A Different God

Yesterday, we asked - but what if I don't want to go to the Father? What if I want to choose a different God?

You can. The Lord gives humans the freedom to choose, but if you're looking for a "different" god, there is none more different than the Lord Almighty. He is truly unlike any other God. 

The Lord created the world for the purpose of walking in it with His creation; there is no other creation story that suggests anything close to this. In fact, most god stories use the world for either warfare or punishment. 

The Lord loves the world He created; the other gods seem to tolerate the world, at best, and they use it as a place to release their emotional energies, for good or for bad. In many cases, the other gods use the world as a trophy, as a prize for whatever game they are playing in their god-realm. And let's say it again - the Lord's "god-realm" is the world; He wants to be here. 

The Lord loves us; He loves us so much that He sent His Son as a sacrifice so that we didn't have to spend our entire lives trying to appease Him, as the other gods demand. The other gods are constantly judging our performance, always changing their behavior based on a whim. God's posture toward us has always been love. 

As a reminder, I'm using the word "god" here, but what we're really talking about is any sort of worldview that attempts to account for the existence of the world as we know it. That means, yes, I'm talking about science, too. The science myths have nothing on the creation story of the Lord Almighty. 

And all of these things that we're talking about that set God apart, these are matters of truth - a truth that the world has trouble trusting because it doesn't understand what truth is any more. 

But that's precisely why we have to keep declaring it. 

When we declare the truth of the Christian faith, it is an absolute truth in a post-truth world. I get it. The world doesn't seem to care. It doesn't want to hear it. But that's not entirely true. 

The world doesn't want to hear the biblical truth; they want to hear the Gospel truth. Whatever aversion the world may claim to have to Christ and Christianity, they still actually love a story about redemption and grace and love. And so when we think about what it means to declare the truth of our faith, we have to start with the Gospel truth - the truth that reveals the loving, merciful, gracious heart of God...not by tolerance and whatever else the world thinks "love" is these days, but in the creation and foundation of the world itself, which is rooted in the very heart of God. 

There's an old saying that says no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care, and this is true about the Christian faith as well - nobody cares about coming to the Father (i.e. heaven or hell) until they know how much the Father loves them. And this is the truth that we're not talking about enough. This is the truth that we're not putting at the center of our discussions enough. 

We're out there trying to tell others they have to choose God because they don't want to go to Hell and He will send them there...what kind of God is that that someone should love Him? No wonder the world is turning away. 

But what if we tell them about the foundation of all things, the voice that speaks into the formless and void so that He has a place to walk with His creation in the cool of the garden? There's a God I want to go to - the One who wants to come to me. 

There's plenty of truth about God that even a post-truth world is interested in. We just have to recognize it and start to speak it.

Because it is this truth that makes our God the "different kind of god" the world really is looking for.