And lo and behold, we see Diehl explaining that God is perfectly righteous in this:
You can’t hurt God, but He has already hurt you, and that it something He wants to talk to you about. God did not hurt you just to leave you crushed and bleeding on the ground. He hurt you to help you, but only He can show you how those two things come together.
God’s ways really aren’t as mysterious as Christians make them out to be. God has intentionally filled your life with experiences which enable you to understand why He operates the way He does. On this earth, you’ve already learned that there are times when you have to inflict more pain in order to improve the state of something. To trade out a failing heart for a good one, drastic damage is done to the bones and soft tissues that stand between the surgeon and the organ he needs to access. By the time the patient is out of surgery, he is in much worse shape than he was when he went in, yet in time he will end up better than ever because the surgery was performed. God works in similar ways in your life: inflicting wounds that often seem excessive and nonsensical in order to bring about some lifesaving changes. You can understand this principle because God has already taught it to you.
Because of the experiences God has given you in life, you understand the concept that sometimes things must be destroyed in order to realize their full potential. Seeds are totally destroyed in the process of growing into trees. Dig up a fifty year old pine tree and you aren’t going to find some perfect little seed still intact under the base of the trunk. The seed is gone. It was obliterated in the process of becoming what it was created to be: a mighty tree. So also, there are aspects of you that God is going to destroy in order to release the potential that He has built into you. God has reasons for what He does, and in every terrible thing that He does to you, His primary goal is to help you. God wants you to thrive, not go through life as a hurting, hateful mess. But God has intentionally designed His growth program to involve some brutal experiences. Does this make Him evil in Character? No, it does not. Character cannot be defined by actions, only by internal motivations. Right now all you are looking at is His actions. Ignoring motivations is going to lead you into deception every time. Do you really want to waste your life hating God only to find out that He was Someone totally different than who you thought He was? (Emphasis mine)
Which, in turn, makes me wonder if Diehl is familiar with the Well-Intentioned Extremist and Tautological Templar concepts.
