It is possible that the title may annoy you. It may sound as though I’m saying that you are wrong about God, whereas I know all the answers and will put you right. If that is how it sounds, I want to tell you that that’s not how it is. I wish only to proclaim, as faithfully as I can, what I understand to be true. You would not expect me to approve of error, merely for the sake of being popular.
The revelation which I have received from God is very special indeed. But it is not made especially to me—it is made to you and everyone else in the same way. The Bible is God’s revelation about Himself and His purpose. There are ideas about God which I judge to be mistaken, because they are out of harmony with the truth which is in the Bible.
It seems to me that what some people have done is this: instead of coming to the Bible to learn there about God and His purpose, they have for themselves invented ideas as to what God is like, in accordance with what they would wish Him to be. The tragedy is this: false ideas about God and His purpose lead to false hopes and false ideals.
Ultimately, a self invented God is no God, judged by the real standard of God’s truth. The matter therefore is not one merely of theological argument or academic disputation: it affects the very fundamentals of your life and mine. A false God of our own invention cannot answer when we are in jeopardy, and can offer no solace in the agony of our soul or in loneliness. A self invented God has no influence in this world and has no power to give life in the world to come. That is why therefore it seems right to me as best I can to draw attention to those ideas about God which, though they may be popular, are nevertheless contrary to what God has revealed.
1. God’s Severity
The first mistake I wish to bring to your attention is the belief that because God is a God of love, He cannot therefore be a God of judgement. This idea conceives God (if I may say it without being irreverent) not as a father but as a grandfather—benevolent and indulgent, not wishing to hinder what His children want to do, and not making inconvenient demands upon them. His ultimate concern is to bring all His creatures to Himself and overlook all their sins, and so make the world into one big happy family.
Those who think thus are mistaken about what the love of God is. The love of God is the love of that which is good and true—and to love good intensely is to hate evil and falsehood. The love of God is not some sweet sentiment which pretends everything is all right when it is not.
There are some who suggest that the God of the Bible’s New Testament is a different God from the one revealed in the Old Testament: in some way He has evolved from a God Who used to hate sin, to a God Who now merely overlooks it. But when God is confronted with irretrievable wickedness He destroys it. It is an act of His love. It was so at the flood (Genesis 6-9); it was so at Sodom (Genesis 19). It is to be so in the day of the world’s doom, when Christ returns (Acts 17:31).
God may be invisible but He is not indifferent. ‘Whatever one sows, that will he also reap’ (Galatians 6:7). That principle is indestructible. It was so with Israel: confronted with Jesus their rightful King they chose Caesar (John 19:15), and 40 years later Caesar came to them and destroyed their city and took them to himself as slaves.
There is a moral element in the nature of God with which all things ultimately must square. Every cause of wickedness will eventually be destroyed. It will be an act of love. If you can conceive of a God who will allow someone to go on sinning until they are irrecoverably wicked, and then let them go into eternity, you can conceive of a God Who is not really a God of love.
Jesus Christ told a parable (Luke 13:6–9) in which the owner of a garden comes seeking fruit on a tree, and finding none he declares that the tree is useless and must be cut down. The gardener persuades him to let him work on the tree for one more year—then, the gardener says, if it still is barren then it shall be cut down. This story reveals there is no disagreement between God and Jesus Christ about the fate of that which is incurably barren. Jesus came to save us from our sins (John 3:16). But that man or woman who insists on being a failure will not benefit from his salvation. He told another parable about the two classes of people at the judgement: ‘And these will go away into eternal punish-ment, but the righteous into eternal life’ (Matthew 25:46).
2. God’s Interest in the Earth
The next mistake about God conceives of Him as being a God Who has no real interest in the earth. To think of God as being especially interested in this little planet, when there are millions of systems like our solar system in the universe, is to make Him into a small God—too small for those who hold this view. But the Bible says that God is vitally interested in the earth. There is a declaration of divine policy, which was uttered by God to Moses when God’s people had refused to carry His glory into the Promised Land: ‘Truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord’ (Numbers 14:21).
That is the pole star of all the prophets, as they tell out their message of the day which is coming when peace and joy and singing and gladness and security and life in its fullness shall be established, not in some unknown abode in the heavens, but right here on earth, where at present sighing and sorrow and death abound. That has been the hope of all people of faith down the ages, who have not been mistaken about the purpose of God. Not that they might pass from the earth and ascend to heaven, but that they might see upon the earth the Kingdom of the Living God.
That is what Jesus meant when he prayed the pattern prayer: ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matthew 6:10). And when he said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’ (5:5). They do not at present, but the promise is dependable. The Psalmist had proclaimed it before: ‘Evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land’ (Psalm 37:9).
To those who have mistaken God’s purpose this is all clotted nonsense, but to those who have understood the Bible’s revelation of God it is the great hope of the Christian faith. God’s promises all concern the earth. It is destined to become a paradise again for the dwelling of His people. The second coming of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world, the coming of the divine King who will rule the earth in equity and with divine authority (Psalm 72).
Long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God had spoken of His Son, and through the psalmist had made this promise: ‘Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession’ (Psalm 2:8). The Apostle John saw a vision of the fulfilment of that promise: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever’ (Revelation 11:15).
Such is the wonder of God’s justice and truth. To the place where Jesus was once rejected, he is coming again to reign invincible. So spoke the angels when he ascended from the earth: ‘This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (Acts 1:11). So shall the ancient declaration of God be fulfilled, that one day the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord.
3. God’s Truth
The third mistake about God which I want to address is that conception of Him which allows people to think that God is unconcerned with how they regard His word and His will.
The outcome of this mistake is to think that we can come to God on our own terms, and can prescribe our own conditions. From this comes a conclusion (not always expressed but certainly implied) that it does not matter what God has said. He is the kind of God Who, although perhaps He has spoken, is always prepared to modify His words so as to accommodate people’s desires.
People who think like this may proceed to worship God and call themselves His children, without having taken the trouble to see what He has said about how we should come to Him. How He said, and His Son Jesus confirmed, ‘In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men’ (Mark 7:7). Now Jesus said that in order to be his friend, we need to show it: ‘You are my friends if you do what I command you’ (John 15:14). ‘Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven’ (Matthew 7:21).
Obedience to God’s will is the secret of success. Noah obeyed God and was saved from the flood (Genesis 6). Lot was saved out of Sodom because he did the word of God (Genesis 19). Naaman the Syrian was cured of his leprosy because he did what God prescribed (2 Kings 5). Whilst he refused and insisted he knew better than God, he remained a leper. So God says, ‘This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word’ (Isaiah 66:2).
I say with sorrow, but I must testify I believe it to be true, that the world abounds with people who will not even bother to look at God’s word, let alone tremble in His presence. They imagine that they will come to salvation because their own conscience tells them so.
If they were not mistaken about God, they would know that no one can come to God on the testimonial of their own goodness. They must come on God’s terms, else it is no good coming at all.
4. How to Come to God
Jesus said, ‘Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved’ (Mark 16:16). Take notice of the imperative tone in the Lord’s voice. That word ‘whoever’ discriminates between those who will and those who will not. ‘Whoever believes and is baptized’ —believing is not believing anything, but believing that which is true. To believe that which is false or self invented is not faith, it is superstition. And the Bible says, ‘Without faith it is impossible to please him’ (Hebrews 11:6).
Baptism means being immersed in water as an act of obedience arising out of faith. That which makes baptism valid is not the water, nor the person who administers it, but the spirit of the person who submits to it. It must be an act of obedience. It is not just a matter of getting wet. It is not a bath, but a baptism.
There are many people who, because they have made a mistake about God, will not heed this commandment. They are indifferent to it because they believe it does not matter. They perhaps reassure themselves that God has modified His demands and compromised His requirements so that all they need do to please Him is to follow their own judgement and obey their own will.
I am afraid that Jesus calls these people fools. He says they’re like a man who builds a house upon the sand, which while the sun is shining seems safe enough, but when the storm comes crumbles and falls with a great crash (Matthew 7:24–27).
‘Seek, and You Will Find’
I have pointed out four mistakes about God, all four of which are quite possible to make, but have disastrous consequences. It is not for me to sit on a throne of judgement—that is not my prerogative. But no preacher is worth his salt if, identifying a mistake, he shrinks away from saying so for the sake of being amiable. If you have been disturbed by what I have said, it is my hope that you will not rest until you have satisfied yourself of God’s word in the Bible.
Jesus said, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you’ (Matthew 7:7). We must seek God where He is to be found—in His own word. And when we find Him, we must come to Him in the way that He requires.
Dennis Gillett