Deuteronomy 9 response by sungyak:
sungyak: The Skeptic understands correctly that God’s love for Israel was not merited by works, but is something freely given to his chosen people as he promised in his covenant. But the inference that God’s love is therefore arbitrary and untrue is far too rash. If God’s free gift of love is based on a promise, how is it arbitrary? And, more importantly, why can’t it be evidence of his love? What makes marriage more ‘loving’ than a one-night stand? Isn’t it because the former is bound by a promise (i.e. vowing to love no matter what) and the latter lacks one (i.e. we’ll see how things turn out tomorrow)? If love is merely based on earning another’s affections by works, where does forgiveness, sacrifice, mercy, and grace come in? Where’s the evidence of love in saying, ‘I’ll love you only as long as you don’t fall short of meeting my standards of love’? Is it less loving of God to lavish his gifts on his chosen people when his people fail to reciprocate that love to God? Why must we think this way? When a mother lavishes her love on her newborn infant, who is utterly incapable of reciprocating the same kind of love to the mother, do we condemn the mother for being selfish and manipulative? Or is she more loving because she has chosen to love her helpless child? And if free will is defined as ‘the ability to do what one desires to do,’ what is the problem in God’s predestining those who, due to their own fallen nature, cannot freely desire to reciprocate the love they’ve received?
Me: God does not give the Israelites a “free gift of love.” His promise to them is nothing like the promise one gives in marriage to love another for all time. In marriage, one promises to love another no matter what. Despite God’s promise to the ancestors of Israel, we see God kill thousands upon thousands of his chosen people for behaving wickedly, and in a variety of “creative” ways (snake bites, plagues, fire, swallowed by the earth, etc). However, this is nothing compared to the fact that God wishes to destroy all of his chosen people multiple times because of their wickedness. He literally proposes to kill them all and to “restart” through Moses. Although God is supposed to be all loving and perfect, it is the mortal, insignificant, imperfect human being Moses, who begs God to remember his promise. God still wants to destroy the Israelites. Only when Moses plays on God’s insecurities by saying that the Egyptians will tell the surrounding nations that he took them out of Egypt just to kill them in the wilderness, giving them reason to mock him, does God relent. This proves that God was willing to kill all of them based on their works, on their wickedness, and that he did not actually give them a “free gift of love,” and was actually willing multiple times to go back on his promise he made to their ancestors.
