The Otherworldly Ways of a Reckless God
The song “Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury is a ship that sailed nearly five years ago, but it sparked an internal argument that has retained a nagging presence in my mind since the first time I heard it.
The song was catchy, but overall, I found it unremarkable. What was most interesting to me were the online debates that it sparked. They were fascinatingly negative. Even the most gracious were uncomfortable with the use of “reckless” to describe God’s love (and thereby God Himself).
John Piper (in what was, characteristically, the most even-handed and pastoral article on the song) found the use of reckless, if not heretical, at least unhelpful. He cool-headedly noted that precious hymns such as “And Can It Be” have had similar imprecise descriptions of God’s love and expressed some concern about the song’s possible leanings toward Open Theism.
However, he did offer a tentative possible interpretation which, in a nutshell, mirrors my own perspective:
But maybe the author used the word reckless in the sense that God’s love may look (to an outsider) foolish, ill-advised, brash, and breakneck, but in fact the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.
The recklessness of God is more assured of success than the most carefully executed plans of men.
Maybe.
John Piper, who is so often the first to be swept up in adoration of the goodness of God, is very cautious with this concept of recklessness.
I am not.
The God of the Bible is clearly portrayed not as merely exhibiting a kind of rage, a kind of foolishness, and a kind of hate, but rather a perfect anger, flawless foolishness, and holy hatred that are the hallmark of a supernaturally wise and merciful love.
If the understanding of our God’s foolish wisdom in revealing His secrets to babes sent our Savior into soliloquys, what praise will the revelation of His recklessness reveal?
The goal of this article is to show you the beauty of God in His redemptive recklessness, to approach the unapproachable by way of an adjective.
For sometimes, like the road to Emmaus, the road that seems to lead away from the holy city leads us closest to its King.
Precise philosophers, both stuffy and gracious theologians, and critical thinkers of all stripes are often frustrated by the artist’s claim to the irrational. The muse does not count with an abacus or come to her conclusions via geometric proof.
The artist is always trying to find a new connection, to see their subject in a new and fascinating light. The rationalist is trying to see all things in the same light to see how they fit together. The artist disappears in the stained glass window; the rationalist is a crisp shadow on the operating table.
Both the rationalist and the artist hearken to the image of their Maker, but both fall short. The artist goes astray too easily, the rationalist turns neither to the right or to the left and never finds what he is looking for.
The rationalist is looking for something old; he is looking for the roots of things. The artist is looking for something new; he wants to be where the flower blooms and even open its petals himself.
God is the giver of the root and the flower. He is the oldest of all things and yet His mercies are new every morning. He is joyfully, terribly, and ferociously the same, yet simultaneously different every time we look at him.
Every story God tells, every moment He creates is a new expression of Himself. It is utterly unprecedented, except for every other moment which ever came before it.
We see God in a hundred million minute and gargantuan ways as He shows Himself with blazing splendor over and over again, endlessly unchangeable in His eternal newness.
One day he saves a friend from a car wreck and He is utterly God. The next day He takes a friend away, weak and wasted, and He is utterly God. One day (more than two-thousand years ago), He became a Man… and He was still utterly God.
We are always seeing God in new and unexpected ways. Even His antipathies, from death and sin to pain and pride, are swept up in His symphony.
Thus the imprecise artist, with his words pulled out of thin air, devoid of analytical scaffolding, finds something new about the old God. He finds God reborn and revealed in facet after glittering facet of faith.
Therefore, in this vast universe of songs and stories, of books and poems, of paragraphs and sentences that have described and revealed to us anew the glory of the unchangeable God, I will add my own brief appendix, my own small but unbowed microcosm.
I will add one adjective and I will defend it. Not because I love the word itself but because I love my God whom it represents.
Do I believe God to be reckless? Yes. I believe Him wildly and perfectly reckless.
I believe this not because I love wildness for wildness’ sake, but because I saw and loved it first in my Savior. In the same way that God alone can hate perfectly because He is love, only God can be flawlessly reckless because He is omniscient.
He knows profoundly all the painful consequences of His actions, so only He can profoundly disregard each one. It is this disregard which has purchased our redemption. It is this wildness which has won the world from the darkness of the Devil.
It is this recklessness on which the glory of God is built.
This is not a defense of a word, it is a defense of God Himself.
I won’t pretend that wasn’t melodramatic. I was originally intending to be much more lighthearted with this piece.
The first title I came up with was “God is Reckless (Unless you are a Calvinist)”, a phrase which would draw little ire from Calvinists and even less laughter from Arminians (though it drew significantly more from me).
The motivations behind that title were mostly humorous, but they were serious enough that I scrapped it for something more ecumenical.
I have already gone to great lengths to emphasize my support for the idea of God’s recklessness. However, what do I mean by “recklessness” with regards to God?
There are three aspects of God’s character and dealings with humanity which are innately reckless.
- His incarnation
- His atonement
- His will
Really, my list above is only a list of places where God’s recklessness pops up most clearly in the story of redemption. All of these “aspects” are really clear implications of one another.
If God was reckless in His incarnation, robbing Himself of equality with God and robing Himself in the weakness of man, He was equally reckless in every moment He orchestrated leading up to it (His will). If He was reckless becoming a man and living sinlessly in a sin-soaked world, He was reckless in dying for that whole world when He knew many would not receive Him (His atonement).
Let me briefly explain each aspect.
The incarnation was reckless because the Son did not reckon with His own power or position, but emptied Himself to become a man. Even then, He did not become a man fully-formed like Adam, but a baby in a cold manger. The God of the Universe became vulnerable, sick, and hungry.
He was tempted and He was weak. He got angry and sad and happy. In the end, He was hated and eventually killed. Though God showed great concern and forethought for us, He showed little regard for Himself.
His atonement was reckless because it was lavish. If we take 1 Tim 4:10 and 1 John 2:2 at their word, Christ died as a free sacrifice for every person who ever lived, yet countless millions of those people would reject God’s love. The atonement was and still is recklessly unrequited in the hearts of the damned.
His will is reckless because it is good. God works all things together for good to those who love Him in the midst of an unquestionably evil world. The balance of history walks on a razor-thin line: one slip could send the wavering masses of humanity into the abyss. But God, with invariable mastery, beats all the odds to magnify His name, show all His glory, and fulfill all His foreknowledge.
However, there are plenty of substantial objections that I have found to the idea of God’s being reckless. Chief among them are the accusations that recklessness plainly means uncaring, irresponsible, or inconsiderate of consequences.
The question is, which cares, what responsibilities, and whose consequences? We may have certain standards that answers those questions, but too often we set our standards in the wrong places.
Jesus has always exposed and challenged people’s standards. When He gave out free lunches, people flocked to Him, but when He offered Himself for lunch, people ran away (John 6:53–58).
When His mother and brothers came to see Him, He profoundly redefined His family. In another place, He even says that without hating father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, no one can be His disciple (Luke 14:26).
Yes, a man must count the cost of discipleship, but we must remember that the cost is always too high. It may not be reckless to consider the cost of discipleship, but it is certainly reckless to pay it.
Jesus has already made it clear that the cost is everything you have and more. Count the cost while you can, but do not count it forever or you will find it to cost much more than you could ever have reckoned.
It is reckless to lose your life, even if you save it in the end. Such recklessness, however, is vital to faith.
In addition, I have heard the argument that God is not reckless because He considers the consequences of His actions. To me, this seems to be another non sequitur.
A man who spends three days deliberating over the consequences of going into battle armed with a pencil and clad in only his underwear is no less reckless when he does so than someone who spends but three seconds in contemplation.
In fact, the man who considers the decision for three days might be called worse than reckless: he may be called a fool.
Our standard is one of care and consequences: God’s standard is one of souls. He counted the cost of our redemption, found it nearly as high as His own eternal being, and plunged in anyway.
The God who turned His back on Himself and stretched the limits of the Trinity for the sake of the pittance of pitiful souls who would believe in Him is not a study of calculated decorum. Such a God is a warrior armed with a wild passion and a jealous love. Such a God is the raiser of the sun, the shouter of battle cries, the breather of the universe, and the reckless maker of man.
Yes, even God’s supreme act of creation was a risk the size of the cosmos. To create another free agent after His own image (and to give him authority over the universe) was surely the original most reckless of loves. And yet it was the only environment in which love could exist at all.
I suspect that several of my readers are getting slightly nervous and possibly glancing around for their pitchforks or a set of stakes, firewood, and gasoline (though I do not intend on pulling a Servetus any time soon).
To imply that God takes risks and does not consider consequences begins to sound blasphemous, swaying dangerously towards rhetoric reminiscent of the Open Theist.
An Open Theist (for anyone unfamiliar with the term) is simply someone who upholds the free will of man and denies God’s foreknowledge of man’s free actions.
I am not an Open Theist.
I affirm a view of God’s foreknowledge in which God does not decree the free actions of free creatures but knows them and their outcomes nonetheless.
God’s foreknowledge in that sense seems like an obvious conclusion to me. It is how specifically He has this foreknowledge which is much more interesting.
What is the mechanism behind God’s foreknowledge? Does He have a Molinist middle knowledge where He has foreknowledge by dint of knowing every single possibility?
Does He have foreknowledge because He is outside of time and all things are unfolding before Him simultaneously in an eternal present moment?
Does He have foreknowledge simply because He decided exactly what would happen to every atom and molecule in the universe at any given second from before creation?
I don’t know. I doubt it’s the first one, I hope it’s the second one, and I do not believe it is the third.
How then can I say that God takes risks? If the underwear-clad, pencil-wielding man from before had known for certain that he would win the battle despite his inadequate attire, could we really call him reckless? If he knew the consequences of his unorthodox actions were good, how could he be careless?
God knows every outcome, yet every outcome is still the result of truly free actions. Even foreknown outcomes involve risk: foreknowledge merely knows how that risk will resolve.
Foreknown victory does not make underwear and a pencil less risky implements. Neither does foreknown success do so for a baby and a cross. God not only knows every outcome and is sovereign over every soul, but also takes unimaginable risks and dares unthinkable consequences.
God is both the regal emperor and the reckless rebel in His own universe.
Interestingly, He is equally wild in both roles.
The emperor gives with a prodigal liberality, a lavish generosity that borders on wasteful.
In the famous story of the prodigal son, we have a picture of two kinds of wastefulness and two types of prodigality. The son takes his inheritance and spends it recklessly on prodigal living. He throws his birthright into the pockets of pleasure in a picture of prodigality that is hell-bent on hedonism and hedonistically bent on hell.
The father, on the other hand, first generously gives the son all that is his right though he knows it will be wasted. Then, when the son returns, he throws him a banquet and honors him richly.
The son was predictably reckless, but the father was spectacularly so.
Did the father calculate exactly how much he needed to give for his son to come home? Did he carefully consider the cost of loving his son and make his decision from there? His son had spurned his gifts before, he could do so again.
No, the Father did not and does not balance the books with souls. He does not love or not love based on the price tag. He loves because He is love.
It is not conjecture to say that God left no stone unturned to effect our redemption. Christ calls us to leave all to follow Him because He left all to be with us.
There was no price Immanuel did not pay to win us back. The lavishness of His gift remains as a memorial to His reckless generosity.
But even the giving of that gift was risky.
As a rebel God-man in the universe which God created and man gave up, Christ was no less reckless. He was incarnated in weak and susceptible flesh. Through suffering He had to learn obedience and reality could come tumbling down any moment if he didn’t.
Jesus kept every command, fulfilled every prophecy, and conquered every temptation. God’s unprecedented infiltration of His own creation was a resounding success which reverberated through the entire cosmos. It finished and began a story at whose final bell all will be made new and nothing will remain as it was before.
And yet it is vitally important to know that Christ only won because He could have lost. He could only succeed because He could have failed. There can be no victory over sin if there is no battle.
Adam fought sin and failed. In Christ, God took gloves off and fought in our place. The crucial point, however, was that God had to actually, truly, really, and fully be in our place. His substitutionary humility, perfection, death, and resurrection could have no power for man if they were not performed by a man with all the weaknesses common to man.
God knew that Christ would be born in a manger, ride into Jerusalem on a colt, die on a cross, be buried in a rich man’s tomb, and rise again on the third day: He knew that His plan would be executed perfectly.
But He still had to overcome enormous odds with His own Godhead as collateral to pull off the most reckless and redemptive plotline in the history of the cosmos.
I’m going to discuss Biblical examples of God’s lavish recklessness and redemptive risk taking in a moment. I’ll explore the jealous and uncompromising wildness of the self-sacrificial love of God.
But first I want to take a step back.
If we thought that God was merely a planner of plans and a schemer of schemes, a calculated God who has drawn up his accounts and written his screenplay and has decreed them all together so that all of history was already done from eternity, He would still be wonderful.
If God had determined whatsoever shall come to pass down to the timing of our breaths, we would yet have the grandest and greatest God in the universe. We would have a narrative of unparalleled love and poignancy.
But, wonder of wonders and glory of glories, this is not our God. Our God did not tell this story because He made it up, but because it happened.
He is the author of the story, with all of its sublime grandeur already clear in His mind, down to each intricately gorgeous detail. Yet He is also this story’s actor, writing each paragraph and page as it happens in a swift and stupendous show of blood and ink, love and action and predestination all at once.
For even the predestination of God is wild and untamed, plunging with prophetic certainty into depths of pain and impossibility only to resurface with hands full of glory and eyes full of grace.
What God has predetermined will occur, He predetermines by His own will and action. When He declares He will have checkmate in five moves, lose two pawns and a bishop, and end the game with a knight on c3, His word is absolute not because He has taken control over the other players, but because He is a masterful player of chess.
His Word does not come back to Him void. He has created the rules of the universe and He plays by them. In the words of the Westminster confession:
…neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
— Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1
God has created agents whose wills are not violated and secondary causes whose liberty is real and undamaged. Though these wills are often if not always weak and wayward, our God neither takes away their freedom nor their authority. Each wayward choice has a real and various possibilities, each with a real and incontrovertible effect.
However, even through the most difficult and dangerous of passages, God has painted His purposes with an unparalleled pointedness of poignancy to execute His preordinations to perfection.
A safe God would break wills and waive second causes to save the world all at once in a burst of blank benevolence. A reckless God has relegated Himself to the confines of His own arena. Like the Harry Houdini of Heaven, our God is working with both hands tied behind His back, because He has tied them. He is a willing captive to His own story, an athlete competing according to the rules.
And He will be crowned.
For even thus restrained, He has still turned darkness into light, changed night into day and death into life; He has overcome the greatest of all enemies with his very own weapons in the hands of the weakest of all things.
Our Christian lives are the most dangerous and exciting lives that could be lived, while also the safest and most peaceful. Because of our God, we have all the joy of certain victory with all the exhilaration of inevitable defeat.
We fight for freedom because we already have it, and we have it already because we fight for it as though we did not.
Because our God is reckless, we too must be reckless. Our divine wisdom must be pagan foolishness, our supernatural understanding become natural ignorance, and our heavenly mind of Christ be incarnated into the earthly mind of a maniac.
Not only is the recklessness of God beautiful, it is powerful. It is the catalyst for all of our own actions.
Christ is our captain and we are His motley crew. If Christ risked nothing, we paddle like pretend sailors in a pond of impotence.
But if Christ risked everything, then we have no excuse but to walk on the water beside Him, unrolling the edge of the horizon as we unravel the tempestuous darkness of the Devil into the peaceful, oceanic dawn of our Father.
This article so far has been a set of barely-sane soliloquys. More than half of my arguments have been more aesthetic than logical, preferring poetry to practicality.
I still contend that poetry is the most practical of all positions, but I digress.
It is, nonetheless, time for the hay to hit the hardtack, the diaconate to dilate the dustbin, and my book-bloating blabber to bite the bullet and cite the Bible.
It’s time for the nitty to hit the gritty and quote chapter and verse.
But where to begin? The sweet symbol of the drink offering in Exodus 29:40–41 or Genesis 35:14? The radical and unlikely love of Hosea 1:2? The wasted warnings of Matthew 11:20–24? The wasted perfume of John 12:3? The foolish wisdom of 1 Corinthians 1:18–21?
All of these examples show that God works differently than us. His standards are not our standards and His ways are not our ways.
In fact, Isaiah 55 is often used as a passage to point out that we can never fully understand God’s ways. I agree with them, but I think that this passage shows us not merely that God’s ways are a mystery, but it demonstrates how His ways are a mystery.
In “Mere Christianity”, C.S. Lewis says the following, speaking of the Trinity by geometric analogy, comparing our understanding of God to the two-dimensional being’s understanding of three-dimensional space:
In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways — in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
God’s ways are never entirely incomprehensible, but they are “put together” (so to speak) at a point just beyond our full comprehension. How does this apply to Isaiah 55?
Seek the Lord while He may be found,
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
Let him return to the Lord,
And He will have mercy on him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.”
- Isaiah 55:8–10
With the famous statement “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God is not saying that we should face His doings which we do not understand with resignation, nor with non sequiturs.
He is, in fact, describing the way in which His ways are not ours. He emphasizes His holy otherness while simultaneously condescending to our own dimension via the verses before.
God’s ways are not our ways because He pardons those who return to Him. God is not like us because He is merciful. This echoes Ezekiel 18:25, the climax of one of the most profound passages in the Old Testament:
“Do I have any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?” says the Lord God, “and not that he should turn from his ways and live?”
“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not fair.’ Hear now, O house of Israel, is it not My way which is fair, and your ways which are not fair?
-Ezekiel 18:23,25
God is not telling us that we don’t know anything about His ways: He is telling us exactly how His ways work. He is telling us that His ways are higher than our ways not because they are incomprehensible but because they are abundantly merciful.
It is this mind-boggling abundance that bends the radical love of God into recklessness. It leads us into a land of inverses and opposites where our world is turned constantly on its head.
Our own dimension of understanding is built out of the same squares and oblongs as the more daring dimension of our God. His eternal inversion of our expectations is familiar, yet profoundly foreign.
When God pours wine over His sacrifices and leaves the edges of His fields unharvested, when He multiplies a few loaves and fewer fish into twelve baskets of leftovers, when He stretches out His hands and His prophets over and over again, only to draw them back covered in blood and insults, He shows us a reckless extravagance that is impractical and wrong in every sense except that it rings more right than all of our own careful self-preservation.
All of the virtues which we have pursued in sin have become vices, and the vices which we left behind have become virtues.
Eternal weakness is stronger than any mortal might, divine rage meeker than any earthly gentleness, heavenly hatred more loving than any human devotion, holy jealousy more selfless than any earthly charity, and the foolishness of God wiser than all the understanding of men.
If God may be foolish and full of hatred, why can He not be reckless? If He is a lover bright-eyed with jealous fury, is He not also a lover burning with reckless rage?
Ours is not a God of safe steps and tame stories: He is a God who marries prostitutes, stores His treasure in jars of clay, sends His Son in sin-susceptible flesh, stretches out His hands to a disobedient people, sheds His blood for lawless sinners, and has promised to win the world with a kingdom of weaklings.
Divine recklessness is superficially similar to earthly recklessness. Earthly recklessness is hateful and weak, furious and foolish.
So is divine recklessness.
However, the hatred of divine recklessness is humble and unselfish, its weakness is meek and mighty, its fury is pure and impartial, and its foolishness is as wise as truth itself.
The nature of God takes all the language of our earthly dimension and transcends it, elevating points into lines, circles into spheres, cubes into tesseracts, and recklessness into reverence.
Our earthly penny-pinching cannot match or comprehend God’s eternal extravagance, nor can our self-absorbed fears grasp His self-sacrificial courage, so we call Him reckless.
God is reckless because we are too cautious. He is wild because we are too restrained. He is jealous because we are passionless. He hates because we do not love.
He is reckless because we are “reck-full”. We reckon with the immediate and the insipid. He reckons with the intrepid and the eternal. The costs that we count as consequences vanish in the wind. God calculates clearly with concerns which will outlast the earth itself.
God is severely lacking in sin. We are not.
If we reduce our God to a mere miser of moments and a counter of consequences, our Godless confusion and sin-shortened sight will lead us to ruin.
The calculations of men are the laughingstock of God, written in the variables of vanity. The carefulness of God is recklessness to men.
To deal with this world in God’s dimension, we must walk in His ways with an otherworldly wisdom.
This wisdom is first pure then peaceable, rich with an alien mercy and supernatural with a fleshly foolishness. This wisdom pours itself out to the last drop for one parched man in a thousand who will open his mouth; it shatters the deepest darkness into the purest of dawns against the most diabolical odds; this wisdom turns the hinges of the universe on the birth of a bawling baby in a barn in Bethlehem.
Our God’s love is foolish and reckless to the world. We are fallen humans made in the image of God: we are everything God is in every way He is not. God, on the other hand, is everything that we are in every way that we are not.
Thus our recklessness is our ruin, but God’s recklessness is our salvation.
There is no worthier witness to the glorious love of God than this salvation, no act more representative of His character than redemption. It is His strongest story and sweetest song.
Each movement leaps from unreserved self-sacrifice to outrageous generosity, awash with broken perfume bottles and interwoven wills.
Our God has signed His symphony with a melody that is inerrantly wild, beautifully breathtaking, and radically reckless.
And it is marvelous in our eyes.
