Ok, if you're still reading this blog, you have my eternal gratitude. I know I'm sharing some things that are not easy to hear. To be completely honest, I am going through my own personal sifting process as I write this thing and my 'flesh' is screaming at me to burn this blog and walk away from this study because, frankly, this stuff is not fun. It's not fun to write about it and it certainly is not fun to be going through it.
But it is necessary.
You may be wondering why it is necessary for God to 'sift' us. Why does the Potter have to put us through circumstances and situations that strip us down to nothing and bring us to our knees? Why do we have to lose absolutely everything, including our sanity at times, for God to finally get us where He wants to get us?
The short answer is because of our inherently sinful natures. The longer answer is: God has an image problem.
If you were to do a man-on-the-street style interview and just ask random people to say the first word that comes to their mind when you say the word "God", the number of different answers you would receive would probably blow your mind. Obviously people who are not knowledgable of the scriptures or who don't go to church aren't going to have a healthy understanding of who God is. How could they? Expecting an 'unchurched' person to give an accurate description of God is as insane as expecting Stevie Wonder to correctly describe the color blue.
However, God's image problem doesn't stop at the doors of your average church. Do that same man-on-the-street interview of faithful church attendees all over the land and you'll come up with the same mind-blowing diversity of answers. The truth of the matter is, most of God's people do not have a full understanding of God. It's not their fault, of course. Even the scriptures tell us the depths of God's wisdom and knowledge are beyond our finite capabilities and His ways and means are 'past finding out'.
It is this chasm between our human understanding and the reality of God that makes this entire spiritual exercise so difficult. Generally speaking, we humans do not naturally gravitate toward subjects that do not elevate us. With few exceptions, we all want to be seen as 'special' or 'extraordinary'. Do you think the modern popularity of superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man and the mythologies that surround them is an accident? Like the Greek/Roman myths of antiquity, our modern-day myths are filled with tales of average human beings elevated to superhuman levels to either take over the world or save the day.
How about our cultural obsession with celebrity? Humanity loves to lift up those who are extraordinarily gifted and worship them as our 'heroes' (we also enjoy tearing them down, but that's a different blog subject). From movie stars to professional athletes to award-winning singers, our culture has created a religion around those we recognize as worthy of our praise. The underpinnings of that worship is the belief that if Brad Pitt, LeBron James, or Taylor Swift can do it, maybe we can too. Hence the popularity of talent shows like American Idol.
Generally speaking, most of us want our 15 minutes of fame. A large percentage of the population want to be seen as special or extraordinary. Some of us even want to be the hero.
Christianity is the antitheses of all of that. Christianity dares to put man in his place as a creation gone wrong. From Eden to Armageddon, mankind is described in scriptures as 'lost', 'wicked', 'sinful', and in need of saving from themselves. For a culture obsessed with evolving into something extraordinary, those concepts aren't just unpopular, they despised and are easily rejected and filed away in the same realm as the Greek/Roman mythologies.
If you think what I'm describing hasn't infiltrated our churches, you aren't paying attention.
Perhaps you've heard of the famous sermon preached by Johnathan Edwards in the 1740s entitled "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God". The history surrounding this sermon involves a season of revival that spread throughout the American colonies that came to be known as 'The Great Awakening'. Pastor Edwards' sermon is widely acknowledged to be the theological centerpiece of the teachings that were birthed in that great revival and promulgated over the last 200+ years of our nation's evangelical history.
The foundation of this sermon is the concept of God as a vengeful God who will bring eternal torment upon those who die without a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. While this teaching wasn't new in 1741 America, the emphasis on God's wrath against sin and those who choose to revel in it had a freshness to it that brought countless millions to a spiritual crossroads, forced people to face their morality and mortality in the same breath and challenged them to make a decision of repentance and salvation from God's wrath.
I'm certainly not going to refute any of that. There is plenty of Bible to support Pastor Edwards' seminal sermon to say nothing of the generations of evangelical sermons that were birthed from The Great Awakening. But what I will say is there is much more to God than an angry deity searching for reasons to punish his wicked creation.
Over two centuries of preaching on the wrath of God against sin has produced a lot of spiritual decisions and if recent church history is any indication, not all of those decisions have been positive. There is an imbalance in the Body of Christ that has introduced a considerable amount of problems, not the least of which are generations of Bible-believing preachers and teachers who are still looking to be elevated to a form of ministerial celebrity within the Christian ranks.
When I was a kid, the churches I attended were known as Independent Baptist Churches. Like most denominational churches, there was a certain amount of pride attached to our specific brand of church. I couldn't begin to count the number of sermons I've heard in my lifetime from chest-thumping (dare I say, praise-fishing) preachers proclaiming the 'unedited truth' of God's word as disseminated from doctrinally approved Independent Baptist theology. Other denominations, including other Baptist churches, were regularly painted as errant mutations in need of education in 'the truth' or complete and utter antichrists in need of judgement and destruction. Only the Independent Baptists had the full understanding of scripture. Only our brand had 'the truth'.
I grew up with that mentality and fully believed it throughout my young adulthood. It wasn't until I got outside of that Independent Baptist box and began to see and experience God outside of the confines of my Independent Baptist upbringing that I began to see, if not fully understand, several actual truths that have formed my limited understanding of God in my adult years.
Truth #1 - We absolutely cannot put God in any man-made box. Doing so feeds our pride and creates unteachable sermon critics instead of humble sheep in need of feeding from the bread of life.
Truth #2 - Any time you come to a place of relational comfort with your understanding of who God is, you had better buckle up because God is about to set things in motion that will shake you out of your comfort zone and challenge your beliefs about Him and your image of Him to your core.
Truth #3 - Blind loyalty to any man-originated system that focuses on a limited number of God's characteristics creates an unhealthy imbalance in the Body of Christ. This imbalance is what has created the denominational confusion that is predominant in modern Christianity.
I say these things, not to slag on Independent Baptists, but to speak from personal experience of a problem within the Body of Christ that is hardly indigenous to that one denomination. Pick a denomination, including non-denominationalism (which has become a denomination in itself) and it won't take much time to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
I could go on for while here, but I'll summarize my views of denominational Christianity by describing a scene of a group of children trying to put the same puzzle together but each one taking a few pieces of that puzzle and proclaiming the picture complete while spewing anger and hatred at the other kids who are doing the same thing with their own collection of puzzle pieces.
The number of different denominations all claiming to have 'the truth' from the exact same book as all the other denominations use is frustrating. Dig a little deeper and take a look at all of the sub-denominatons there are (like the different types of Baptist churches, Pentecostal churches, Assembly of God churches, etc) and your brain will literally explode.
All of these groups all claim to worship the same God, get their truths from the same book, and all claim to have a corner on the theological truth market. Is it any wonder why God has an image problem? Can you maybe see why God would want to put an end to all of this by transforming His people from self-governed, pride-filled representatives trying to build their own little fifedoms of doctrinal truth into Spirit-led, Spirit-filled followers who know their place in God's kingdom and are submitted to working with Him and His people to build His kingdom?
Can you see where God might hate sin, not because of how we act when our moral compass is out of whack but because of what our selfishness and pride does to His plans for us? Can you see where God would want to separate Himself from and punish those who are dead-set on never listening to His Word but would want to reason with those who have the capacity to have ears to hear? Can you see where God would have grace and mercy on those to whom He will have grace and mercy and wrath and vengeance to those whom He would have wrath and vengeance?
Is God is looking for reasons to punish sinners or is He looking for sinners He can reason with?
"Come now and let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool." - Isaiah 1:18
Or is He both of these things and much, much more?
STAY WITH ME. WE'RE GETTING TO THE GOOD STUFF NOW...
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