The first, of course, is the one everyone likes, and that is that God is love. Everyone likes to be loved even when they're cynical and bitter and misanthropic and roll their eyes every time someone uses the word "love" in a sentence, unless it's used in conjunction with other words like "hot" or "monkey". When someone says "God loves you", usually you think he's a freak, and I have to confess that even while I acknowledge that I believe it's true, I would probably think he was a freak, too. Usually when someone talks to me, whether it's about God or bigfoot or even just the weather, I assume that they're profoundly retarded.

 

Anyway, back on topic.

 

The Bible does make it clear that God loves us. It kind of spells it out. I like to think that God even loves us in ways that we can't understand, because for one thing, that means that I don't have to explain it any more than that, but also because if you limit it just to what you understand about it, for most people that involves sex, obsession, or some kind of restraining order. And it's not like that.

 

When a person tells me they love me, it doesn't usually impress me much, because they could mean any number of things and it's impossible to know how to take it without a common frame of reference, so unless it's someone I'm really close to, my reaction is usually along the lines of "That's great! But keep it to yourself!" But when God loves you, if you believe it, it kind of changes things. Even if, like me, you don't exactly know what that means.

 

Like, a preacher or a sunday school teacher or that weird "love someone" lady on the radio late at night, always talk about "love love love" all the time, you know. God loves you. God accepts you just as you are. God reaches down to you, however low you've sunk. It's all right there in the Bible, you know, even how Jesus hung around with all the whores and tax collectors. And whoever asks, receives. And whoever seeks, finds. And how your faith is counted as righteousness, and then there's mercy and forgiveness and redemption.

 

Now this is important stuff. Don't miss it. If you were advertising for God, this would be your selling point here. You'd put this on the billboards, and talk about it on commercials. Whoo hoo.

 

So God is love and that's great, but there's something else.

 

It's death, wrath, anger, judgement, the Great Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, all that stuff in Revelation. It's not pretty, and folks don't like to hear about it, but it's all right there in the Bible, how God is sinless and man is not, and sin is displeasing to Him and can't stand in His Presence. Preachers preach on it, some of them like every single week. They get up on their pulpits and roll up their shirt sleeves and wave their arms around, and some of them even start crying. And believe me, if you're sitting in church waiting for him to finish up, and the preacher starts crying, you might as well settle back, because you ain't getting lunch on time.

 

Now, you can listen to either one of these preachers: The one talking about love and hope, or the other talking about wrath and judgement. And odds are, if you're persuaded at all by their preaching, you're not going to want to much hear what the other one is saying. You're going to think, that other guy's got it all wrong. He's missing the boat. And yet they're both talking about the same God and the same Bible, and sometimes they're even telling the same exact stories. You could hear one say that God hated the sin in the world and sent the Flood to destroy everything, and that would be true, if you believe the Biblical account. But the other guy could just as easily say that God loved Noah and spared his whole family and there was a big rainbow and they sang "Kumbaya" and everyone was happy, and that would be true, too. Except for the "Kumbaya" part.

 

Now, you could say that all this is just a matter of perspective, like it's a bottle-being-half-full kind of thing., but I don't think that's so. I think, if you're just hearing or believing one of these things and not the other, then you really are missing the boat. Maybe it kind of goes back to God being enormously huge, because I think that God is both of these things at once. In a way, I think it's kind of like the "balance" thing that some Eastern religions talk about, like maybe you shouldn't concentrate too much on either one of those things, or you lose your focus. Not that I'm saying Buddha or anything is just like Jesus; I'm just using that as an illustration. Anyway, it's what I think.