Wearying God

 This week's verse is Malachi 2:17:

You have wearied the Lord with your words. But you say, “How have we wearied him?” Because you say, “Everyone who does evil is good in the Lord’s opinion, and he delights in them,” or, “Where is the God of justice?” 

 The book of Malachi is a wonderful kind of rogues gallery of bad religious practices and ideas. In this verse, God challenges believers not to have a lax or cynical view of God's requirements for us. While people think they are being inclusive or realistic, they are instead judging God by putting words in his mouth, and that is exhausting for God to endure.

Have you ever had someone have a completely unrealistic view of your motivations or opinions? Where no matter what you said, they would not shake themselves of their false idea of who you are? It's absolutely infuriating to have someone constantly assuming you have some ulterior motive, or that you don't hold a certain value, or that you have a certain collection of beliefs. But when we put words in God's mouth, or assume he doesn't mean what he says, that is what we are doing to him.

In our postmodern world, it is easy to fall in love with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." We want to be inclusive and accepting, and so we act as though there is no such thing as sin, that everything we do, even brazen sin, is fine and acceptable to God. Anything goes. You do you, right?

But grace does not say there is no sin. Grace is what is offered to us when we are forgiven for sins we have committed. Sin is still sin. It is still repulsive to God. The difference is that we will not burn in Hell for eternity for it. God suffers and pays the price on the cross. It isn't even cheap, let alone free.

The moral fashions of our day encourage us to say "everyone and everything is OK no matter what" but that is not based in reality. The Bible is very clear that someone cannot call themselves a Christian while willfully ignoring what God wants of them. We are covered by his grace, and we are forgiven when we turn from our mistakes (over and over) but that is not the same thing as saying that evil is good, and that he delights in our sin. God hates sin, but he loves us enough not to make a life or death issue over it when we say we're sorry.

The beauty of God's holiness is that he has standards, even if he accepts those who are still trying and failing to meet them.

The flip side of that is when we don't want grace, and we then pray "Where is the God of justice?" We want swift unyielding revenge on our enemies and on those who prey on the innocent. But sometimes God gives people extra time to realize their error and turn things around. How many times have you unwittingly done something evil, habitually, even over decades, before you realized how wrong it was and came to him for forgiveness? Would you be crying for justice if it was stupid teenage you who was slated for eternal damnation?

The beauty of God's grace is that he gives us every possible opportunity to see our error and turn to him. We are the undeserving recipients of the "seventy times seven" gift of forgiveness for what we do wrong.

To say that God loves evil is to say that God does not have standards for our behavior and that sin is a figment of our imagination, or worse, that the only sin is to say that there is sin. To say that God is not a god of justice is to say that God is not right to extend grace to us, and that we have a better grasp on right and wrong than he does. These are weedy vines that have been growing since the garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and began to judge God's management of the universe.

So let's not weary God by assuming his lack of instant justice is a weakness on his part, or that the whole idea of sin is imagined. Sin is real, and God is powerful enough that he can bring things back into order, even if the reset does not occur in our lifetime. Instead, let's thank God for his abundant grace, and run to him for forgiveness, asking for help to do the things he wants of us the way he wants them done.