"Only love can summon a response of love"

I very seldom review books before I finish reading them, but Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew has been truly eye-opening. I started to highlight a paragraph that I wanted to put here, but ended up highlighting many more afterwards.

"In a garden, a man and woman had fallen for Satan's promise of a way to rise above their assigned state. Millenia later, another representative -- the Second Adam, in Paul's phrase -- faced a similar test, though curiously inverted. Can you be like God? the serpent had asked in Eden; Can you be truly human? asked the tempter in the desert...

"... Satan proposed an enticing improvement. He tempted Jesus toward the good parts of being human without the bad: to savor the taste of bread without being subject to the fixed rules of hunger and of agriculture, to confront risk with no real danger, to enjoy fame and power without the prospect of painful rejection -- in short, to wear a crown but not a cross...

"... Nailed to the cross, Jesus would hear the last temptation repeated as a taunt. A criminal scoffed, 'Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us.' Spectators took up the cry: 'Let him come down from the cross, and we will believe in him... Let God rescue him now if he wants him.' But there was no rescue, no miracle, no easy, painless path. For Jesus to save others, quite simply, he could not save himself. That fact, he must have known as he faced Satan in the desert...

"... The Temptation in the desert reveals a profound difference between God's power and Satan's power. Satan has the power to coerce, to dazzle, to force obedience, to destroy. Humans have learned much from that power, and governments draw deeply from its reservoir. With a bullwhip... human beings can force other human beings to do just about anything they want. Satan's power is external and coercive.

"God's power, in contrast, is internal and noncoercive. 'You would not enslave a man by a miracle, and craved faith given freely, not based on miracle,' said the Inquisitor to Jesus in Dostoevsky's novel. Such power may seem at times like weakness. In its commitment to transform gently from the inside out and in its relentless dependence on human choice, God's power may resemble a kind of abdication. As every parent and lover knows, love can be rendered powerless if the beloved chooses to spurn it.

"'God is not a Nazi,' said Thomas Merton. Indeed God is not. The Master of the universe would become its victim, powerless before a squad of soldiers in a garden. God made himself weak for one purpose: to let human beings choose freely for themselves what to do with him...

"... God's terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit in his face, to crucify him. All this Jesus must have known as he faced down the tempter in the desert, focusing his mighty power on the energy of restraint.

"... God insists on such restraint because no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason he created us."

-- The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey