In God’s love He sustains all existence,
for His love is up-building. He has created this world to be His dwelling
place, and so His love is omnipresent within this world (3-4, 301). This means
that His power is part of His goodness. His goodness is defined according to
His agape, and this means that
“goodness [for God] is to give away completely,” therefore, “there is only one
who is good – God, who gives all things” (264-265, 405-406). That God gives all
things is true, because God, in making this world and humanity His tabernacle,
gives all things by giving them Himself, His very own life. He is the
Self-Emptying One who freely gives of Himself. Therefore, His power is set to
work in promoting this end by promoting His aim to make all people neighbors of
agape. This makes sense when
considering the context where it says how God will make humanity His temple and
part of His family. Here it says that He is all-powerful, given how His power
is made manifest by His ability to give us the freedom to be self-giving without
imposing Himself by compulsion: love that acts in self-control is the greatest
power (2 Cor. 6:14-18).[i]
Now it is true that God uses His power to
seek His own glory and honor. Nonetheless, those who cite this biblical truth
fail to take seriously the truth regarding Him being love. They fail to recognize that “in seeking His own, which
is love, He seeks it by giving all thing… yes He sought his own by giving Himself
for all so that they might be like Him in what was His own, in sacrificial
giving of Himself” (264-265). Furthermore, God being Good is not a matter of
Him necessarily using His omnipotence to ensure that only good things happen to
all. In this case, if anything bad would happen (i.e. suffering) to something
He has made, then it would mean that He is either all-powerful but not all-good
or all-good but not all-powerful. On the contrary, God’s goodness rests in Him
giving everything freely, and the highest gift to be given is to give every
person the opportunity to be like Him in giving themselves freely. Every moment
He gives them the opportunity to receive or reject the gift of His intimate
communal presence.[ii]
In God’s goodness, God freely gives
Himself to all. The reception of this gift is conditional upon a reciprocal self-denial
on the part of each person. This requires laying down our self-defined life in
exchange for a life that is found in God by being a partaker of the divine
nature of agape-love. This life
decision requires us to be open to Him enabling us to empty ourselves of
self-seekingness. We become transformed by abiding in and manifesting the self
that is God’s image by being part of a “royal and holy priesthood” of God. When
our very existence abides in God’s sanctifying spirit, we can “proclaim the [agape-]virtues of the One who called us
out of darkness and in his marvelous light [of agape]” (1 Pet. 2:5-9). In giving the highest gift of being godlike
by His goodness towards us, the reception of it required the conditional that
it could be rejected. This rejection transpires in the presence of a stubborn
hard-heartedness that resists openness to being a dwelling place of the divine
life of agape. God’s power to give
this gift of freedom to be self-giving or not to be self-giving is necessarily accompanied
with the potential of evil that leads to suffering. When self-giving receptivity
to the gift of the Creator’s love does not happen and self-love takes root
instead it leads to anti-agape thoughts,
emotions, behavior and actions which are the root of all suffering and evil.
This transpires by those creatures that are not inherently agape and act accordingly. Establishing this “possible world” in
which God could have neighbors in agape-love
required omnipotence. This omnipotence is a prerequisite for a free being to create another free being in His likeness. As Kierkegaard
states, “omnipotence contains the unique qualification of being able to
withdraw itself again in a manifestation of omnipotence in such a way that …
that which has been originated through omnipotence can be independent” (405).
Finite power, however, can only make someone dependent, and such “only a
wretched and worldly conception of the dialectic of power holds that it is
greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent”
(405). People out of anti-agape seek
to control others by their power, whereas God seeks to give others the freedom
to be His life-partner or not to be. An enslaving, controlling, and compulsory
love is not love but rather self-possessive hedonism that declares, “If I
cannot have you, no one can,” “I will force you to belong to me, because I
deserve you,” or “I created you, you have no right to be other than I desire
you to be”. A hedonistic God who like human beings uses His power to force
Himself and His will on created persons is not the God of Scripture. A God like
this we do not read about in Scripture for we read: “But the Lord saw that the
wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth. Every inclination of the
thoughts of their minds was only evil (violent) all the time. The Lord
regretted (was sorry) that He had made humankind on the earth, and He was
highly offended (grieved in His heart)” (Gen 6:5-6).
This omnipotence of God in creating humanity
in His own independent image only could happen by withdrawing himself at the
same time in giving Himself away as their Creator, and this marks the
independence of the receiver (405). Therefore, “God’s omnipotence is therefore
his goodness. For goodness is to give away completely, but in such a way that
by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent” (406).
God formed from nothing something that possesses “continuity in itself,”
however the cost of such freedom is that this entity is “the most frail of all
things” (406). This free creature cannot accomplish its intended end without
exercising this freedom by self-denial. This means we truly become human beings
in God’s image when we freely depend on Him to give us His way of existing
according to agape-love.
Consequently, God Himself sustains this freedom, such that if one “had the
slightest independent existence over against God (with regard to substance),
then God could not make him free” (406). This means that human freedom is
sustained by us subsisting continually in God. Therefore, God lost no power in
creating human beings, because He did so through His very existence. He breathed
His breath/ spirit into mankind by which we became “living beings” in the
likeness of God’s being. Having
likeness to God’s being hinges upon the
freedom of a to-be or not to-be, to be self-emptying or to not be self-emptying, i.e. to be self-loving.
Therefore, creating humanity as the creatures most like Himself in
independence, required that the Creator make human beings the most dependent of
all creatures at the same time. Humanity is wholly dependent on our Creator to
come into our true existence as fellow co-workers in God’s house of agape, to be holy (as set apart/
devoted) as He is holy (set apart/ devoted).[iii]
The life of agape originates from God and not human being. Only in absolute
self-denial can we take up the life of agape,
and apart from such absolute self-denial anti-agape will inevitably be present in various forms through us (9-10,
216). Just as Kierkegaard says in accordance with Scripture (1 John 4) “It is
God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, He who himself is
love,” for only “God brings up love in a person… and He does it to send love
out into the world” (9, 190, 216). Only God can teach and enable human being to
participate in the liberating and up-building (edifying) life of agape (Gal. 5:13-14). This freeing life
of agape is only found in giving
oneself away in imitation of God giving Himself away to being devoted to make
us His neighbors of agape. For us,
only humility leads to true independence of self-denial, the way of the cross,
for true freedom is the freedom to be ourselves that is to be like-God. This
freedom only comes by way of self-denial by partaking in the free work of agape and not enslaving work of anti-agape, self-love (29, 38-40, 56,
147-149, 278-279).[iv]
This freedom is articulate more clearly where we read, “For someone who has
died has been freed from sin… Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal
body so that you obey its desires… Now
present your members as slave to righteousness leading to sanctification” (Rom.
6:7, 12, 19). Hence, while a person remains under the law they remain enslaved,
because they cannot help but be self-loving apart for self-denial.
The freedom of the law can only come by
the fulfillment through abiding in agape that
fulfills the law instinctively. In other words, our freedom to be the selves we
ought to be lies in choosing that
which is the fulfillment of the law, the way of agape. What the law requires is impossible for creatures of
self-love, and so the law should be the occasion for self-denial of true
freedom to recognize that only in God can we truly be good humans. God’s love
gives potentiality where the law takes away potentiality. This only happens
because the law is present by which freedom can come, yet only from dying to
one’s ability to independently fulfill the law (38-39, 105-106; Gal. 4:4, 21-31).[v] Freedom
begins, for us human beings, when self-striving autonomy ceases, and we accept
total dependency on the communion of agape-love
with our Maker by which we truly become who we ought to be: His co-workers in agape-love.
[i] God’s
power here is manifested by His servant like demeanor in giving us the freedom
to be self-giving to “be separated” from the self-love of the world that we
might be “welcomed” by God, who in His power makes a way of reconciliation, but
due to His great power tempered with His loving goodness, does not force this
way of reconciliation but awaits the response of man crying out for such
reconciliation, as Christ said to let-go of their life (of self-love) and pick
up their cross (of self-emptying mirroring self-empting of Christ), for Christ
“died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but
for him who died for them and was raised” (2 Cor. 5:15).
[ii]
To be like Him means nothing short of being freely self-giving, however the
difference with a finite created entity is they are not agape in themselves but
can only be agape by communally abiding in and through Him as their tabernacle,
for in self-giving they can only give anti-agape or self-love, so the
self-giving required of them is a self-giving to the end of being self-giving
like God is self-giving, which means self-denial in humility and meekness, for
“the sacrifices God desires are a humble spirit” that realizes one’s absolute
dependence on God for being one’s trueself as a neighbor of God in the housework
of agape.
[iii]
This means that to be anything, requires God's grace, for humanity is nothing without being set apart in self-denial to Him, for only by being born of the Spirit
does he come into his freedom to be like God in self-emptying, which requires self-denial
of the most radical form, even more so than the angels, for we can be more like
God then them because we are more dependent than them for being what we truly
are, His neighbors in radical independence to the degree that sharing in the
most intimate aspect of the trinitarian communion agape is possible only to us
among God’s creatures, for we not them were created to be God’s house.
[iv] Gal.
2:4, 4:3, 8-9; John 8:35; Rom. 6:6-7, 16-20; 2 Pet. 2:19. This is why we read
the paradox in Scripture, “Live as free people, not using your freedom as a
pretext for evil, but as God’s slave” (1 Pet. 2:16).
[v] This
freedom, therefore, comes by way of embracing sanctification, which means
letting go of self-love which enslaves oneself, because one finds oneself doing
what one does not intend to do: one wants life but one gets death, wants rest
but gets only restlessness, etc., therefore self-love deceives and one guided
by deception is a slave, whereas one who embraces self-denial does it conscious
of the truth or at least believing in the truth, and so what freely chooses
without deception life and rest that can be found in self-denial alone, which
is a decision that is one is free to make without being controlled. God after
all intended all mankind to be a temple of agape that manifested throughout the
world the agape-love of God and in doing so manifesting the glory of His face,
as the Loving One, for God “wants to breathe the eternal life, the divine, into
the human race…. [to be] a nation of priests” (135). Therefore, seeing as we in
independence were let loose from the hand of God, true freedom can only be
found in returning back to the hand of God to abide in Him by way of
self-denial and the wooing of His Spirit (116-117).
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