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Incommensurate Joy
God when he made the world faced this problem: he had to decide whether there were to be creatures who were not only spirits--that is, able to choose their destiny--but who were to be spiritual animals, creatures liable to harm and destruction. And moreover, given that there were to be spiritual animals liable to injury, he had to choose whether he would intervene and suspend both nature's destructiveness and the harmful effects of freely chosen evil. We know the choice he made: he decided that our situation would be one in which we would have to find him, learn to trust and love him, while we were exposed to injury and destruction. (p. 38)
It is perfectly natural to want to be secure. But we may, without realizing it until tragedy strikes, have made our security a condition for God's reality. Our security, we assume, is something he must grant, if we are to trust him. Such an unspoken but active assumption takes it for granted that we are in charge of the conditions in which God's reality is to be found. We assume that we know the conditions which he must meet, what he must do, in order for us to know that he does or does not exist. But the discovery of his reality, the discovery of the nature of his love, is not in our control. God loves us, but that does not mean that he will invariably protect us. He is a mystery over which we do not possess power, which we do not begin to understand until we submit to his conditions. We must renounce our demands for personal security, our demands that there be no human misery, before we can receive assurance of his reality and love. (p. 43)
Only when we learn from suffering, when we learn personally what it is to be a creature, vulnerable to destruction, can we begin to find and to know what it is to have a loving Father. (p. 45)
To know God is to realize that there is a felicity which is beyond pain and compensation. There is a joy which is beyond the issue of rewards to make up for loss. Paul described all his previous achievements before knowing Christ, and which were now lost, as of no account. This is not because pain and loss do not matter, but because to deal with God is to find a reality who is incommensurate with the world. He is not on the same scale of measure or on the same balance as anything else; and what he want to give us is himself. (p. 47)
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Grace and Peace,