The Unselfishness Of God

Ihave always felt that this was the moment when I truly discovered the unselfishness of God .

Until then, although I rejoiced in the salvation I had found for myself, I still suffered from a secret, torturing suspicion that, in the end, it was a rather selfish salvation —both on God’s part and on mine.

How could a good God enjoy Himself in Heaven while knowing that a large proportion of the beings He Himself had created were doomed to eternal misery — unless He were, in some way, a selfish God? I knew the Bible said He was a God of love, and I supposed it must be true. But deep down there remained that hidden feeling that His love could not stand comparison with the ideal of love I felt in my own heart.

I knew that, imperfect as my love was, I could never enjoy Heaven while even one of my children — no matter how disobedient — was shut out. And the thought that God could , and did , enjoy Heaven while countless thousands of His children were shut out seemed to reveal a failure in the most essential element of love. So even while I was grateful for forgiveness and the sure hope of Heaven for myself, I often felt that the God I worshipped must be a selfish God, caring more for His own comfort and His glory than for the suffering beings He had made.

But now I began to see that the wideness of God’s love was far beyond anything I had ever imagined. If I gathered together all the unselfish love of every mother’s heart in the whole world, multiplied it by millions, and pressed it into one place, I would still have nothing more than a faint shadow of the unselfishness of God.

I had always thought of Him as loving. But now I discovered something far deeper: He did not merely possess love — He was love itself , love embodied and woven into the very essence of His being.

I saw that God was, as it were, made of love, so that in the very nature of things He could not act cont rary to love. It wasn’t that He chose not to — it was that He could not , because love was the very essence of His nature. The law of love, like the law of gravity, is inevitable in its operation.

God, if I may say so, is under this law and cannot help obeying it. And once I understood this, trusting the God of love became as natural as breathing. Every doubt evaporated, and I was filled with boundless delight at the thought of having been created by such an unselfish God.

I saw that His role as Creator was, in itself, an absolute guarantee that He would care for us and make all things work together for our good. The responsibilities of ownership blazed with breathtaking clarity. Not the rights of ownership — as I had always thought — but its duties , the obligations that ownership imposes.

Just as, in a civilized society, people are held responsible — by public opinion or even by law — to care properly for the things they own, so our Creator is necessarily bound, by the moral law of His own nature, to take proper care of the beings He has made. He must be held responsible for our well-being.

It was all so glorious that it often seemed almost too good to be true — that we truly belonged to such an unselfish God. Many a time, when some new insight into His goodness overwhelmed me, I would take my Bible, open it to the passages declaring that we belong to Him, and put my fingers on the verses, reading them aloud just to reassure myself that they really did say — freely and without limitation — that He was indeed my Owner.

The phrase, “Remember thy Creator,” suddenly took on a wholly different character. I had always thought of it as a warning meant to frighten us into good behavior. Now it shone with comfort — a delightful assurance that everything must be well with the creatures of such an unselfish Creator.

I saw that God was good not merely in a religious sense, but in the truest, most practical sense of the word. And a good Creator was, of course, bound to make everything go right with His creation. The fact that nothing was hidden from His eyes — once so terrifying — became the most comforting truth in the universe, because it meant He knew all about us and could therefore do His best for us.

My own experience as a mother — once a source of conflict with my beliefs about God — now came into perfect harmony. My children have been the joy of my life. I cannot imagine bliss more exquisite than the moments when my arms have been around them. Those moments have seemed nearer to the joy of Heaven than anything else on earth. And I think this joy has taught me more about God’s feelings toward His children than anything else.

If I, a finite human being with limited capacity, could find such joy in my children, what must God — with His infinite heart — feel for His? Most of my understanding of the love of God has come from this very experience. I could not believe that God had created me with a greater capacity for unselfish love and self-sacrifice than He possessed Himself. Since discovering the mother-heart of God, I have answered every doubt about God ’s love simply by looking into my own heart as a mother.

To me, it is impossible that a true mother could be selfish toward her children. A mother who puts her own comfort and welfare before her children is, in my mind, an unnatural mother, one who has failed in her highest calling. And if one looks at what we call the lower creation, even the animals teach us the supreme duty of maternal self-giving. The mother tiger will die before she lets harm come to her young. She will starve so they may eat. Could God do less?

I speak of self-sacrifice, but in truth I cannot really call it sacrifice. No true mother — one who knows the reality of motherhood — would ever regard her care for her children as a sacrifice. It may involve exhaustion or hardship, but not sacrifice in the ordinary sense. The real sacrifice would be if she were not allowed to care for them.

For this reason, I believe that many disappointed mothers — who do not receive the gratitude they desire — have only themselves to blame, because they demanded gratitude rather than inspired it.

This understanding has revealed to me God’s feelings toward us: that what we call Christ’s “self - sacrifice” was simply the natural and necessary expression of His love; and that the astonishing thing is not that He did it, but that He could not have done otherwise .

Since discovering the mother-heart of God, I have never been able to feel the slightest anxiety for any of His children — and by His children, I do not mean only the good ones, but the bad ones equally. Did not Jesus tell us that the Good Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine safe sheep to search for the one that is lost, and does not rest until He finds it?

Viewed in the light of motherhood, the word “lost” becomes profoundly comforting. Nothing can be “lost” unless it is owned by someone. To be lost means only, “not yet found.” The lost coin is still gold, bearing the king’s image. The lost sheep is still a sheep, not a wolf. The lost son is still a son, with his father’s blood in his veins.

So if a person is a “lost sinner,” it simply means he is owned by the Good Shepherd, and that the Shepherd, by the very duties of ownership, must go after that which is lost — and keep going until He finds it.

To me, the word “lost” contains the strongest possible proof of ownership.

Who can imagine a mother with a lost child having one moment of rest until the child is found?

And who could imagine God being less concerned than a mother?

I believe that all the problems of the spiritual life , which so often distress conscientious souls, would disappear like morning mist before the rising sun if only the full blaze of the mother-heart of God were allowed to shine upon them.

I came to see that, since Scripture declares we were created in the image of God, we are obliged to believe that the best in us — not the worst — is what reflects that image. Anything that, in our highest and most unselfish moments, appears selfish, unkind, unjust, or self-seeking must never be attributed to God, no matter how things may “seem.” If God is unselfish, then He must be at least as unselfish as the noblest ideal we can conceive — and of course infinitely more.

All the biblical texts about God’s goodness suddenly shone with new meaning. I realized that His goodness is not a condescending benevolence but a genuine, wholehearted goodness — one that includes true unselfishness, deep consideration, and above all, justice. Justice has always seemed to me one of the first essentials of goodness; I cannot imagine calling anyone “good” who is unjust, no matter how impressive their outward appearance of virtue may be. In short, I had, such an overwhelming revelation of God’s intrinsic and inherent goodness and unselfishness that nothing since has been able to shake it. Many aspects of His dealings with the world have been,, and still are, mysterious to me; but I am convinced that every one of them could be explained through the lens of His love and justice, if only I could see deeply enough. And I believe that one day I will see clearly what I now hold by faith: that His loving kindness truly reaches over all His works.

I do not mean that all this understanding came to me at once. But I do mean that on that day, riding a tramcar in Philadelphia, a light broke across the character of God — a light that has never dimmed in the slightest and has only grown brighter with each passing year.

For me, it is enough to say, “God is,” and the answer to every difficulty is already present. What amazes me is that I, along with so many other Christians, had failed to see this, even with the open Bible before us —and that all sorts of distortions of God’s character, even outright slanders against His goodness, can find a ready welcome in Christian hearts. To me, such misrepresentations became almost unbearable. I could listen patiently — even with interest — to almost any strange or unorthodox idea that did not malign God’s character. But the one thing I could not endure, the one thing I could not sit quietly through, was anything that — even under a cloak of piety —suggested the faintest insult to God’s love or His unselfishness.

I will never forget a memorable incident in our home when a distinguished preacher from Boston was visiting us. At breakfast, the conversation turned to God’s love. He insisted that you must not rely on it too much, for there were limits to what God could endure — just as, he said, there were limits to a mother’s love. He claimed that a daughter might commit certain sins a mother could never forgive, sins that would forever close her heart and her home, and he argued that God was the same. To believe otherwise, he said, was to hold a “grandmotherly religion.”

I have no doubt he meant to undermine my views on Restitution, though we were not discussing that topic. He simply wished to convince me that God was not as “foolishly loving” as I believed. But to hear mothers, and the God who created mothers, so misrepresented was more than I could bear. Though he was my guest, I burst out in fierce indignation, declared that I would not sit at the table with anyone who held such slanderous ideas of God, and left the room in tears. I refused to see him again. I do not claim that this reaction was courteous or even Christ- like, but it shows how overwhelmingly I felt about the matter. To me, the honor of God outweighed every rule of social etiquette.

I see now that I might have defended that honor just as strongly, but in a far more Christ-like way. Still, to this day, the one thing I find extremely hard to tolerate is anything that maligns the character of God. Nothing else compares to this in importance, for our entire salvation depends absolutely on who God is. Unless he can be shown to be wholly good, wholly unselfish, and wholly just, then our case is utterly hopeless. God alone is our salvation, and if He fails us — even in the smallest degree — we have nowhere else to turn.