God’s Energy is Always Love

This week we have been discussing the ways in which we can experience the energies of God. Since our ancestors were removed from the Garden, humanity has experienced the energy of God not as love, but as punishment. I have often compared it to how children experience the love of their parents trying to keep them safe. Children approach a hot stove, and a parent slaps hands to keep them safe. The child experienced that love as pain rather than joy. It is easy to read the Old Testament and see an angry and vengeful God, rather than love. Today’s reading from Genesis is one of those moments.

As you can read below, when God saw the wickedness that had been fully embraced by our ancestors, He chose to remove them from the earth. The Church teaches this was God’s saving action, rather than mere punishment in anger. As we also read in Genesis 3.15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel.” God had planned for His Son to enter in to creation to defeat the devil and his wiles.

When evil grew throughout the world, God chose to remove the evil for the sake of all humanity, rather than risk evil completely destroying humanity. We are tempted to read today’s passage as God’s punishment, but if you consider the story of the child approaching that hot stove, then you can appreciate today’s action as salvation.

God has always been planning our salvation since the moment of creation, but at certain times during our history, He stepped in to alleviate evil for the sake of our eventual salvation. What does this have to do with experiencing God’s energy? Sometimes we experience His energy as pain, but it is always love. During Great Lent, we have the chance to reframe how we experience God’s love rather than change the way He actually loves us. Something to think about as we complete the second week of Great Lent.

After Noah was five hundred years old, Noah became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. – Genesis 5.32-6.8