Vol.VI No.XII Pg.5
February 1970

Telling God What For!

Robert F. Turner

While home for the holidays I sat up for some late TV shows, and heard Eddie Albert do his prayer thing. He is highly talented, and did it well; but the product was another of the current sickening series of illogical and uninformed charges against God.

Sometime back a popular singer sang, If I Owned the World — everything would be lovely. He would make everyone act just right. Later, and still popular, the crooners tell God, What The World Needs Now — Is Love. We have enough fields and mountains, they say, but God, if you want to know — we need more love.

Now Eddie upbraids God, and practically orders Him to make everyone love one - another. One gets the impression from all of this that God must be a real dunce not to see the needs in His world; or worse yet, He must not care what takes place here. He is even charged with being responsible for our ungodly mess.

I do not charge a conspiracy and for all I know these singers and actors have so little faith and concern in the reality of God as to be totally insensible to the affront they offer. The injustice and sacrilege of the matter will only appear to those to whom God is real, and who know, by revelation, something of His nature. Oddly enough, I even like the songs as music, but am repulsed by a more general consideration of the attitude and social status they represent.

We are ensnared by a philosophy of corporate sin — the world is sinful — society is a mess— and we can somehow escape individual responsibility and guilt by making blanket charges against the establishment.

We will adjure God, Make everyone love his neighbor! as if God had not thought of that centuries past — to use relative terminology. Do we really want this kind of love — this kind of slavery?? Mans free- will must be destroyed — he must no longer be left free to choose — he must love me; for which I can feel little joy or gratitude, seeing it is forced upon him!! Is this really love??

A completely dominated police state has peace — of sorts. Would we have God become our arbitrary ruler — and all good become a farce? But someone says, God should make us so we really love one-another with our own free will. There is inherent contradiction in the very statement, making this nonsensical foolishness. Of such, C. S. Lewis wrote, It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; but because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. (Problem of Pain, pp. 16)

God is love, and proved His love in Christ; offering not only instruction and perfect example, but forgiveness for our failures. (1 Jn. 4: 10-f.) WE MUST CEASE BLAMING GOD FOR OUR OWN FAILURES: AND OFFER PENITENT PRAYERS.