Israelites’ sin by loving them even more! This is God’s restorative justice.
Yet we remember collectively the admittedly harsh judgments that usually
come earlier in all these texts, which I have to believe was the prophets’ own
way of teaching the principle of karma. (Goodness is its own reward, and evil
will always be its own punishment.) This was their way of communicating
divine fairness built into our good and bad actions. But the nature of our
neurons seems to be that we remember the negative and forget the positive.
Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of
heaven.*13
As long as you operate inside any scarcity model, there will never be enough
God or grace to go around. Jesus came to undo our notions of scarcity and tip us
over into a worldview of absolute abundance—or what he would call the
“Kingdom of God.” The Gospel reveals a divine world of infinity, a worldview of
enough and more than enough. Our word for this undeserved abundance is
“grace”: “Give and there will be gifts for you: full measure, pressed down,
shaken together, and running over, and poured into your lap” (Luke 6:38). It is a
major mental and heart conversion to move from a scarcity model to an
abundance model.
No Gospel will ever be worthy of being called “Good News” unless it is
indeed a win-win worldview, and “good news for all the people” (Luke 2:10)—
without exception. The right to decide who is in, and who is out, is not one that
our little minds and hearts can even imagine. Jesus’s major theme of the Reign
of God is saying, “Only God can do such infinite imagining, so trust the Divine
Mind.”