God of Right

I like to think that I can do no wrong. Knowing my motives and intentions (and ignoring the ones that are plainly self-centered and wrong, justifying them away as best I can, usually based on the inherent evil of the party I am being self-centered against), I like to believe that I am always acting in the right. After all, if I thought I were doing wrong, I wouldn't do it. Would I?

But the truth is that I can do wrong. The harder truth is that I do do wrong. The harder truth than this is that I do do wrong a lot, especially for someone who thinks she can do no wrong. 

Can I get an amen?

The good news is that God is a lot better, a lot greater than I am, and He can do no wrong. And that gives me something, at least, to trust in. (And even more than that, to believe in, to hope in, and to build my life on.)

This is hard for a lot of us because of the little problem of evil in the world. (Theodicy, for you theology buffs.) How is there so much evil in a a world ruled by a God who can do no wrong? How do bad people thrive and good people suffer if God is thoroughly good and incapable of wrong? How do our lives continue to be so broken if God, who loves us, can do no wrong? 

It leads to a theology where perhaps God just loves to punish us. If He can do no wrong, then left is right and right is wrong and wrong is good and if wrong is good and God is good, then maybe God can be wrong, which would only be good...and these are the kinds of twirling thoughts that keep a man of good faith up at night. Are they not? 

The problem is that we have such a limited understanding of right and wrong, such a shadowed perspective of it. We see things from one angle, and we get so confident in what we can see, but give us a glimpse of something outside of our peripheral vision for a second, and we realize how complicated it is. 

For example, a man commits a violent crime, and we say that what is right is for us to kill him for it. Death penalty. It is the only just outcome for the victim of the crime. But what about the victims of our justice? What about the man's family, who lose him just the way his victims lost so much? Is that just? Is that right? We wrestle with these kinds of things almost endlessly; they cause rifts among us. We see how our limited perspective sometimes completely disregards something that on any other terms, we would consider extremely important - namely, human feeling. 

We view God's actions in the same way. We see them through our limited perspective, and we can't understand. We can't fathom how something might be good or s because from where we sit, it doesn't look like either. We think maybe God got it wrong. 

But He didn't. 

God cannot do wrong. 

Even Job's friends knew this; it's one of the few things they got right: far be it from God to commit evil acts; and from the Highest One to engage in wrongdoing!....Can one who despises justice also govern?

Could God be good if He was not just? The answer is, of course not. 

Of course, that doesn't help our hurting hearts that, sure enough, just don't understand. But perhaps we can hold to knowing our perspective, as sure as it seems, is limited by our creatureliness and instead, we can lean only on the truth....unlike us, God can't do wrong. 

He simply can't.