Articles
Whose Picture Is in Your Wallet?
An American soldier aimed his rifle at a wicker basket, sure that hiding beneath it was a German soldier trying to escape from Italy in 1944. Just before he pulled the trigger an Italian woman ran at him shrieking, “Bambinis! Bambinis! Bambinis!,” and she stood in front of him with the barrel of his rifle against her stomach. Under the basket was not a German soldier but her three children ages 3-6 years old. That soldier, Martin Adler, now 97 years old, recently enjoyed a reunion with those children in their Italian village. He brought them chocolate bars to commemorate what he had shared with them after they were saved by the heroic actions of their mother.
Now, you might expect the story to say that through the intervening years these three children would have carried a picture of Martin Adler in their wallet, but that would be backward. You see, it was Martin Adler who carried their picture in his wallet for the past 77 years. That is how much those precious children meant to him as a grizzled, war-hardened soldier.
Reading this article immediately made me think of our relationship with God. We preach, talk and study about our love for God, but maybe we don’t emphasize the other side of that coin enough – God’s love for us, and His desire to save us at all costs!
Of course, many passages of Scripture underscore God’s love for mankind: Jn 3:16; Rom 5:6-11; Eph 3:14-21; 1 Jn 3:16; 4:7-11; etc. But these are just words on a page unless we truly believe them, incorporate them into our self-image and build our present life and future hope on them.
It is easier to say, “God loves us” than to say, “God loves me.” This is because we know ourselves better than we know anyone else. We have deep knowledge of our faults, weaknesses, failures, and we feel great guilt and shame whether we recognize those feelings for what they are or not. This tends to devalue us in our own eyes. But when we think of all of humanity, we instinctively recognize the value of mankind in the aggregate. “Sure God loves the world, but how can He love me?”
Perhaps the equivalent of God carrying our picture in His wallet is the writing of our names in His Book of Life: “And I urge you also, true companion, help these women who labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the Book of Life” (Ph 4:3). This echoes Jesus’ mild warning to the apostles: “Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Jn 10:19-20).
It was God’s prior love for fallen mankind, but also God’s love for each sinful individual, that impelled Him to spare us the fate we each deserve. The analogy of Martin Adler breaks down in that the children he spared were totally innocent, and he sacrificed nothing to save them. God, on the other hand, gave His only begotten Son to save those who have committed heinous crimes against His own nature and laws. That degree of love is hard to wrap our heads around, but it is true because God said so.
