God the interventionist

I was watching Intervention the other night (I'm pretty much obsessed with it), and during the pre-intervention the interventionist said to the addict's mother, "You are not turning your back on your son. You are saving his life." She was faced with the ultimatum of forcing her son to go to rehab for his addiction or kicking him out of her house if he refused to go to treatment.

And it made me think of God, and His anger. Maybe His anger with us is like the anger of loved ones towards an addict at an intervention. The anger is because of the love they feel towards the addict. Our addiction is to sin, and to allow us to continue to sin would be to sentence us to death, just like allowing someone to continue a heroin addiction would be a death sentence. Though it looks like punishment, it looks like He only loves us when we are good (or sober), like we are only accepted when we jump through His hoops, if we make the point of His anger about those things, I think we are completely missing the point.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his second volume of The Prophets, writes, "Nothing is so sweet to the heart of man as love. However, for love to function, the suppression of sympathy may be necessary. A surgeon would be a failure if he indulged his natural sympathy at the sight of a bleeding wound. He must suppress his emotion to save a life, he must hurt in order to heal. Genuine love, genuine mercy, must not be taken to be indulgence of mere feeling, excess of sensibility, which is commonly called sentimentality" (page 76-77). C.S. Lewis shares a similar viewpoint in A Grief Observed when he writes, "The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed--might grow tired of his vile sport--might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't"(page 49-50).

Like a surgeon, He must hurt in order to heal. Like a parent or a friend, He can't enable us if He wants a relationship with us, a healthy and good and stable relationship that is. He wouldn't be loving us if He just let us continue in our addictions; He wouldn't be love if He didn't get angry or upset when He saw us turn to the thing that was killing us again and again.