It matters to God!
It makes sense for someone to say it doesn’t matter to God whether we like him or not. But that would only be one more “sensible” thing that’s wrong because it does matter to God whether we like him or not. That’s an astonishing truth about God which, when we think about it in the light of creation and redemption in Christ, becomes obvious. How could he in love create us and not care what we think about him? It's true enough that he can be angry and chastise us but that only proves that it matters to him what we think about him! Revelation 3:19 says he chastises us because he loves us!
One of the awful lies Job’s friend Eliphaz told was this: “It doesn’t matter to God how you behave or think. It doesn’t affect him one way or another.” (See Job 22:2-3.) As the NIV renders it Eliphaz says, “Can a man be of benefit to God? Can even a wise man benefit him? What pleasure would it give the Almighty if you were righteous? What would he gain if your ways were blameless?” Eliphaz means well. He wants to exalt God far above all the puniness of humanity but in the process he bears false witness against God because the whole book of Job is built on the fact that God is proud of Job (see 1:8 and 2:3 and 42:7-8).
What pleasure does God get out of us? He loves it when we say no to the God-denying look of the world. It gives him pleasure to see us struggle against great odds, continually lose specific battles and still get back up and into the war. And we do battle against great odds. We’ve been shaped in wickedness, we’ve come to love ease and take great pleasure in feathering our present and post-mortem nests. We’ve been dominated by patterns of behaviour for many years and there’s enough evil in the world to continue to feed those patterns that makes them hard to break.
Poverty and war, social evils and paramilitaries, entrenched corruption in government, ill-health and depression come at us, wave after wave. Now and then we sense the awful power of the Sin that has the world by the throat and it’s then we see the cross for what it is. All these awful evils that we can see and sense remind us that there is something deeper, more awful than these visible horrors; they’re the tip of the iceberg. So when you stand up, when you shut your mouth to vile speech, when you open your hand in generosity, when you open your heart in forgiveness, when you dismiss the temptation to isolate yourself from the church and the needy world, it matters to God. It pleases him! More than that, it advances his cosmic purposes. You are fighting God's battle for him against all the forces of gloom and cynicism in the world. One day you will see the glory of what you have done!
Believe it: it matters to God!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.