For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake,
But My lovingkindness will not be removed from you,
And My covenant of peace will not be shaken,”
says the Lord who has compassion on you. Isaiah 54:10
God is not threatening to punish us; he’s threatening to love us!
How can eternal love be a threat, you ask? Isn’t such compassion and kindness a wonderful thing? After all, it is ostensibly the central claim of Christianity, such as in John 3:16, though in some people’s versions they seem to make that love a thin veil over a fairly angry and petty God!
Nevertheless, the promise of heavenly love can be disconcerting and frightening, depending on a person’s disposition and desires. The selfless and self-offering love of God, as seen in the cross of Christ, engenders either profound relief or palpable dread. God’s love, with its utter selfless concern for others, to the point of suffering, will be threatening to the degree we are self-seeking, self-serving, and apathetic or malicious toward others.
If we tend to see people as objects and commodities, using them for our own benefit, the prospect of the love of God is distasteful to us. We do not want to be conformed to this divine love! We don’t want to suffer for the sake of others! The cross can be a disturbing revelation of what we are trying to avoid in every way possible. The other-seeking love of God, if we were in it, would be the fires of hell.
The threat is not only from God’s love. In a similar way, grace can be just as intimidating.
To need grace is to have to admit our own powerlessness. We must accept charity, and how adamantly many of us don’t want to be a “charity case.” We feel the sting and shame of not being a self-made person. Grace makes us the recipient of divine pity, but we don’t want to be pitied!
Grace destroys any puffed-up sense of self, all our illusions of competence, and reveals that we are truly beggars. Maybe this is why the poor in this world more readily turn to God. They are more aware of and ready to accept their need for help, and less inclined to believe in self-sufficiency!
Instead of grace, we might rather suffer some consequence or punishment to atone for our own mistakes, rather than to be simply forgiven. We don’t want handouts. It is humiliating. If I could pay my dues, I would know I made restitution in some cosmic way for my offenses. I would preserve a sense of dignity, that I stand on my own two feet. I don’t want to admit my total helplessness.
Pride loathes grace. Selfishness despises love. The ego fears both the self-forgetfulness of true love and the helplessness of depending on grace.
The path that Jesus says few take is not because it is too lofty and unattainable, but because it is too lowly and undesirable. His way is one of descent, not ascent. Nothing really impedes our descending into God’s love nor prevents the reception of mercy except our pride.