Allah and the Flower Child

Amidst a world of suffering and personal tragedies, Christians refuse to consider the possibility that their “Good, Good, Father” might not be all that good. When you look at the world that God supposedly created, all you see are school-shootings and hurricanes and corrupt politicians. Cancer is always knocking at someone’s door and maybe you’ve even lost a loved one. So how exactly is God good?

I think the simplest answer, aside from the fact that NBC gets better ratings when they report violence, is that He’s not. The simplest answer on the surface, is that God doesn’t exist and that Christianity is just a band-aid that someone manufactured for hopeless people.

I’ve found however, that the simplest answer might not always be the right one. And so, if you suspect like I do that there is a god and that this god is probably the One the Bible describes, you might also, as I do, care to seek Him out in hope of discovering exactly who He is.

When we search our motives, I believe that the much more personal question we are really asking is not one of God’s apparent goodness, but whether or not God can be trusted. How can a Christian like Horatio Spafford lose everything dear to him and respond with words like, “it is well with my soul”? Let’s start by outlining two views that shape how Christians put their trust in God.

Part I “Mutant Spawn”

On one hand, we have a holy, all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite God who by default is the cause of all things. Nothing happens that He doesn’t either allow to happen or put into motion Himself. We believe that God’s in control and that He’s also benevolent and loving and so all these bad things that keep happening must be the most infinitesimal part of His massive, cosmic plan that will turn out to be good in the end. And so we trust God because He’s God.

On the other hand, we have a loving, compassionate, humble God who desires intimacy with His creation. But because He’s a gentleman, He let’s us choose whether we want to be with Him or not; whether we want life or death. Out of love, He sacrifices perfection and His right to control His own creation for a relationship with us by offering us free will. In this way, we understand that the cause of our suffering is ultimately anything that separates us from God; whether it’s our choices, sinful lifestyles or Satan. And so we trust God because He’s good.

“Well Brice, Fluffy is still in the ground and all you’ve managed to do is describe a mutant form of Islam and the disillusioned spawn of new age hippies and dualism. How is this supposed to help?” Your words, not mine.

Before we move on I would like to draw your attention to two things. The first is that I’m not a theologian or a pastor or the Pope, and I hope my incomplete, and possibly inaccurate descriptions of how we as Christians sometimes view God will not deter you from grasping the point I hope to make in just a bit. The second is this: It is by faith that we believe that God exists and it is by faith that we believe that God is good. What we believe doesn’t change who God is. Instead, what we believe changes who we become. And what we must choose to believe that is of the utmost importance, is that Jesus came to earth and died in our place and then came back to life so that we may have life in Him. The cross is the foundation of our faith and any contractor will tell you that a house without a proper foundation, isn’t worth living in. Back to the mutant spawn.

What I’ve described above is not Islam nor new age-dualism. Muslims don’t believe that Allah loves them and dualism within the context of Christianity tries to put Satan on the same level as God. I don’t think I’ve ever met a hippie but I’m sure they’re kind and lovely. What I’ve described are two Christian views that focus on different characteristics of the same God but elicit the same outward response of trust in a Higher Being. While these views are helpful to a point, they paint an incomplete picture of God’s character; a dire insufficiency I hope to remedy a little bit later.

Many Christians will argue over which view is better but I don’t want to and since I’m the author, we won’t. However, I will say this. While knowing what we believe is important and knowing why we believe it is just as important, I’ve come to understand that what we hold in our hands is very dull indeed when compared to the truth we hold in our hearts, and if we find ourselves with our fists clenched so tightly around an idea that it’s impossible to hold someone’s hand, we might be missing the point altogether. Whether we trust in a God with a good plan or we trust in a good God, we must love as Jesus did.

Thus far, we’ve approached our question from a subpar perspective which is to say “our own.” Much like an astronomer that seeks to understand the universe but believes the sun to revolve around the earth, are we who seek to understand God but believe His existence to serve our own.

If we look at the cosmos as a near infinite symphony, each one of us might be just a single note on an everlasting sheet of music. And in the blink of an eye, as our lives connect with what we know as the present in time, we live out our solo loudly and proudly as the star of our own concert but only the Composer/Conductor can witness the true splendor in His masterpiece as a whole.

Life on this earth is a God-given privilege, not a right. Take God out of the picture and there is no picture. He’s big. We’re little. He’s right. We’re wrong. He’s not a part of our symphony, we’re a part of His.

So now, rather than looking at God through our earthquakes and illnesses, let’s try to rise above our fading circumstances and see things from God’s eternal perspective. Instead of looking at our world and then searching for flaws in the Creator, it might do us well to look at our Creator and search for flaws in ourselves--or literally anywhere other than in the only truly good and perfectly loving Person to ever exist who has insurmountable power and infinite wisdom.

To know God in His fullness is the first step to understanding how He is good and ultimately trustworthy. And while I’m sure He’s a composer of sorts, He’s definitely a writer and He’s written a pretty good book to get us started.

Part II “The Whole Truth”

The Bible is first and foremost a story about God and His personality. As we read, we find out who He is and what He’s like. First we find out that God is a Creator of good things and that He’s personal. Then we find out that He doesn’t tolerate disobedience and that He has emotions like anger and jealousy. But we also find out that He doesn’t give up on people and that He exists in three parts. He’s loving and kind and gentle, He’s patient and humble and He has big plans for our lives.

Discovering the character of God is a lot like math. Not in the meticulous, boring sense but in the sense that it builds on itself. When we find out that God is loving, it adds to the fact that He’s holy. It doesn’t negate it.

God has always been exactly who He is today. God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. He is holy, just, and jealous. He is kind and compassionate. He is Love and He never changes. While God is unchanging, there is a significant change that occurs in how He chose to interact with humanity and that started and ended with our Savior, Jesus Christ when He became the eternal object of God’s eternal wrath instead of us. This is a gross oversimplification of the single greatest act of love known to mankind so I encourage you to read it for yourself but basically this is what we call The Good News of Jesus Christ.

At this point it might seem like we’ve gotten off track a little bit, but the point of part II is this. How we see the world and interact with one another should start with a full and accurate knowledge of God’s character based on the whole Bible, and while a book can’t possibly encapsulate God in His entirety, the Bible contains exactly enough to let us in on what we need to know.

So far, In order to get an accurate understanding of who God is, we’ve looked at two different theological views and then I’ve implored us to grasp a greater view based on not just sections of the Bible, but the whole of it, and now we’ll move into what is hailed by most Christians as the most important facet of faith, albeit perhaps also the most neglected. This last part is all about relationship.

Part III “So Help me God”

The Bible, like any other good book, is more interesting when we know the Author personally and to read God’s word is good, but to read His word with Him is a whole different story. Many of us have said a prayer and attend church or were baptized when we were younger, but still struggle to grasp what it truly means to have a relationship with God.

Time is currency. Where and with whom we invest our time is where we see returns. We must invest our time in the Person that offers the best return, not because He will return or because our return is in heaven, but because we must become like Him and be the light to our world outside our Sunday mornings. We must approach our lives with Jesus, not the other way around. As we spend time with God we begin to look like Him and think like Him. We understand who He is and who He calls us to be and so we begin to approach others around us in the same way that He would. We either look like Jesus, or the world.

Too often, we leave Dad at home when we go to the playground and when we get picked on, or someone doesn’t take turns on the slide, we run home crying to Daddy. Church on Sunday is our home and our lives at work or school or with our families is the playground. We leave God in Sunday. We leave God in our morning devotions. We leave God at youth group. We live our entire weeks on our own strength and go to church to get “filled.” God doesn’t live inside four walls, He lives inside us.

(Church on Sunday is an opportunity to serve and encourage one another. If you go to “get filled” or expecting to be served, you’ll be looking for a new church every other year. Jesus didn’t look for another earth, when we didn’t offer Him coffee and put Him on our prayer list.)

As Christians, we are supposed to be in this world but not of it. Living in our circumstances and then looking to God to fix them is being of this world. Instead, we are of God which means our reality is His kingdom. We live according to His righteousness and His love, lead by the Spirit of Holiness, and then in Christ, we come to understand that we are the solution to our world’s problems. Or rather, Christ in us is the solution. We don’t really amount to much on our own.

Our relationship with God is of paramount importance. In many countries, people are being killed because they act like Jesus. In our country our laws make it increasingly difficult to have a thought or opinion that doesn’t offend someone. When your boss says you have to give a marriage license to two men, you may have to ask yourself whether Jesus died so that you could have life in Him or so that you could have a job. We make sacrifices because God made the ultimate sacrifice. It’s what we do. We must be like Jesus in every area of our life. Especially outside of church. Theology is good, the Bible is where everything starts, but our relationship with Christ sustains us and changes the world around us because this is where we truly begin to know God.

If at this point you feel like I lured you in with a titillating question and then proceeded to dodge the answer to that question while dragging you down an obscure path to end with a rant that has nothing to do with your beloved Fluffy, then you’re pretty much right. But if you’re still wondering who to blame for this bad world then let me be the first to admit that though I’m supposed to be part of the answer, I’m at the heart of the problem. God is good, but He’s hidden behind all my opinions. I’m supposed to look like Jesus, but I’ve left Him in church. I’m a Christian who says the right words but does the wrong things. I’m supposed to show you Light during your dark times and encourage you when you’re in despair but I haven’t been there. I’m sorry.

Our answer to this globe-sized deuce we seem to experience every day, is a Christian who reads his Bible and prays. And a Christian who doesn’t do that is of use to no one but Satan. I believe that with Jesus, I can change this world. So, help me God.