The Fairness Paradox

It seems to me that every human has ingrained in them some sort of level, ruler, of fairness. Every single human on this planet (or maybe just at least America, I dunno) strives for, or regards highly fairness. If something is not fair, well that's just plain wrong. Maybe even evil. Exhibit A: any child that can talk. "That's not fair!!!" This lasts until teenage years at least. Anyway, so I'm thinking about how strange that is. Why the heck are we so ingrained with fairness? Why is that the standard? I was also thinking about how even seems to usually be the best of most things. Not too much of this, not too much of that. Balance. That coincides very nicely with fairness. Kinda on the same path. But then also following along on my thought process I got to thinking about paradoxes (which I am fascinated with) and how they are everywhere, especially wherever God's hand is evident. Let's look at a few cases. First off, God becomes Human. Whoa. Big one. Then He decides to go ahead and dwell IN humans. Yeah, that's kinda weird and not quite right by normal thought. Then there's men and women who are supposed to live together and become one as husband and wife, and make a family. If you know a man and you know a woman, then I think you know what I'm talking about. They're pretty opposite. Also there's the whole saved by grace but also you have some sort of free will. God is sovereign but He wants you to be involved some how. Predestination some how meshes with free will. You have to die in order to live. Anyway, so all of this is kind of going through my brain, and I'm thinking about how we love fairness and it's so ingrained in us (of course unless it hurts us, and then we conveniently ignore fairness) and how I can see that fairness is pretty tied into justice. We all know God is a God of justice, so it almost seems like fairness is a skewed perspective, an almost but not quite there form of justice. An image of God, but from the imperfect human side. Our own try at being a god if you will. But here's where the fairness paradox comes in. And I have to thank Relient K for this one. We so much want fairness, but God will not allow it. He will not allow the fair thing to happen. He must impose His grace, thus being very unfair and a little bit biased. I mean come on, we go about gallivanting and imposing our will and wants, showing, proving that we are gods, spitting in His face and just walking away, yet He will not allow the fair thing to happen. For some reason (and I think some part of it's God's love for the paradox) He comes in and won't let happen to us what deserves to happen, and forgives us. All the while maintaining His pure Justice and inflicting punishment for our crimes. Yet not on us. So not fair.

Sweating Blood

I'm sorry, but Mark Driscoll has now become a somewhat large part of my life. Maybe significant would be a better word than large. Or influential. Anyway, I've downloaded several of his recent sermons onto my I-Pod and I was listening to one of these a few weeks ago. He had a couple of sermons on prayer, and he was talking about the Gethsemane prayer, where Jesus was like, "Listen, God, I REALLY don't want to do this. But not my will..." I was washing the dishes the other day (yes, I do that sometimes) and for some reason I started thinking about it. So here's where Driscoll's influence comes in. He pointed out that Jesus was in agony over what was about to happen. But probably not the reason we all think (excruciating physical and emotional pain) but instead about taking on the wrath of God. Whoa. For eternity He has been God, has been in relationship, has known nothing else, and now he's going to experience God the Father turning His back on Him and releasing all of His wrath. Whoa. That is mind-blowing. So Jesus is sweating blood because He cannot imagine, doesn't want to imagine being separated from God. That one kinda hit me strong. So for some reason, as I said, I was randomly thinking about that, and I started thinking about if there was something the Father wanted His Son to do, but His Son REALLY didn't want to do it, maybe that's ok to have that emotion. Maybe it's not necessarily a sin to not want to do what God wants us to do. But it really all comes down to, are you going to do it? I know that there has to be some sort of fine line in what's going on in your heart. I know there's a difference between, I don't want to do this, but I'm going to because I love you; and, I don't want to do this, but I'm going to do it because I want to prove how righteous I am, or something along those lines. It seems to me there has to be something going on in your heart, but what it all comes down to is, do you submit? Do you do His will? For some reason this is reassuring to me. I'll be honest, a lot of times I don't want to do whatever God's will is, mainly because I am stubborn and prideful. Anyway, my point was, that the main point is that we submit, even if we have a time of not wanting to, and maybe even if there is a large portion of us still not wanting to while we submit. But I also don't want to ignore the point Driscoll made: Jesus was sweating blood because He didn't want to be separated from His Father, even for a little bit.



Thoughts?...please! Am I off my rocker on this one? Does any of this make sense?