In
Why would a god let so many of his "flock" stray?,
Lometa said:
God uses sin, evil, and suffering as a means of magnifying and enhancing his own grace and glory.
...to which
tandex replied:
What you're saying then is that God tempted man to fall in order to enhance and magnify his own grace and glory. Once again it doesn't say much for a merciful God who would dangle knowledge before an ignorant, innocent man and woman and then punish him/her with eternal damnation simply for complying with God's need for Grace and Glory.
There are plenty of issues to tackle in that exchange, but in this node I'm going to focus on the admittedly
perplexing and, on the surface of it sort of
offensive, fact that when
God acts He does so in order to magnify His own
glory throughout
Creation.
Why offensive? Because of our tendency to
anthropomorphize Him. This is not wholly a
bad thing -- we were after all created
in His image, and through the
Incarnation,
God the Son became both God and man in full. We are more like Him than we are anything else. But what I'm referring to is the unfortunate habit we get into of picturing the
eternal,
omniscient,
omnipotent creator and
Lord of the universe as a crabby, unpredictably dangerous old man with a long white beard. (In this we are confusing
God with
dannye.)
If a human being were to act primarily out of a desire to show the world how
unbelievably fantastic he is, we would think him
egotistical and
shallow; most of us on some level or another see
humility as a virtue and resent
braggarts. Self-congratulation is frowned upon, while for Christians at least, all thanks and praise are due God.
This is because God by His very nature is the highest possible
good, and a life that is lived in such a way that it points toward the glory of God would be the best possible life. So it's good for us to glorify God -- but what about Him?
Not only is God the highest possible good,
perfection in fact, but He is also the only completely self-aware being in
existence. God knows that He is the only person in creation that is truly and without reservation deserving of glorification. And because He is who He is, this is not arrogance; it is a fact. For Him not to magnify His own glory in the world He has created would be in violation of His own nature and the true order of things. It is an acknowledgement of the way things really are. Even evil and death, which if they reigned unchecked would appear to be a failure of God to protect His creation from itself, are turned by His grace into an occasion for triumph.
So his motives (insofar as we can translate them into terms our limited brains can wrap around), which would seem selfish in one of us, are entirely appropriate for God and in no way contradict His
love or the
selflessness He has shown in redeeming us. In fact, they are part of a divine whole; when God reveals His greatness to us we are led back to Him.