Lewis: the God of good

Sunday, March 15, 2020
Meditation:
    And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the LORD’S commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the LORD set his affection on your forefathers and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations, as it is today. Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.
    —Deuteronomy 10:12-16 (NIV)
Quotation:
    There were in the eighteenth century terrible theologians who held that “God did not command certain things because they are right, but certain things are right because God commanded them.” To make the position perfectly clear, one of them even said that though God has, as it happens, commanded us to love Him and one another, He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another, and hatred would then have been right. It was apparently a mere toss-up which He decided on. Such a view of course makes God a mere arbitrary tyrant. It would be better and less irreligious to believe in no God and to have no ethics than to have such an ethics and such a theology as this.
    ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms, Edinburgh: James Thin, 1958; G. Bles, 1958, p. 61 (see the book)
    See also Deut. 6:5; 7:9; 10:12-16,19; 30:6; Mark 12:30-31; John 15:12-13; 1 Thess. 3:12; 4:9; Heb. 13:1; 1 John 4:16; 2 John 5
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You are good, and You have rejected evil. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
    search    script    mobile
sub    fb    twt    Jonah    Ruth