“Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy; for thou renderest to every man according to his work.
”
The weakness and unbelief of men has led them to think of God as bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief and the arguing spirit. Gladly would I help their followers to loathe such thoughts of God; but for that, they themselves must grow better men and women. When the heart recoils, discovering how horrible it would be to have such an unreality for God, it will begin to search about and see whether it must indeed accept such statements concerning God; it will search after a real God by whom to hold fast, a real God to deliver them from the terrible idol. It is for those thus moved that I write, not at all for the sake of disputing with those who love the lie they may not be to blame for holding; who, like the Pharisees, would cast out of their synagogue the man who doubts their travesty of the grandest truth in the universe, the atonement of Jesus Christ. Of such a man they will unhesitatingly report that he does not believe in the atonement. But a lie for God is against God, and carries the sentence of death in itself.
Commentary
by James House
Lies "for" God: I am tempted to declare them as the worst kind of lie, though I'm not confident that assessment is correct. For as MacDonald has just said, their cure lies within themselves.
Lies for and about God have affected billions of lives. They have prevented untold numbers from the benefiting of having full faith in him: how can you have full faith in someone you cannot logically trust? And they have prevented many from believing in him at all.
Lies for God indicate a distrust in God - the feeling that God needs help outside of His own truth. That distrust indicates belief in lies about Him - and the new lie for him reinforces the related lie about him. Lies for God are lies about God.
Lies about God may indicate one of a few things about the liar. 1) as just noted, that the liar believes God needs (underhanded) assistance to achieve His ends, 2) that the liar wants to create cover for some flaw or action of his own, 3) that the liar loves talking about or being seen as being involved with God, more than he actually loves God and His truth, or 4) that the liar purposely wants to subvert God's work.
The grandness of the sense of Justice that is innate to (inherited by) all of us is that it will always, if not immediately, eventually, cause those lies about God to make reason stare our souls in the face! We cannot believe lies about God because the simplicity of the Truth about God lies within the comprehension of all of us. As we cringe from the sense of disunity, we are faced with the options of 1) naming it incomprehensible (above our understanding) - and therefore suspending (conscious) disbelief, 2) deciding God as a whole must be fictitious and thereby adopt atheism, or 3) recognizing it as an opportunity to learn a new truth about God.
To be true lovers of Truth, whenever we sense such disunity, we should foster our doubts about the conflicting points, and use that doubt as the opening to discovery. As true lovers of Truth, we will not feel the need nor desire to lie for God.
As lovers of Truth, we will come discover the God who is our Father - and who does indeed have all the perfect attributes of an idealized, perfectly loving and just Father.
"Doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light." (George MacDonald)
"Every question is a door-handle." (from Warlock o' Glenwarlock)
"What else than the ideal have the followers of the ideal man to do with?" (from Thomas Wingfold, Curate)