The Pottery We Make

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  Genesis 1:27

No one has ever seen God.  But the unique One, who is Himself God, is near to to the Father's heart, He has revealed God to us.  John 1:18 (NLT)

...God spoke many times and in many ways...and now in the final days, He has spoken to us through His Son...  The Son expresses the very character of God...  Hebrews 1:1-3 (NLT)

...His Son... the express image of His person... Hebrews 1:2-3

I'm walking through C.S. Lewis's Problem of Pain .  I made this choice recently for several reasons, but perhaps none more powerful than the recent bombings at the Boston Marathon.  There are more powerful personal reasons, greater motivations or concerns for me now that I have begun this reading, but the genesis for the choice lay in the Boston Marathon Bombings and the subsequent fall out in several forums where trolling atheists openly blamed God or 'proved, once again' that He doesn't care if He does exist.

I actually entered the dialogue, which I rarely do.  Most of the antagonistic responses to my contributions weren't worthy of my further response - though my heart broke for the people behind the words.  One response directly to one of my posts intrigued me, and so after receiving notices of the responses to my contributions I scrolled through the commentary and followed the revealed character of the persons antagonizing myself and others.  One troll revealed a character worthy, perhaps ready and capable to receive a reasoned response.  His/Her dialogue with another Christian actually made the decision for me, and I responded.  The dialogue ended with my statement that their inability to reconcile an omnipotent (all powerful) God with the free will choices of humanity was poorly framed on their part - because if they would reason it through from a different direction they would force themselves to see that all the answers to all the questions they claimed to have in this life were actually answered by the conundrum of Free Will.

I have no misconceptions about who is responsible for the tragedies which occurred, I in no way blame God for the evil actions of willfully, evilly deceived humans.  Likewise I don't blame Islam or Socialists or any other defined or vague belief system.  Nor is my focus today to explain the tangents (which I actually understand) they went down and the assumptions they made in choosing their actions.  I don't blame God, nor do I blithely release the responsible parties by blaming the Devil who actively encouraged them and nurtured the hatreds which lead them to their step by step choices.  My response to the worthy troll that day was in regards to the misconceptions an angry world holds in regards to Free Will, which, like it or not, leads us directly into the problem of pain in this world.

I can only touch on one small piece of this issue here today, much as I would like to write my own book.

Fathers.  We the created, unfortunately mold God into their image.

Read that again: We the created, unfortunately mold God into the image of earthly human fathers.

C.S. Lewis touches on this as he tries to walk us through defining Divine Goodness as compared to our conceptions of Good and Evil:

A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the world, afraid to restrain him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind, is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood. 

Unfortunately that quote defines far too many modern parents today.  And those of us who don't always fit that easy going "they're just kids" mold are looked at with confusions that are never given words.  Parenting which can NEVER exhale and say "they're just kids" are an extreme of the pendulum swing to avoid as well.

Another point Lewis makes in these regards is likewise a prevalent misconception of who God is:

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right.  And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness - the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy.  What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'what does it matter so long as they are contented?'  We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in Heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'.  Not many people would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds.

If we could speak to each other today I would say: "actually Mr. Lewis even though you wrote this sometime around 1940, many of us today HAVE precisely formulated our theology of God in those terms.  We conceive and accept only a God that wants everyone happy (as we or they define happiness)."

Insert United States Constitution and the Rule of Law debate here, or legalized abortion debate here, or Occupy movement, or marriage equality debate, or NAMBLA's normalization of pedophilia debate here.  If there's some controversial subject wrapped around the heart of Social Justice that really lights your fires, insert it here, because the sides of the debate are the same in all of them: God's definition of happiness versus humanity's definition.  We define happiness differently than God.  And so we make ourselves God.  We buy wholly the lie in Genesis 3:5 that we "will be like God."  At some level in every debate we find a side looking wholly into the face of God, or wholly into the face of humanity (who can at their very best be reflections of God's goodness) as the solutions.  God alone is the definition of right, and just, and good, and peace, and happiness.  But to point this out and hold to it often puts friends who agree there is a problem at loggerheads.  I experienced that unfortunate discovery in the Occupy discussions when I held that only God could bring the justice they sought, while they were petitioning man.

Back to my point here.

Our own angers and distorted misconceptions about God far too often come from our own fathers and their interactions with us.  We, with unspoken reasoning, reveal by our actions our unchallenged assumption that If our earthly father abused or abandoned us, will not God do the same?  It becomes an unfortunate idolatry where we place God on the potter's wheel and make Him in man's image.  I would say all of us are guilty of this to some extent, even with good fathers.

Edith Schaeffer, in her book A Way of Seeing says:

It is all backwards when a torn pattern - a spoiled pattern - is followed and handed down year after year, and people forget what the original pattern was like.

John Sheasby, a South African evangelist and teacher of the Christian faith engages this in his book The Birthright with:

When you think of your earthly father's presence, do the words "fullness of joy" come to mind?  How about when you think of your heavenly Father?  If they don't, you have a distorted picture of Him - 'a torn pattern,' to use Edith Schaeffer's words.  One of the reasons Jesus came to this earth was to restore that torn photograph to its original condition...  Everywhere Jesus went He left behind pictures of the Father.  Pictures of His goodness.  Pictures of His compassion.  Pictures of His joy.

And so I hear the author of Hebrews reminding us:

...we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away. 2:1

And Paul telling Timothy and the rest of us that drifting away leads to shipwreck (1Tim1:19)