God: Mirror or Master?

[Tenchi]

Romans 1:20-23

20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,
23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. ​

The Big Problem people have with God is that He is so determined to be what He is: God. He's resolute in His divinity, in His supremacy over all things, in His right to rule over all that He has made and sustains at every moment. It's annoying. How can we be god if He keeps intruding as the Real Thing upon our efforts to do so? We work assiduously and persistently at being our own boss; we imagine, with great creativity and passion, ourselves as the pinnacle of all things; we say sage things to each other, and think deep thoughts, and build clever devices and congratulate ourselves on how amazing we are. But, then, we look over at the One, True God and see a Being that quickly exhausts our comprehension, leaving us far behind in His dust. He is the Uncaused Cause, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, perfect and infinite in His qualities. He needs nothing; He depends upon nothing; He does not diminish or improve. The longer we look at Him and consider Him, the more miserable and impotent we appear in comparison. What a very irritating Person He is to those who wish to be His equal!

We build and destroy; we see Truth and tell ourselves lies; we help on one hand and harm on the other; we delight in beauty and make ourselves monstrous, perverse and ugly. Violence, destruction and death overshadow the history of humanity. For millennia, human beings have oppressed and murdered each other for money, and power, and pride. Medicines, machines, methodologies of thought and craft have lifted men and women up from wandering tribes, scrabbling about for food, fighting constantly with each other, into massive nations of affluence, and ease, and comfort. But then, in the midst of plenty and play, these nations decay, spiraling downward into madness and war.

This is all very frustrating for, among other things, it establishes what God has said about us: We're all at our core "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." (Jeremiah 17:9) Though made in His image, reflecting His qualities in our self-awareness, creativity, moral sense, and philosophizing, we twist these things, turning them to evil purposes and into corrupt versions of what God intended (Ephesians 2:1-3; Titus 3:5; Matthew 15:19; Romans 3:10-18, etc.). We just can't seem to help ourselves - which is what God has said is true of us. How extremely aggravating.

Rather than be provoked at every turn by God's uncomfortably accurate (and thoroughly unflattering) description of us, and rather than have to suffer His stifling rule, humans have hit upon the idea of simply denying He exists. Brilliant! If they say God doesn't exist, He doesn't. Just ignore the universe He made. Imagine it simply popped into being out of nothing for no reason at all. They say this is “scientific” thinking, though, so they don't feel totally silly. Of course, at every turn these same people borrow from a theistic worldview because a universe without God is insane and pointless. Better a little philosophical inconsistency, a bit of hypocrisy, than the emptiness, absurdity and savagery of a world where Man actually lives as an accident of Nature, without purpose, except for the mindless propagation of the species, DNA-replicating "meat sacks," void of any higher, transcendent purpose, merely eking out as much pleasure from life as possible before disappearing forever from an uncaring universe.

Some, though, try a different tack: Instead of denying God exists, they simply make a god after their own image. God is us; we are God. What better god could one hope for? Such a god is always perfectly aligned with one's own personality and preferences, acting in accord with what one thinks makes the best sense, what seems "right." One's God will have one's own foibles and failings, susceptible to the same temptations, plagued by the same uncertainties and angst. Wonderful! One's God will be a mirror, not a Master.

The world is full of such gods, manifesting the full range of human personality, weakness and imagination. Some reflect human wisdom; others, human passions and lusts; some reveal in their nature human darkness, the terrible human propensity toward evil; still others are exercises in human creativity, but inevitably bounded by a human frame of reference. These gods love and hate, fight and die, create beauty and produce hideous beasts, laugh, weep, rage and hunger. But, for all their grander, "divine" scale, they remain fundamentally human constructs.

Christians nod their heads, agreeing that such "gods" are no gods at all. Christians know better. There is only the One True God, Jehovah, the Jews of the Old Testament called Him, the Alpha and Omega, Maker and Ruler of All. They would never fall prey to the foolishness of believing in a god like Zeus, or Odin, Shiva, Molech, or Tiamat. No, the God they serve is all-loving, accepting everyone, tender, tolerant and gracious; He is a Helper, their co-pilot, the One they turn to when everything else goes to pot; He is compassionate and forgiving, accepting that they mess up now and then, never imposing on them, or making them feel unsafe; He'll never give them more than they can handle or leave them in pain, protecting them from all harm. What a God! They can really connect with Him. He's so understanding, so reliable, so…nice.

Other Christians scoff at the ugly, strange, rampant gods of the ancient world, trusting themselves to a much more powerful, strict and dangerous God. He's tough, no nonsense, flooding the entire world to rid it of wickedness, blasting evil Sodom and Gomorrah to ash, casting unrepentant sinners into eternal hell. He is Sovereign over all and holy, making everything do at all times exactly what He wants. No molecule shifts, no thought passes through a person's mind, no act, good or bad, occurs but He has ordained it. He wants obedience and, by gum, He'd better get it! The God of the Bible isn't for weenies! Stand up straight, give it your all, and serve Him. Or else.

(Continued below.)

 

[Tenchi]

Still other Christians understand that there is no mountain-dwelling god throwing lightning bolts at people, or a four-armed death goddess out for blood, only the rational, reasonable, though ultimately inscrutable God of the Bible. He is the origin of Truth, Reality and the Laws of Logic, a God meeting us in the realm of the mind, first and foremost. He’s a God who makes sense, who we can synthesize with modern science and understand. This God is unchanging, without caprice, eternally consistent, the antithesis of hyper-emotional, sensual “spirituality.”

There are some Christians, too, who reject utterly the silly pagan gods of old, rightly calling them demons in disguise, out only to destroy. These believers understand that God is not distant and cold, aloof and severe in His interactions with His creatures, appeased only by dark rituals and human sacrifice. No, God shows up! He’s the tingle in their arms, or the flush of warmth that descends from head to toe, or the overwhelming hysteria that drives them to uncontrollable laughter or tears, or the convulsing power flinging them upon the ground to shake and contort. God is Real. He touches them directly and powerfully, showing them He’s there in supernatural experiences, miraculous healings, and incoherent spiritual noise. God can be consumed like a bottle of booze or a joint of marijuana - and to the same intoxicating effect. Above all, God can be felt!

How is it, though, that Christians hold such widely-divergent notions of God? Could it be that, like the pagan, Christians fall prey to making God a mirror rather than Master? It seems so. They take what is revealed of God in Scripture and emphasize those aspects of Him that best suit who they are. The gentle, retiring Christian emphasizes the tender and peaceable qualities of God; the aggressive, A-type Christian camps on the hard-nosed, active, getting-it-done features of God; the introverted, rationalistic believer roots firmly on the mind-centered, logical God they find in the Bible, and so on.

The problem with these widely-varying perspectives on God, however, is that they are all only narrow “slices” of God, unbalanced exaggerations of Him, that reflect the individual, not the God they claim to love and serve. God incarnate is not only a hard-driving, no-nonsense critic of the two-faced Pharisees, but ALSO the God who took up children onto his lap, urging great care of them, and weeping over the lost condition of the Jews and the sorrow of his friends; God is supremely rational, calling us to “reason together” with Himself, AND the God who commanded the Israelites to march around Jericho, making a terrible racket ‘til its walls fell down; God is merciful, compassionate and loving AND holy, hating deeply all sin, judging and condemning the unrepentant wicked.

To see God only through our personal preferences, fitted to our personality, is to be like the proverbial blind men trying to understand an elephant. One has the elephant by the nose, another by his leg, still another by his tail, and a last man has ahold of the elephant’s ear. Each understands the elephant through his contact with the particular part of the elephant he’s touching. “An elephant is like a tree,” says the one who has the elephant by the leg; “An elephant is like a snake,” says the man touching the elephant’s nose. And so on.

The point of the story is that none of them sees the elephant as it is in its entirety and so draw faulty conclusions about the nature of the elephant, disagreeing sharply with one another about what an elephant is. This analogy is supposed to characterize the problem with religion in general which, for various reasons, falls apart in its attempt to do so, but the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant does serve as an apt parallel to what people do generally in their approach to God, willfully confining their view of God to that part of Him they best appreciate and insisting to fellow believers that the part they see is the only part worth seeing. Approaching God as a mirror rather than Master, they are blind to the aspects of God their fellows observe, and in that blindness, take up a distorted, diminished understanding of God.

Getting it wrong about God, though, can have disastrous results, leading to things like suicide bombing, human sacrifice, war, sexual depravity, cruel oppression, and the demonic. We are, as God has said, rotten at our core and when we try to make God in our own image, that corruption inevitably seeps out in the version of Him we produce.

The more a believer can set themselves aside, then, in their contemplation of God, seeing Him not merely as a mirror but The Master, the fuller, deeper and TRUER their fellowship with Him will be. God says to us in His word that He is not acting in our lives to make us more and more ourselves, but to make us all like Christ (Romans 8:29). This means the retiring, don’t-cause-a-fuss type believer will find a courage and assertiveness that is not natural to their disposition and the temperamental, aggressive believer will develop a meekness and gentleness uncharacteristic of them but fundamental to the Person of Christ. The passionate, sensual Christian will forsake their fleshly pursuit of God for a spiritual one, and the phlegmatic, reason-focused child of God will open their lives to their God-given realm of emotions, weeping, even, over what “breaks the heart” of God.

As believers across the spectrum of personality, experience and preference fix their eyes on the Lord and are changed into His image by the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18), they all become more and more the same because they are all increasingly like the Saviour. Integral to this homogenizing effect, though, is the abandonment of the practice of making God in one’s image, a mirror rather than The Master.

Don’t be satisfied, then, with the god that suits you; embrace the whole revelation of God in His word and truly know Him. Unlike the blind men fumbling about with the elephant, a full picture of God - full enough for us, anyway – is given to us in the Bible. As we set aside our personal preferences, removing the “blinders” of personality and prejudice, and allow the Bible to shape for us our conception of our Maker, we encounter a Master truly worthy of service and worship, a God whose boundaries exceed our comprehension, whose holiness, goodness, and love move us to humility, submission and joyful dependence. Most importantly, the God revealed in Scripture is not us, mired in our weaknesses and sin, bound in darkness, ignorant, petty and capricious.

Isaiah 55:6-9
6 “Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near;
7 let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Revelation 1:12-18
12 Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands,
13 and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest.
14 The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire,
15 his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.
16 In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.
17 When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last,
18 and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.