Does God give up on people?

Does God give up on people?

This question was submitted by Dawn.

I have to admit that I find this question somewhat heartbreaking, because of how I see God as an intimate and yet infinitely steadfast figure.  At the same time, I know that human despair is a real thing and people come to believe that God can give up on us faster than we give up on ourselves.  My heart goes out to anyone in the world (which I imagine there are many) who asks this question, because I know that there is real pain and fear behind it.

The short answer to this question is no.  God does not give up on people.

The Whatabouts... 

Like everything, I suppose there is a bit more nuance to this question.  I will start by giving a couple of possible bits of Scripture and theology that could be misinterpreted that God may give up on us.  

The first and most obvious thing that one might wonder about is what about Hell?  I do believe in the afterlife and Scripture does talk about separation from God in that afterlife.  Now, admittedly I have never been to the afterlife and can only surmise what happens there.  This alone could be a whole series of posts, so I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole.  My hunch about Hell is that it is not a place full of people whom God has given up on, but perhaps it is a place that people have given up on themselves.

C.S. Lewis wrote an allegorical view of Hell in The Great Divorce that fairly accurately describes how I imagine it all works.  In this vision, souls have the constant opportunity for salvation, but out of fear will not take it.  My general feeling is that Hell is probably not a place of literal fire, because what does the body care about pain after it has died?  Rather, I would imagine Hell to be a place where people are caught in the quagmire of their own hate and despair.

You might say, "But wait, this is still an eternal damnation thing. You can't tell me that God hasn't given up on them!"  Well, yes I can.  What kind of eternity would it be for someone who is incapable of loving his/her neighbor to sit at the eternal banqueting table next to the person s/he hates the most?  If you are a loving person, able to forgive, then the heart can soften and you can see eternal joy in such a place.  If you have so hardened your heart to refuse to love or forgive, then an eternity next to your enemy would be literal hell.  That is why I say that Hell is not God giving up on us, but rather it is us giving up on ourselves.


The other "what about" scenario is Jesus' one-liner about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. "Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."  (Matthew 12:31-32). This line appears in some form in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), but you may wonder what in the world Jesus is referring to.  You would not be the only one.  No one really knows.  There are a great number of educated guesses and some traditional teachings on this, but like the question about Hell, this could take more than a paragraph or two.  

The Letter to the Hebrews gives us a clue to this mysterious sin.  "For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt." My hunch about this is not that it is about someone lapsing and returning to God (I'll deal with this one in a minute), but having been so awash in God's presence in perhaps a mystical way that few, if any, have truly experienced, and then somehow manage to go against all that, this could be the problem - and nearly an impossible thing to do!  

The very next line tells us what this sin is likely really about.  Verses 7 and 8 say: "Ground that drinks up the rain falling on it repeatedly, and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it produces thorns and thistles, it is worthless and on the verge of being cursed; its end is to be burned over." Basically, if you're given something good and do something bad with it, that's blasphemy.  

This gets at the heart of what is blasphemy.  It is not about the naughty words you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.  It's about doing something evil in the name of the One who is the standard for good.  I think this would look something like doing evil in the name of one's faith - a sad reality of many misguided practitioners of religions.  These are the misguided holy wars and the rejection of other human beings in the name of, and perverting the name of the God of love.  In the same way that Hell is not God giving up on us, but us giving up on ourselves, I would say that blasphemy is us giving up on God.

So, then what...

As I said above, people do drift away from God and come back.  Sometimes people are raised in the faith and then spend youth and middle age away, only to come back when older.  Or, sometimes people find new paths in life that still effectively allow them to live within the teachings of Christ.  This is life.  This is not any form of blasphemy, but it does open a door to an answer to the initial question.  

Consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  In it, the beloved younger son squanders everything the father intended as the son's inheritance.  And yet, even with that, the father embraced him as he returned.  I have an image of an old man weeping as he embraces the son, not letting him go for fear of losing him again.  This is a beloved parable, because it is so powerful.  The line the father tells the older brother always sticks with me: "But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found." (Luke 15:32)

This parable gives us a glimpse into God's infinite grace and mercy, to always take back the lost and the least.  It is in this parable that we are reminded that it is in God's very nature to be reconciled to our humanity.  The reason we are Christians is because we believe that God took on human form, sacrificed self and conquered death, just so that our humanity would be saved.  

Two passages that are suggested for funerals come to mind.  The first is from Lamentations 3:22: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."  In this line, the prophet Jeremiah reminds us that God's faithfulness is so steadfast that even when life feels at its darkest, God's love comes back like a new morning.

The second passage we often hear at funerals that comes to mind is Romans 8:39: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."  Yes, we are never really removed from God's love.  As Christ took on our humanity, our humanity is infused with the Divine in such a way that the two cannot be separated.  

So, does God give up on people?  Absolutely not!  We can give up on God and we can give up on ourselves, but God does not ever give up on us.  I would venture to say that even when we are hopeless and in our darkest moments, God is like that waiting father with open arms always ready to embrace us again.