So… what’s up with this title?
I wish I knew the original thought behind it. Sometimes I wake up abruptly in the night with an idea that just MUST be recorded and, well, this was one of my recents.
There was also an elaborate dream about being a speaker at the Super Bowl, which should tell you how much my subconscious mind knows about the Super Bowl.
Despite being the product of 2am brain waves, I do think I can take a guess at where I was going with this. Perhaps my subconscious was picking up on something my brain has been processing lately: the nature and character of God.
I live in America: land of the free, home of the brave, but I must acknowledge that it is also the land of the Super-Walmart and the Big Gulp. Though I am grateful for the opportunity and freedom to make my life what I want it to be, I can’t apply that same “Have it Your Way” mentality to God and expect his character to be just as it is represented in the scriptures.
So basically, God can’t be whoever I want him to be and still be God.
Cradle to Cross
I first came to grips with this idea when I was preparing for the first-ever message I gave in a church. My pastor asked if I would give a short Christmas teaching and I, halfway through my Bible degree, was incredibly excited to share some of what I had learned. My message, titled “From the Cradle to the Cross” discussed the incomplete picture of Christ which results from keeping our ideas of Jesus limited to the tiny, helpless baby lying in the manger.
In the movie Talladega Nights, Ricky Bobby announces that he prefers to pray to Baby Jesus.
Jesus “meek and mild”
G.K. Chesterton wrote about this concept in The Everlasting Man, explaining how the picture of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is an incomplete image. In a passage I find slightly humorous, but not the least bit untrue, Chesterton writes,
“If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing meek and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about the tone of the voice that says ‘Hold thy peace and come out of him.’ It is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue for the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these controversies; but considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New Testament is new.”
The idea that Jesus is meek is not untrue, but it’s not a wholistic picture. Jesus, the very image of God the Father (John 14:8-9) cannot merely be meek if he is to be Savior. Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights might have liked the “eight-pound six ounce, newborn infant Jesus,” but we need the wholistic picture for God to really be God.
Don’t worship a guy named Max who owns a garden store
Back to that ridiculous but apt title.
My natural flesh-self (which always gravitates toward the path of least resistance) does not like the Jesus who asks me to submit to anyone’s will but my own. If I’m not paying attention to how God reveals his character to his children, I might invent a god.
The god of my invention likes who I like and hates who I hate.
He always agrees with me.
He is always “loving,” never convicts or corrects me, and doesn’t make me feel bad.
The god I invent most definitely would never ask me to do something I don’t want to do.
The god of my creation might as well be a guy named Max who owns a garden store: unoffensive, stays out of my business, nice. But this god is also powerless to change me, heal me, and save me. The god I invent is full of “grace,” but not truth. On other days, I might invent a god who is all about “truth” (read: very angry at me and everyone) but lacks the grace we see the true God bestowing all over scripture.
Sorry, Max.
If I am to follow the true God, I need to submit myself to all of him: all of his titles and character traits He himself has revealed through Scripture; to all of His sides and colors and flavors and fragrances, not just the ones I prefer. And the thing is, I actually want Him more, the real, true God. At least I do when I taste and see that He actually is as good as He says He is (Psalm 34:8).
In my eight years of reborn-ness, I have only just begun to dive into the mystery of the true God– the one who is better than anything I could make up. I know Him now to be the one who has healed my mother’s sickness and healed my heart of so much bitterness and fear.
When I was going through a breakup a few years ago, I begged God to remove my pain with a sort of spiritual codeine, but He didn’t. I didn’t get that for a bit. All I wanted to was bargain and moan and be numbed because I felt like my heart was split in two. There were some very tender moments in that season where I would cry out to Him, usually after reading in the Psalms, and though I still felt the pain, I could also feel Him coming close to me and feeling it with me. It was consistent with his character– how He sent Jesus in the form of man, not only to heal us and forgive us of our sins, but also to be WITH us. The God who does that… that’s a God I want to serve.
For reasons unknown to me, the Lord may not remove every obstacle in my path, and I can trust Him even so because He has proven himself to be trustworthy, faithful, and true. He has named himself Abba (Father; Gal. 4:6), Shalom (Peace, Judges 6:24), Rapha (Healer, Exodus 15:26), and Jireh (Provider, Gen. 22:14). I may not know the depths of each of those names or characteristics yet, but I know they all describe the same God who somehow desires that I know Him.
It reminds me of when Mr. Beaver speaks to Lucy about Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. “He’s not safe,” he says. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Kayley Chartier 