Unconditional. Absolute. Complete. Also maybe harsh, inflexible, intolerant. Unconditional surrender. What was required of the Axis powers by the Allies at the end of World War II. What was NOT required of General Lee at the close of the Civil war. Confederate soldiers were permitted to keep their sidearms and their personal horses, one small right act before federal policies and practices continued the devastation of an already crushed South.
Unconditional. A word that refuses forgiveness and opposes redemption. We even have idiomatic expressions for this [and no, I don’t use that “i’ word very much]. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. A more obscure one- Don’t throw out the champagne with the cork. The idea of going to extremes, such extremes that we discard good along with the bad. We do this all the time. We evaluate an action or decision by a person and write them off completely for that one thing. Unconditional.
Have you ever noticed that the truth about God is often opposite, inverse, antonymic (is that a word?) of and to the truth about us and the sin in our world? God takes that same word, unconditional, and applies it to the way He loves us. Yes, absolute, complete, yes inflexible. And maybe this is why we just don’t get it. When we think unconditional, all we can think of is negative. We can’t seem to let love be in the same sentence with that word!
And yet God continues to force those two words together. Unconditional. Love. In a way that boggles and confounds us.
I am a thorn in Your crown
But You love me anyway
I am the sweat from Your brow
But You love me anyway
It’s like nothing in life that I’ve ever known
Yes, You love me anyway
Oh, Lord, how You love me.
-Sidewalk Prophets
We pull away from God because we… just…. can’t… believe that anyone could love us with no strings, no conditions, no if’s.
I paid a huge price for you:
all of Egypt, with rich Cush and Seba thrown in!
That’s how much you mean to me!
That’s how much I love you!
I’d sell off the whole world to get you back,
trade the creation just for you. -Isaiah 43:4 The Message
There it is. The message is clear. He would give…anything…everything… to get you back. That is the measure of His love for you. When that doesn’t make sense to me, it is when I am measuring love from my view, through my eyes. I try to limit God to what I can do, how I can love. This takes me down a path of rejection and denial. No! Not Him rejecting me, but me rejecting a love that makes no sense to my narrow, limited, conditional mind.
I enjoyed the sound of the rain in the predawn darkness this morning. That gentle, uniform, unconditional sharing of life-giving water that blessed our entire valley. I am reminded yet again that God loves me with a love that won’t stop, a love with no strings.