Faith and reason: Path to making God's love recognisable

How do we know God cares when Christians die, get sick or are involved in tragedy at much the same rate as everyone else? Richard Dawson offers some answers.

Perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith can be summed up in the phrase God cares about you or, to put it in slightly more selfish language, God cares about me.

It is a mystery because the notion that the God of the universe might have my welfare at heart is not only incredible, but it is far from being self-evident.

Christians die, get sick and are involved in tragedy at pretty much the same rate as everyone else, so if God can't favour those who profess faith where's the evidence that God really cares for me? One of the difficulties in answering this question is that we have come to conceive of love largely in terms of reward, so that we expect some kind of obvious result from one who loves us.

I think, for example, of Woody Allen, who is known to have complained that he would believe in God's love if God would do something tangible such as depositing a large sum of money in a Swiss account under his name. Viewed in such terms love, however, becomes unrecognisable.

When we look only for what we can get from love, we not only forget the greatest reward of love, which is to engage in loving another, but we become quite unlovely in our self-centredness.

The evidence for God's love, according to the Bible, lies in two places.

The first is in the statement that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us", found in the book of Romans in the New Testament.

The usual concept of God is that we will find acceptance and love only when we do as we are told, but this is not what we find in the Gospels.

God came to us in Christ before the world had made any real attempt to leave behind its wrong-doing and this is made plain by the execution of Christ on trumped-up and completely false charges.

But even this was not enough to quell the love of God for humans.

Rather it was clear that Christ knew what was going to happen and yet still planted the Church on earth in order that it might take up the task of passing on the story of God's love to as many people as possible. In Christ's love expressed in His life and death we are shown that God cares for all humankind. This means that God cares for you and I.

The second place one finds evidence of God's love is in the life of the Church over the last 2000 years.

One might at first imagine that this evidence is tarnished by aspects of the first piece of evidence, in that the Church is well known for its ability to let God down occasionally.

However, this comes with the territory where sinners are welcome and for that reason, the Church's life is often not consistent with its Lord's.

Quite simply, those in the Church make mistakes and the Church itself is a body which constantly requires realignment with the example and testimony of Jesus.