this awful impression that God was a hostile dictator who would stop at nothing to roast me alive forever for my smallest breaking of His commandments (and I’d broken so many, even by the age of eight), but fortunately for me I didn’t have to wait for a cartoon like this one to deliver me from that perilous thought.
I found out who God really was and how He deals with us by picking up that dusty old family bible one day and actually reading it, yes, cover to cover, from gory start to gory finish, except that between all that gore (which I noticed, by the way, was always to do with man’s rebellion and selfishness), I also read of a God who loved us so much that He was willing to become one of us and join us in all our suffering (yeah, ‘I hurt myself’), and provide a way out of it forever. This is the God who says, “I will wipe away every tear from their eyes” and who has it as part of His plan to make “a new heaven and a new earth.”
Wake up, brother, and don’t wait for cartoons and fantasies to deliver you from real dangers. God is no more a hostile dictator than the natural universe is, but there is danger from both to the ‘natural man’ who has chosen by his intransigence to become flakes and cinders with the rest of the created order when the lights finally go out on our world. A door has been opened to you by Jesus Christ, Him who says ‘I am the Door.’ Don’t be like the men of Sodom who, lusting after angels’ flesh, could not find the door to open it. Instead, when you hear the Beloved knocking, run to open your door, and welcome Him, lest you like the woman in the Song of Solomon have to run through the city looking for Him and, even getting beaten by the guards, may never find Him again. They say, ‘opportunity only knocks once.’ Could this be the opportunity for you?
The 'Everybody' thread at American Digest was certainly one of the more enlightening things I've seen, in a long time. Such rancor at odds with the premise of the cartoon,which is of indiscriminate unity.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about rancor; to tell whether people were motivated by rancor, and which people they were, I'd have to be a mind reader. Nobody commenting on that thread had obviously hostile motives; just very different concepts of truth and good.
ReplyDeleteWhat I did see was fundamental disagreement between some commenters who were made happy by the cartoon, and others who thought it was disgusting or deeply misguided. Not much middle ground between those two responses.
The conclusion I draw from the thread is that even if God really exists and really is that unconditionally loving, His own creatures may not approve of Him. Not too surprising, really.
--Erich Schwarz