That’s Not God

I am going to present some things that people believe are God but are not God. First there is the belief that when something terrible happens it is God’s fault. That is not God. Most of the death and disaster that people blame God for are just the result of living in a fallen world. When Adam and Eve turned their backs on God, they were not the only ones to be cursed; the earth itself was affected. The “thorns and thistles” were just the tip of the ecological iceberg that resulted from the humans’ failure. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and tornadoes would never have occurred in Eden. The curse also affected human relations as we see very quickly demonstrated when Cain murdered Abel. The devolution of people into wickedness before the flood in Genesis 9 shows how completely the original sin permeated the race.

Some people believe that one religion is as good as another: all roads lead to God. That’s not God. The ancient Eastern mysticism that is repackaged in the New Age thinking of today imagines god is everything and everything is god. It is true that God created everything and is everywhere present to His creation, but He is both separate and transcendent from what He made. When pantheists deny the personal nature of the Creator, they wade into the murky waters of a self-created god who is, in fact, the arch-enemy of the one true God. There is a pantheon of not-gods imagined by men throughout history: Zeus, Thor, Allah, Krishna all recommending paths that lead not to God but to death.

Most self-proclaimed atheists conjure up a god they can refuse to believe in. That’s not God. The downward spiral of their deception is explained by Paul in Ephesians 4: “This therefore I say and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the Gentiles walk: in the futility of their mind, being darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart, who, becoming callous, gave themselves over to licentiousness, for the pursuit of all uncleanness in greediness.” It is ironic that some highly intelligent people fall into this trap, but it points to the truth that the God of the Bible is apprehended by one’s spirit and not through “the futility of [the] mind.”

Some people think that God is an all-forgiving grandfatherly type sitting on a big throne somewhere in the sky just waiting to welcome His prodigal children home. That’s not God. It is true that the Apostle John said God is love, but what some people seem to ignore is that in the same epistle, John warns believers to walk in the light lest they fall in league with the devil. Unless you can make yourself believe that God will forgive the devil, you don’t want to be in his league. The theme of God’s wrath poured out against sin is demonstrated or stated in almost every book of the Bible. To ignore God’s holy judgment and focus solely on love is wishful thinking at best and a pernicious lie at worst.

Finally, there are people who call themselves Christians, who claim to believe in the God of the Bible, who think their God is going to let them into His Heaven because of their good works. That’s not God. I have written before about my experience some years ago canvassing our church neighborhood with the Evangelism Explosion approach. We asked, “If you died tonight, why should God let you into Heaven?” I was shocked by the number of Bible believing, church attending people who said, “I have been good.” I think the explanation for this misunderstanding of clear biblical teaching is that instead of seeing humans made in the image of God, some tend to make God in the image of humans. I had someone tell me recently that he couldn’t imagine a God who didn’t behave like a proper human father. That’s reversing the image concept.

Without getting into the deep weeds of God’s foreknowledge or human predestination, it is enough to say that if we think we can fully understand the God who made in us in His image, that god is too small to be the God of the Bible. Pure grace, the grace of God, is something little understood and seldom practiced by mere humans. It is hard for people steeped in the idea of fairness to grasp the depth of what Paul told the Ephesians: “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast.”

The same mindset that causes people to misunderstand who God is affects their idea of what a Christian is. Many think Christians are supposed to be perfect; that’s not biblical thinking. Nor would I say, as if to forgive my shortcomings, that I am “just a sinner saved by grace.” Rather I would say that I am a saint living by grace, washed in Jesus’ blood, buried into His death, and risen to walk daily in His robe of righteousness. I might agree with the bumper sticker that proclaims, “I am not perfect – just forgiven.” In those moments when I walk in the light as John recommends, that’s not me. That’s God.

Related posts: Answering Rob Bell; The Goodness of Wrath; The Goodness of God When Trouble Comes; The Winnowing Fork of God; Lies We Have Been Told