Day: June 17, 2012

Some of us find it all too easy to feel that God enjoys forsaking people. I think we have this perception partially because we have found some pleasure, or at least a sense of self-righteous satisfaction, in forsaking others ourselves.

When someone of our acquaintance does something negative to us enough times, or is simply someone we find it difficult to like, our fallen human tendency is to want to put such individuals out of our lives. Oftentimes that is exactly what we do if we think we can do it without censure from other people whom we want to keep in our lives.

When we decide to forsake a relationship with another human being who has hurt us, or simply become a burden to us, we may well feel a sense of “justice” being done. This often involves a subtle (or not so subtle) sense of getting back at someone who we openly or secretly think deserves it. We experience the pleasure of vengeance, if sometimes only on a small scale. We may justify it by saying to ourselves that we are simply setting legitimate boundaries and not being a “door mat”, but the truth is we get a little charge out of writing that person out of our lives.

Now it may be true that sometimes we really have been “casting our pearls before swine” and allowing someone who is unrepentantly abusive to have too big a place in our existence. When we have truly exhausted efforts at reconciliation and take action to avoid needless continuing harm to ourselves this is not necessarily wrong. Neither is realizing our limits and cutting back on a social connection that does not benefit either side of that connection. I am not talking about what might be legitimate action to at least temporarily end relationships that are truly harmful to us and which God may not have called us to continue in. I believe such circumstances can exist, especially when the person in question shows no sign of repentance towards either God or us over a long period of time.

What I am addressing is rather the wrong pleasure we may get out of ridding ourselves of people who simply bother us or, for that matter, feeling that way even towards those who we may have a valid reason to distance ourselves from. Either way we allow ourselves to feel good about cutting someone off. The truth is that, as Christians, we are not within our rights even to revel in completely forsaking a connection with a harmful person. It may be alright to feel relief in such an instance, but not pleasure.

This is because our God and our model is not one who desires to finally “write off” any human being. We are told in Scripture that He “will never leave us or forsake us” once we have truly become His children through Christ. We may push Him away, but He will not take the initiative to push us away. We might make a theological argument that once we leave Him He has no choice but to leave us, but He will never be the one to initiate that leaving because it is not in His perfectly loving nature to do so.

As for forsaking the unrepentedly wicked in the sense of allowing them to go all the way down the wide road that leads to destruction, the Bible tells us that God “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. We might do well to remember that our Lord wept over the people of Jerusalem who did not recognize and welcome the day of his visitation, those who would not come to Him for salvation.

God is all about loving and permanent relationships (even within Himself, witness the Trinity) While it is true that His relationship with us is contingent upon our acceptance of His Son’s sacrifice for our sins He does not ever take pleasure in broken or unrealized relationships between Himself and those He created in His image. Neither should we take pleasure in the breaking of bonds between us and our fellow human beings, whether justified or not.

Perhaps we who wrongly fear a God who would take satisfaction in forsaking us would lose that fear if we were more repentant about our own wrong satisfaction in forsaking others.