Far too few Christians are in the habit of checking themselves on their beliefs about what God is saying—whether it comes to interpreting the scriptures, or to whatever might be going on in their hearts. As a result, they tend to miss it whenever they make errors in interpreting these things, and come to regret it later.
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It’s one of the top false teachings in the churches that “God loves everybody”. It’s taken as a given—as an unassailable fact, and non-negotiable. But while it’s true that God is an amazing lover of people, and loves people far more than any of us could ever deserve, we owe it to ourselves and to God to understand everything that the Bible says about this important topic.
The surprising-to-many fact of the matter is that God does not love everybody. Yes, yes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” (John 3:16), but do you know the rest of what the Bible has to say on the topic? Let me throw out just one example for your immediate consideration:
The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked, those who love violence, he hates with a passion.
Psalm 11:5 NIV
As it turns out, there are several passages of this sort throughout the Bible. To learn more, listen to my podcast episode: Re-thinking the Bible. Episode 20: How God Values People
He had been so certain that day that the thoughts and feelings that had come into his heart were a direct communication from God, having been put there by none other than Jesus Christ himself. Later, however, he would come to understand that those thoughts and feelings had been nothing more than the natural workings of his own mind, and that he had been merely assuming that God was behind it.
Even so, he went for decades without ever adopting a reliable strategy for telling the two apart. And he would make the same mistake thousands of times. For the many failures he encountered, one would think he might have tired of the whole thing and turned to scripture instead for learning the will of God. But it was just too alluring—this idea he had got from church that God was going to be communicating with him directly, as if by a private conversation in his own heart. He much preferred that to the prospects of reading and study and contemplation. And so he continued on as he had been taught.
And he would not come to see it for many years, but the result of all this was that he had set up by mistake an interior altar to his own will and reasoning, and that the actual opinions and wishes of God had had very little to do with his daily decision making. Once he finally stared learning how to listen to the scriptures, he realized then that God was “telling” him many more things through the Bible than he had ever perceived before, when he was looking mostly inside his own heart for communication from God. And not only was there more of it, but what he was hearing now was much different in nature than before, for now, it disagreed with his own thoughts and feelings much more often, and required him to adjust his personal view accordingly.
This was much harder work, but was much more authentic and effective, and he was alive again, growing in ways he had not grown before.
I have sat back in amazement
And watched the religious man
Post a hard and cautionary meme
That condemns the very practice
He regularly commits himself—
As if it could not possibly
Be relevant to his own behavior.
And I wonder at how he
Must have got hold
Of a different Jesus than the one
I have read about—
Who would have scalded him
With a rebuke about his blindness,
Even as the man was busy
Posting memes about blinded people.
He is proud, it seems,
That he knows the warning
And passes it along to others,
Playing a role in this world
That he, no doubt, counts as important,
For he is the teacher of good things,
With hardly an apt thought about
Being the doer of good things himself.
He thinks he can fudge the facts
And get away with it—
That he knows what he’s doing
And everything’s going to be all right.
But the practice has already taken its toll
And he cannot see himself for what he truly is,
Even in his obvious acts of hypocrisy.
And being blinded thus far,
He doubles down with more deceit—
With bald-faced lies in response to those
Who tell the truth about what he has done.
He did not, I venture,
Get enough spankings.
Funny, we!
And not to get
Too serious
All of a sudden,
But the question arises
As to whether
God is laughing
Or not.
I have worked for decades to understand the Bible keenly while living in this messy-minded world. And the investment has surely not been without its rewards! But particularly in light of this deliberate pursuit of excellence, I do wonder just how much I may have overgeneralized about the quality of my thinking being better than that of most others. Surely I have crossed the line often, and have assumed myself in the better place when I was not.
I wonder at how I may be doing it still, and I have learned too much about myself to assume that I am not!
And I said to him, “You know you’ve changed my life, right?”
And he smiled when he replied with a dismissive roll of the eyes, “No, you’re the one who did all the work.”
Continue readingThere is no refuge
No escape from being seen
No way around being found out
For we have no choice in life but to act
And even our inaction is itself our choice
And while we might rather that the truth of us
Should stay hidden from common view
Our actions reveal just who we are
And how we reckon the world
And what we do believe
To everyone who
Happens to
See.
