Steve Ray answers a caller who claims that God is held to a different standard from humans.
Transcript:
The apologists were saying that God is not held to the same moral standards that we would have with any other moral being. And that you guys teach that, and because it’s a God, it’s not accountable to stewardship or consent in a moral relationship with us. And by teaching that we have to have two separate moral sets of books for this God and for people, this relationship that you’re teaching, a moral relationship with this God, mirrors exactly what would be an abusive spouse relationship. So how is this actually good for society that you teach this? Why is this God? Well, first of all, I have no idea who would have said that or said that God is not accountable. That sounds to me like the God of Islam, which is the difference between the two. And I would say this just as a comparison. The God of Islam is he’s viewed as pure will. He can do whatever he wants. He’s not accountable to anybody. In the Catholic tradition, what we believe is that God is love and that God is accountable. He can’t make a square, a circle. He’s made the universe the way it is. And he has created even a covenant relationship with us as Christians, which is the relationship of a loving husband or father for his children. And I don’t know where you would get the idea that we have two sets of standards. Now, I could say he is the creator and as a creator and Paul makes his point in Romans 9, 10 and 11. If I make something, I can also smash it. If I made it and I made it in its mind and I created it, I can smash it. But God loves us. And the fact that he made us in his own image, he said that he made us in his image. And even God loved us enough that he came down here to the verses of the Bible. I memorized as a youngster was in the beginning was the word, which is Jesus. And the word was with God, the Father. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us that he cared about us so much that he came down and actually became one of us. So he could experience as a human what we experience and actually to lay his life down for us to come to pay for our sins. And our shortcomings. So I don’t know how we get this idea that God has one set of standards and we have another. We’re actually made in his image and he is our model of correct conduct. OK. Well, you just said that God is by definition love. So therefore you’re not allowed to ever morally assess it as anything other than love.
And so therefore, not the user. I didn’t I didn’t understand it. Say that again. I’m not morally allowed to. If you define somebody as a moral label by definition, they could never be anything other than that label that removes any true moral assessment of the person. They are by default only that that is what the abuser teaches the person they’ve abused that I’m in power. I am love. Anything I do, you just have to misinterpret why I smack you today for not wiping off the countertop properly because I’m loving you. You’re just misinterpreting this as abuse.
To smack somebody to smack somebody for loving for not setting the table right is certainly not love. Nobody I would not know no Christian I know of would ever say that that’s the case.
When it talks about a husband and a wife in relationship to Jesus and his church, it says that a husband should treat his wife. The number one condition of a husband’s relationship to his wife is that he should lay down his life and love for his wife. Why? Because God laid down his life for us and we are to follow his the way he does things. Now, I raised four children. I have 20 grandchildren now. And I like if you ask them, they’d say grandpa is love. Grandpa loved us. Grandpa showed love. But then they would also say that I disciplined them because they needed to be disciplined at times in order for me to raise them to be responsible human beings. And I couldn’t love does not mean nice. If you compare, if you say that love is a synonym for being nice. No, it’s not because if I discipline my children and I always did it out of love, I never smacked my kid. I never did anything like that. That’s not love. That’s anger. That’s wrath. That’s sinful. So God is love. But he’s also you can’t say he’s just love. He’s also justice. And he’s also merciful that his mercy is his greatest quality, by the way. He will do things for us and love us and forgive us even when we’re not deserving of it.
So I’m not sure where you get the idea that we have a God who has a separate rule book for himself than for us, because everything that is taught in the Catholic Church is that God is love and justice and mercy and transcendent. But he loves us so much that he’s willing to give his own life for us. And when we sinned against him, he didn’t just wipe us off the face of the earth. He came down and gave us whole life to redeem us. A lot of times when I find people that have a problem with God or with this kind of thing about God being a wrathful God or having a separate it almost always is there’s been a problem with that person and their father. You know, in other words, I get a lot of people ask me say they don’t can’t love God or they never feel forgiven or anything. And I ask them, what is the relationship you have with your father? And almost 95% of the times they say my father was abusive or my father ignored me or my father left and I didn’t have a father. And that’s why then when we pray our father who art in heaven, we see our earthly dad in that and we trans and we actually then we transpose our father to the heavenly father and we see him as different than he really is. I don’t know. I don’t want to say that that man had that problem. I’m just saying that a lot of times that’s the case.