Meet Scout, our nine week old lab/border collie mix. She is every bit as cuddly as she is wild. She is: smart, unpredictable, and delightfully funny. Her personality has arrived and she is bold and loud and even intimidates our 11 year old lab, Maddie. Every night everyone in our family fights to be the one to put her in her crate to sleep, and the next morning, we fight to be the one to wake her up. She is so fun, sweet, and crazy. She is always so happy to see each one of our family members every time we see her, and she licks us all up one side and down the other. So what does this bundle of joy/black fur have to do with why God made you or why He allows bad things to happen?Well, to start, I’ve always struggled with these two questions, and the best analogy I can figure up to explain an answer to these difficult dilemmas is to use my pet—my dog, Scout.
To give you an answer, we first have to rewind and go back to before the world was created and before Adam and Eve. Can you imagine how lonely God was? This huge guy with power greater than you can imagine, just sitting in the heavens with no one to love, and no one to love him back. So he finally decides to make humans and the world, but he has another choice to make. He could design humans to act like robots to all of his commands, doing whatever he said, but God knew this wouldn’t give Him true love, and he was hungry for real, genuine affection.
So, here’s where the dog comes in. Would you want a dog that did every single thing you said? When you said “love me,” it would lick you, and when you said “sit down” it would sit. No! That is so boring, and while the dog is obeying your every command, you never get genuine love. You would never come home to your dog running up to you, being so happy to see you or laughing at it doing some unexpected gesture. It would be a robot, and it would have no personality of its own. That is why we pick real dogs over robot dogs, and that is why God made you and me with a choice to love Him. He didn’t want robot humans, he wanted humans who, given the choice, would either choose to love Him, or not, but at least the ones who loved Him, would really, genuinely, adore Him.
Here’s where free will comes in. Without free will, there’s no genuine love. I’ve sometimes thought, “Well, why did there have to be the Tree of Life in the garden of Eden? Why couldn’t it just have been perfect?” Because, perfect is not genuine. My puppy? Yeah, she is nowhere near perfect: she pees on the carpet, chews holes in my Frye boots, and de-limbed Miss Kitty’s left front paw (my stuffed animal from when I was four—NO JUDGING!!). But guess what, I still love Scout. I would never abandon her, because she disobeyed. That is so cruel. (Somebody call PETA) This is why there has always had to be a choice. From the very beginning, there always had to be a piece of bad fruit and an awful snake. God knew Satan and evil had to be allowed on Earth so that we would genuinely, with our whole hearts, want Him.
And evil makes life hard, and it sucks, but if you believe in loving the one who created you, died for you, and made a mansion with your name on it in a place where you can live without evil for eternity..isn’t it all worth it? Shouldn’t we be telling more people about puppy dogs, love, and the creator of the universe?
Woof, Woof,
XX,
Scout and Claire
