I've heard it before from various places. "If that's what God is like, I don't want anything to do with Him." I find the idea ... befuddling. Are you sure you want to impose on God standards to which you think He should conform? Why not just let God be God? Why not just let Him be whatever He tells us He is? Instead, we tend to misinterpret the nature of God and then run into problems.
One of the common errors we make is assigning our own terminology to God. You know how that goes. "God is love." Oh, okay, well ... "love" means to feel affection toward or to make much of someone, so God feels warmly toward everyone and wants to make much of them. Umm, okay ... but that's not the sense of the phrase. And that's not what we find in the Bible. And when we read, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated", we run into all sorts of problems because we failed to really understand what was originally intended in the phrase, "God is love." That is applying our own terminology to God. Or, "God is good." Okay, well, "good" is when you're nice to people and never do unpleasant things to them. Therefore, obviously, God is nice to people and never does unpleasant things ... You get the idea. If you limit your understanding of a "good God" to "pleasant", then you'll be completely stuck when He claims "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things" (Isa 45:7). While God is indeed "love" and "good", that doesn't mean that we've properly understood what is meant by those terms.
Another extremely common mistake we make is assuming that God is like us. You know ... we are made in His image, so He must be just like us. We can be capricious; so can He. We make mistakes; so does He. We must not be self-centered and neither should He. This error, in fact, is a biblical one. "You thought that I was one like yourself" (Psa 50:21). (If you want a chill, flip over to that passage and get the whole message, especially from verse 16 to 22.) We think that God is like us, and if He is not, there's something wrong ... with Him.
God has revealed Himself to us. He does so in nature. He does so in the written word. We would be foolish to try to apply our own standards and false understanding to His character. We would be far better off letting God be God and going from there. Whatever He is like, we would be wise to let Him be and reform our thinking to align with Him.
2 comments:
Your points are well taken, but they presume that people are willing to let God be God. It's far more appealing to have a god of your own design, because then you can conform it to whatever suits you best. This is the reason that the 2nd commandment exists--humans have an incredibly strong desire to reformulate God to suit themselves. And that is idolatry, pure and simple.
P.S. Why do I think the Ps. 50 passage is another indictment of our society today?
"Why do I think the Ps. 50 passage is another indictment of our society today?"
That's what I meant when I said "If you want a chill." WAY too close to us and way too scary to contemplate.
"they presume that people are willing to let God be God."
True. I write to Christians who, at least in intention want to let God be God and might not realize they're making an idol for themselves instead. Since natural man is hostile to God anyway, I don't hope to accomplish much there.
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