Ultimatums for the Faint of Heart, Part II

To be perfectly honest, I’ve reappropriated the word “ultimatum” to mean something a bit different. Normally an ultimatum looks a little like this:

“If you don’t (stop doing drugs/smoking/cheating on me/watching porn/etc.), I will (divorce you/kick you out/stab you with a fork/etc.).”

Simply put, an ultimatum can be reduced to this basic formula:

“If you do THIS, I will do THIS about it AND THAT’S THAT.”

So I thought to myself, Can ultimatums look different? Can they be the opposite of what we see them as now? E.G., Can an ultimatum be positive?

 

I’m going to ruin part of your childhood now. When you were a kid, if you ever got a chance to go to a travelling summer carnival, did it have a little water-filled track crowded with floating rubber duckies? And if you picked just the right duckie with the magnetic fishing pole, you won a prize? Well let me tell you, children, YOU WERE BEING LIED TO ALL ALONG. Mom or Pop slipped the barker a fiver so no matter what faux avian you chose, you were sure to win a cheap velveteen stuffed animal (unless they dropped fifteen bucks on you, in which case you’d be upgraded to an inflatable electric guitar). Let me repeat: EVERYONE’S A WINNER. Especially the carnival.

Duck 1 à Prize 1

Duck 2 à Prize 1

Ducks 3- 5,000 à Prize 1

 

 

 

Let’s translate this duck example to ultimatum form:

“If you (perform any conceivable behavior, positive or negative), I will (single possible response)."

 

 

 

Examples:

“If you bring me a bouquet of fresh roses every day, I will love you.”

“If you petsit my thousand cats, I will love you.”

“If you write me romantic sonnets and douse them with lavender perfume and hide them under my pillow, I will love you.”

“If you spit in my lemonade, I will love you.”

“If you let all my thousand cats die while I’m on vacation, I will love you.”

"If you spent all our life savings at the casino last weekend, I will love you."

 

 

As some of you may have guessed, this is all a thinly veiled metaphor for

***JESUS***

Dat's right, whoaaaaaa blew your mind

 

 

 

 

 

God was really bad at doing basic math, folks. Like worse than me.

He claims to be perfect Justice and perfect Mercy at the same time. But in my mind, those two things are opposites.

 

Justice= giving or withholding a punishment based on what is due

 

Mercy= withholding a punishment despite what is due



Ya can't be 100% of two opposite traits at once, God! That's impossible!!! That's 200%! Come on, this is BASIC STUFF!

But God is like, "Whatever. I invented gravity and sex. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT"

Somehow, He surpasses our tiny little human brain-logic and manages to perfectly meld together two opposite traits into something that makes sense: Jesus as Scapegoat. God gets to dole out the necessary 100% justice and still manages to deflect it from us-- 100% mercy.

 

 

I once heard the phrase "The hardest 12 inches to travel is from the head to the heart." As in, "You can know something intellectually but not feel it." As in, "Technically I know 'the doctrine' says I'm forgiven and God loves me and stuff but it just really doesn't feel like it right now."
 

This is where that mercy comes in. God's all like,

"You're a little bit right. Maybe you don't deserve my mercy and grace, since you're not exactly perfect and I'm Mister Justice and all. But I paid my five dollars, so YOU'RE FREAKING GETTING THE PRIZE."

whoooo dang that came out of nowhere and even surprised me

 

Let me go back for a moment to that word "feel." It doesn't "feel" like God loves you? I know how that is, dude. Or at least it doesn't feel like he could love you. Maybe you feel like a ball of slime sometimes (or a lot of the time).

THAT'S WHY FEELINGS ARE DUMB AND DON'T MATTER for the purposes of this illustration!

 

 

 

"To feel" could actually be replaced by the more specific phrase, "To experience a subjective emotion at a given point in time and in given circumstances."

"To know" something implies that whatever's receiving the action of your knowing is a TRUE THING.Whereas when you "feel" something, it's admittedly been subjected to the bias of the observer.

Are we following so far? When you "know" something, it's real. When you "feel" something, it may be real... or it may be false.

Somehow, people are able to accept negative ultimatums much easier than positive ones. It's much easier for us to grasp "I will punish you when you do something bad" than "I will stay with you even when you leave me." Maybe this is because we don't have too many examples of dramatic Mercy among our human peers. If we did... if people forgave more easily, would we be able to more easily conceive of positive ultimatums?

Anyway, I wanted to lead into this all gracefully and artfully, but I'm running dry on connective metaphors.

God offers us a bunch of positive ultimatums, and we too often defer to our negative feelings instead of believing what He says is true.

 

For example, God says through Paul:

"...my brothers, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses." (Acts 13:38-39, NIV)

 "If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection." (Romans 6:5, NIV)

"... now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life." (Romans 6:22, NIV)

(Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®.
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.)

As I type these verses, my brain is already fighting them. "What if I don't really believe, though? Does "believing" consist of obedience as well as intellectual assention to a precept? Maybe I don't really count as a 'believer' because I don't always obey. Maybe I was only halfhearted when I committed my life to Jesus. What about when I'm backsliding? Do I still count as 'united' then????"

Ya know what? I don't know. I don't know all the answers to every deep theological question and I never will.

All I'm trying to do here is point out that God says a lot of good things about us, but we typically ignore them. Instead we take all the scary-punishment parts of the Bible and act like they're more true than the happy parts. I do this too. Probably more than you. And this distorted view of God likely contributes to my fear of going to hell.

If I knew-- and by "knew" I mean, "accepted as true everything God says about me"-- I'd probably be less scared.

But like I said in my last post, it's really hard to distinguish truth from fiction when you're right in the thick of it. It's not easy to get head knowledge down to your heart.

Much of the time, the unspoken motto of Christians is

"Fake it 'til you make it."

Don't love your neighbor? Act like you do, and soon you might find your hatred starting to melt away.
Don't actually want to serve anyone? Well, start anyway and maybe you'll find out it brings you joy.

Don't really believe that God's grace is the only component necessary for salvation?

PRETEND YOU DO, AND IT'LL HAPPEN.

 

That's my non-theologian, broken-brain advice. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to write some of these verses down and stick them in places that are obvious to my eyeballs.

 

 

The advent of the next post will return you to your regularly scheduled Argentina jocularity/poop jokes.