Your God's too nice (1)
I know some will be tempted to think I’m callous if not sadistic when I say what follows but I can only assure them that that’s not the truth about me though I sadly confess that I’m not as caring or as sympathetic as many I know. But I’m sick of the God that so much of Western Christianity is about. A ceaseless river of sugar and syrup—that’s what he is. But I’m here to tell you with Job that that God doesn’t exist!
As soon as we’re faced with tragedy—our own or others’—we push God out the side door and in his absence talk non-stop about how sweet and tender he is. We preach thousands of sermons on the cross—all about the tenderness of God and seem to forget that this kid hanging on the public gallows is innocent and that God is putting him to grief! We go on and on about how kind he was to rescue Israel from Egyptand ignore the fact that he ruined Egypt in the process. Egyptian men, women and children went to the wall! He sent drought and famine and pestilence on apostate Israel and innocent children starved to death or went out in a series of seizures in a plague, painfully sucking for air.
Christian types keeps telling non-believers that we can’t blame God for the "natural" tragedies existing in our world. Why can’t we? Whole reams of biblical texts tell us he brings calamities! Amos, looking at devastated lands and hungry cities, generalises it this way: "Shall calamity come on a city and God not be responsible?" and he looked for no as the answer. He tells them (essentially) not to call it bad luck or sheer randomness; it’s one manifestation of the divine wake-up call (see Amos 4 and elsewhere). And what do we do? We call it bad luck! Good grief! And why do we call it bad luck? We call it bad luck (and other things) because we don’t want to admit that God’s responsible. And why don’t we want to admit that God’s responsible? Because we think that that would make him cruel and heartless. Listen, if God sending a famine or a flood or a storm proves he’s cruel and heartless, then he’s self-convicted! He says he sent them! He not only says he sent them, he not only admits he sent them, he insists that he sent them!
One man told me that we know God did it back then but we don’t know he does it now. He was making the case that we shouldn’t lay the responsibility for natural calamities on God because that would make God look heartless. But if it’s heartless and cruel to do it now it wasalways heartless and cruel to do it and God said he did it! Once we accept that God did it once we can never call it heartless and cruel without indicting God. Why won’t we face that? I had a woman tell me she wouldn’t worship a God like that! I think that that’s a tragedy but at least this woman felt the scandal of what the Bible says about him.
You want him? Take him as he is. You want to preach him? Quit cleaning and sweetening him up until he’s acceptable to our sweet Western sensitivities. He subjected his own beloved Son to the cross!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to Brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.