Imagining God

A new book called "America's Four Gods" by Paul Froese and Christopher Bader deals with the way we imagine God to be. We are a nation with images of God based on what we think he is like.

Here are the four Gods Americans have described:

1. Authoritative God

2. Critical God

3. Distant God

4. Benevolent God

It suddenly struck me, as I read the reviews of this new book, that nothing much has changed in thousands of years. More than 3,000 years ago the prophet Isaiah wrote these words as God spoke through him,

Isaiah 29:16
You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?

The problem we have always had as a race is the desire to create our own gods. We are quite reluctant to trust God as he describes himself. More simply than this is our lack of interest in knowing him at all. Few go to God's word to see what he is like and so we invent the god that makes us comfortable. I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me, "well, my god isn't like that..." and with that opening statement they tell me about the god they have invented.

Our greatest need is to know that God that is, but that means we have to pursue him, get to know him, talk to him....and that takes time. It's much easier to make up our own god....and so we have.