Myths about God
By John Stallings
I hope this blog doesn’t cause anyone to pull a theological hammy but there are some myths about God that are fairly well entrenched. I’d like to share a few with you and do a little debunking. What we have here is just a little food for thought. The first myth that is widely believed is;
1. “God is a gentleman.”
This one is almost funny. First of all, God isn’t a man, and He's certainly not a gentleman. Before you pull your bottom lip over your head, hear me out. Isaiah told us that God’s ways aren’t our ways. I won’t belabor this point but even a cursory reading of God’s word reveals God doing things like giving King Saul orders to totally wipe out a people called the Amalakites. Saul, thinking like you & I think occasionally, felt it was, to say the least a little unreasonable if not downright unthinkable; so he interjected human reasoning into it. He thought it would be nice to take their King & put a collar and chain on him and lead him around like a pet. He’d have himself a “King-on-a-string.” Also he’d save the best livestock because it didn’t seem reasonable to him to carry out God’s orders and kill perfectly good animals.
The Amalikites had been causing trouble for 500 years. They had harassed Israel since they first came to the Holy Land. God finally saw they were incorrigibles so He ordered their extinction. Here we encounter a seemingly vengeful, capricious, cruel and ruthless God. He is of all things demanding the annihilation of a whole group of people. This of course was a bloody proposition.
Let’s be honest. What Saul couldn’t see is what we often can’t see and that is that God’s judgment is always an act of mercy. Down deep, we have a desire for a comfortable, domesticated, housebroken and manageable God. Unfortunately you can search the pages of the Bible and you won’t find a God like that. God is a wholly, Holy God. If we ever wonder what God thinks about sin all we have to do is look at Golgotha’s chalky brow and see Jesus hanging on the cross to satisfy the justice of this Holy, sin-hating God.
I spoke to a man recently who informed me that he believed in heaven but not in hell. He was a strong believer in Christ’s death on the cross to redeem all mankind. My message to him was that Calvary and a belief in hell were a package deal-- really a tandem issue. He didn’t understand. I went on to share with him that Calvary makes no sense without being coupled with the reality of a literal burning hell. To be candid, Calvary would have been a cosmic joke if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus died to save us from something terrible. If we think about that for a little bit, we’ll see it. Christ left us enough great teaching to save a thousand worlds but that alone wasn’t enough. His substitutionary death at Calvary is the thing that paid mankind’s sin debt in full and broke down the middle wall of partition between God and man.
Saul’s lack of complete obedience to God brought about his unwillingness to deal with God’s enemies in the way God commanded him to do it in 1 Sam.15. But we only have to read to the thirtieth chapter to see the surviving Amalikites were running amuck all over Israel wreaking havoc. They even attacked and burned David’s home town of Ziclag & took his wife and family hostage. Obviously God knew what He was doing. Here’s another myth;
2. “God wants all things done “decently and in order.”
This scriptural nugget of truth is usually used in regards to spiritual worship. But the question arises here; who decides what “decently and in order” is? I have been invited to homes to eat and the table set before us was fit for a king. They brought out grannies China and really did it up in grand fashion. Now you could tell by the very demeanor of these good folk that this was their version of “in order.”
However I’ve been in other homes where there were six or eight children. We all gathered around a big table and dipped spaghetti & meat sauce out of humongous bowls. By the time all that gang had gotten through eating there was spaghetti on the floor, the walls and believe it or not, I’ve seen food stains on ceilings. I never asked because I really didn’t want to think about how it got there. The parents never changed the expression on their faces while this was happening and you could easily see they were doing business as usual. This to them was “in order” & what mattered was that everyone was getting fed. I should be ashamed to say it I guess but somehow I’m totally at home & relaxed in a setting like this and no, I wasn’t raised by wolves.
Sometimes people will be critical of a worship service & feel if the people make a noise, say amen, or don’t sit like they’re petrified, they aren’t “in order.” Or others who like a more relaxed church may go into a church where the people sit quietly, & be irritated because the people aren’t livelier. I have a feeling that in God’s sight there’s plenty of room for diversity in worship & we need not be too concerned about offending Him if our hearts are right. Some people say, “You don’t have to yell, God’s not deaf.” That’s very true & He’s not nervous either. Some preachers talk in a conversational tone & some are loud but really all that amounts to is preaching style. Many times we get hung-up on style when the main thing is the message. Another myth about God is;
3. “God won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
This one is sort of funny to me too, & anyone who’d think that obviously hasn’t read their Bible. I read that King Nebuchadnezzar was sent out into the fields to graze for seven years. If you read Isaiah chapter 20 you’ll see that God told Isaiah to strip down & get totally naked & go into the streets & preach for three years. Can you imagine him eating a nice breakfast & as soon as he was finished he began pulling off his robe or whatever he wore? He wife asked what he was doing & he answered “I’m getting ready to go to work.”
The New Testament Saul, later to become Paul didn’t exactly volunteer to be smitten down on the Damascus turnpike, blinded & taken to a house in Damascus to wait for God’s orders. God invaded his world in what has to be the greatest conversion in the history of Christianity. Saul of course became willing but at first I’m sure he thought God was about to kill him. Jonah is another example of a man who had to be made willing to take the preaching assignment God had mapped out for him. It took Whale University to straighten him out.
I understand the idea behind this myth. We realize that Jesus stands at our hearts door & knocks, waiting for us to open our lives to Him, & again that’s certainly scriptural. But we shouldn’t push it too far & allow ourselves to buy into a totally erroneous concept of the God we serve. While He has blessed us with free moral agency, He loves us enough to move sovereignly in our lives at any time He chooses. Another myth is;
4. “God won’t contradict common sense.”
Really? To disprove this one we can look at any number of examples in God’s Word. When Jesus spat on blind people eyes, or made a mud paddy & mashed it on their eyes & told them to go wash, was that common sense? I don’t think so. When God told Naaman through his prophet Elisha to go dip seven times in the muddy river Jordon, was that common sense? When God told Hosea to go marry a prostitute was that common sense? I don’t think so. The last myth I’ll deal with is;
5. “God has no sense of humor, He never laughs.”
We’re told in Proverbs 1:26 that someday God will laugh at the calamity that comes upon those who disobey Him.
Listen to the Amplified Bible—Psalm 2:1-4, --"Why do the nations assemble with commotion, uproar & confusion of voices, & why do the people imagine, meditate upon & devise an empty scheme? The kings of the earth take their places; the rulers take council together against the Lord & His Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ. They say, Let us break their bands of restraint asunder & cast their cords of control from us.
He who sits in the heavens LAUGHS; the Lord has them in derision & in supreme contempt He mocks them."
Some people will tell you that God is a Marquis De God, mean & harsh who delights in inflicting pain on us. Others will tell you that He is a hum-bug, a fraud, not the all-powerful all knowing deity we see in the Bible. Some say God is a sugar-n-spice-n-everything nice “little miss sunshine” God.
Between the pages of the Bible we meet the true & living God, not a mythical God of human mental creation. But a God who provides for His people & teaches them His ways.
Listen to Isaiah 55:6---"Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake His way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways."
As we look into the future, one thing is certain, you and I need to get to know God better because knowing Him is foundational to everything else in life.
For- until we know Him we haven’t begun to live.
John
By John Stallings
I hope this blog doesn’t cause anyone to pull a theological hammy but there are some myths about God that are fairly well entrenched. I’d like to share a few with you and do a little debunking. What we have here is just a little food for thought. The first myth that is widely believed is;
1. “God is a gentleman.”
This one is almost funny. First of all, God isn’t a man, and He's certainly not a gentleman. Before you pull your bottom lip over your head, hear me out. Isaiah told us that God’s ways aren’t our ways. I won’t belabor this point but even a cursory reading of God’s word reveals God doing things like giving King Saul orders to totally wipe out a people called the Amalakites. Saul, thinking like you & I think occasionally, felt it was, to say the least a little unreasonable if not downright unthinkable; so he interjected human reasoning into it. He thought it would be nice to take their King & put a collar and chain on him and lead him around like a pet. He’d have himself a “King-on-a-string.” Also he’d save the best livestock because it didn’t seem reasonable to him to carry out God’s orders and kill perfectly good animals.
The Amalikites had been causing trouble for 500 years. They had harassed Israel since they first came to the Holy Land. God finally saw they were incorrigibles so He ordered their extinction. Here we encounter a seemingly vengeful, capricious, cruel and ruthless God. He is of all things demanding the annihilation of a whole group of people. This of course was a bloody proposition.
Let’s be honest. What Saul couldn’t see is what we often can’t see and that is that God’s judgment is always an act of mercy. Down deep, we have a desire for a comfortable, domesticated, housebroken and manageable God. Unfortunately you can search the pages of the Bible and you won’t find a God like that. God is a wholly, Holy God. If we ever wonder what God thinks about sin all we have to do is look at Golgotha’s chalky brow and see Jesus hanging on the cross to satisfy the justice of this Holy, sin-hating God.
I spoke to a man recently who informed me that he believed in heaven but not in hell. He was a strong believer in Christ’s death on the cross to redeem all mankind. My message to him was that Calvary and a belief in hell were a package deal-- really a tandem issue. He didn’t understand. I went on to share with him that Calvary makes no sense without being coupled with the reality of a literal burning hell. To be candid, Calvary would have been a cosmic joke if it weren’t for the fact that Jesus died to save us from something terrible. If we think about that for a little bit, we’ll see it. Christ left us enough great teaching to save a thousand worlds but that alone wasn’t enough. His substitutionary death at Calvary is the thing that paid mankind’s sin debt in full and broke down the middle wall of partition between God and man.
Saul’s lack of complete obedience to God brought about his unwillingness to deal with God’s enemies in the way God commanded him to do it in 1 Sam.15. But we only have to read to the thirtieth chapter to see the surviving Amalikites were running amuck all over Israel wreaking havoc. They even attacked and burned David’s home town of Ziclag & took his wife and family hostage. Obviously God knew what He was doing. Here’s another myth;
2. “God wants all things done “decently and in order.”
This scriptural nugget of truth is usually used in regards to spiritual worship. But the question arises here; who decides what “decently and in order” is? I have been invited to homes to eat and the table set before us was fit for a king. They brought out grannies China and really did it up in grand fashion. Now you could tell by the very demeanor of these good folk that this was their version of “in order.”
However I’ve been in other homes where there were six or eight children. We all gathered around a big table and dipped spaghetti & meat sauce out of humongous bowls. By the time all that gang had gotten through eating there was spaghetti on the floor, the walls and believe it or not, I’ve seen food stains on ceilings. I never asked because I really didn’t want to think about how it got there. The parents never changed the expression on their faces while this was happening and you could easily see they were doing business as usual. This to them was “in order” & what mattered was that everyone was getting fed. I should be ashamed to say it I guess but somehow I’m totally at home & relaxed in a setting like this and no, I wasn’t raised by wolves.
Sometimes people will be critical of a worship service & feel if the people make a noise, say amen, or don’t sit like they’re petrified, they aren’t “in order.” Or others who like a more relaxed church may go into a church where the people sit quietly, & be irritated because the people aren’t livelier. I have a feeling that in God’s sight there’s plenty of room for diversity in worship & we need not be too concerned about offending Him if our hearts are right. Some people say, “You don’t have to yell, God’s not deaf.” That’s very true & He’s not nervous either. Some preachers talk in a conversational tone & some are loud but really all that amounts to is preaching style. Many times we get hung-up on style when the main thing is the message. Another myth about God is;
3. “God won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
This one is sort of funny to me too, & anyone who’d think that obviously hasn’t read their Bible. I read that King Nebuchadnezzar was sent out into the fields to graze for seven years. If you read Isaiah chapter 20 you’ll see that God told Isaiah to strip down & get totally naked & go into the streets & preach for three years. Can you imagine him eating a nice breakfast & as soon as he was finished he began pulling off his robe or whatever he wore? He wife asked what he was doing & he answered “I’m getting ready to go to work.”
The New Testament Saul, later to become Paul didn’t exactly volunteer to be smitten down on the Damascus turnpike, blinded & taken to a house in Damascus to wait for God’s orders. God invaded his world in what has to be the greatest conversion in the history of Christianity. Saul of course became willing but at first I’m sure he thought God was about to kill him. Jonah is another example of a man who had to be made willing to take the preaching assignment God had mapped out for him. It took Whale University to straighten him out.
I understand the idea behind this myth. We realize that Jesus stands at our hearts door & knocks, waiting for us to open our lives to Him, & again that’s certainly scriptural. But we shouldn’t push it too far & allow ourselves to buy into a totally erroneous concept of the God we serve. While He has blessed us with free moral agency, He loves us enough to move sovereignly in our lives at any time He chooses. Another myth is;
4. “God won’t contradict common sense.”
Really? To disprove this one we can look at any number of examples in God’s Word. When Jesus spat on blind people eyes, or made a mud paddy & mashed it on their eyes & told them to go wash, was that common sense? I don’t think so. When God told Naaman through his prophet Elisha to go dip seven times in the muddy river Jordon, was that common sense? When God told Hosea to go marry a prostitute was that common sense? I don’t think so. The last myth I’ll deal with is;
5. “God has no sense of humor, He never laughs.”
We’re told in Proverbs 1:26 that someday God will laugh at the calamity that comes upon those who disobey Him.
Listen to the Amplified Bible—Psalm 2:1-4, --"Why do the nations assemble with commotion, uproar & confusion of voices, & why do the people imagine, meditate upon & devise an empty scheme? The kings of the earth take their places; the rulers take council together against the Lord & His Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ. They say, Let us break their bands of restraint asunder & cast their cords of control from us.
He who sits in the heavens LAUGHS; the Lord has them in derision & in supreme contempt He mocks them."
Some people will tell you that God is a Marquis De God, mean & harsh who delights in inflicting pain on us. Others will tell you that He is a hum-bug, a fraud, not the all-powerful all knowing deity we see in the Bible. Some say God is a sugar-n-spice-n-everything nice “little miss sunshine” God.
Between the pages of the Bible we meet the true & living God, not a mythical God of human mental creation. But a God who provides for His people & teaches them His ways.
Listen to Isaiah 55:6---"Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake His way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways."
As we look into the future, one thing is certain, you and I need to get to know God better because knowing Him is foundational to everything else in life.
For- until we know Him we haven’t begun to live.
John
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