Reality Intrudes

I was on the way to work this morning and listening to the radio. I generally like to listen to a syndicated station playing soft Christian rock named KLOVE (http://www.klove.com). I was listening to a song that said how much God cares about us and a thought occurred to me. This is a head-turner, so beware. God cares about us, but He doesn’t care what we think about Him. Now for the caveat; it matters a great deal to our eternal future what we believe, but the reality is, except for this little consequence of belief, it doesn’t matter what we believe. Now for the explanation.

We have a tendency in this world to act as though our belief somehow influences reality. You’ve seen the books and tapes, “Think and grow rich” and such. The belief behind it is that attitude can change the real world. Thought influences reality. Envisioning something or imagining something makes it real. Folks, God just don’t work that way! We can think anything we want about the nature of God. "God is female”, “God doesn’t exist”, “God is an impersonal force”, “We are all gods”; there are hundreds, if not thousands of views of God. Reality, though, says that no matter how much we may believe what we imagine, it is all still in our heads. Saying that God is dead doesn’t mean He is. Saying God is female won’t make Him so (for the record, He is neither male nor female, He is spirit). God is what He is. And frankly He is unknowable except for what He reveals to us.

The point here is that you are betting everything you are, and everything you ever will be on what you perceive God to be. No matter what you envision Him to be, the reality of who and what He is will not change. Now, this is not what we want to hear. Modern society says you can have your cake and eat it too. No one is wrong, it is all relative. But even classical philosophy has a rule of logic that says that something cannot both be and not be true at the same point in time and space. This is a rule of exclusivity. We want to seem tolerant, being exclusive is not chic. I may disagree with their theology, but the Muslims have one thing right. Their concept of God as Allah cannot co-exist with the Christian God of the Bible, or the Jewish conception of Yahweh. Likewise, the Christian God cannot be the God of the Book of Mormon. The God of the Mormons cannot be Buddha. Buddha is not compatible with neo-paganism.

So, how sure are you that your concept of God is correct? You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Reality will intrude on your dreamscape. For in the end we will know for a certainty. The Bible says that when we die, “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:10 NIV) Not just Christians, but everyone will know the truth. It is obvious to anyone reading this where I stand on this issue…but if I were wrong, then I would still have to stand before whoever God is and confess that I lived my life in vain. There will be a lot of people in that position, and I don’t want to be there, especially just by being sloppy in my thinking.

So, God doesn’t care what you think about Him. He is not going to change just to suit you. Who do you say He is?

Ride-Along

My son is a Criminal Justice major and when he returned home from college this last summer he had a chance to do a ‘ride-along’ in our local police department. He chose to ride on the late shift since that is where most of the action takes place. As he was heading down Rt 7 with the officer in a patrol car, the officer kept an eye on the radar display to see how fast the surrounding traffic was moving. As he approached one vehicle in the opposite lane, the display indicated that the driver was slowing down. As he passed the vehicle, the officer said, “Watch this”, and flipped a switch on the display. The display changed and went from indicating that there was no vehicle ahead in the opposite lane to displaying the now increasing speed of the car they had just passed. “He thinks since we passed him that I can’t see him, but there is a radar cone mounted in the rear of this patrol car, too!”

How often do we think that we need to behave ourselves when we think God is watching, but once we get out of His sight that we can go back to our old ways? Our actions day that as long as we don’t drink alcohol, smoke, swear, gamble, fornicate or do something else sinful while we are in church, we can go back to doing those things on Monday morning. We think God can’t see us because we are not in church. The fact is that this is hypocrisy. “Hypocrite” is a word finding its root in the Greek language and basically means “an actor”, someone who puts on a face for a time and pretends to be something he or she is not.

The real joke behind all of this is that the only person we are fooling is ourselves. Our families know what we are doing, our friends know, probably the people at church know, and God most certainly is not fooled. His sight does not end at the church door. Portraying God as a cosmic policeman just waiting for us to mess up so He can catch us is not a good image really. He loves us, and has paid the ultimate price to rescue us from that very sin that we keep committing when we think he is not watching. So, if He already knows what you are doing and has paid the price so we don’t have to, why not give it all back to Him and accept what He is offering? That is true honesty, and what He has been looking for all along.