When the Israelites made a golden calf to worship soon after leaving Egypt, they did so because Moses had not returned from the mountain and his meeting with God as soon as they expected (Exodus 32:1). And so, with real enemies around and real needs to be met, they felt like they needed something more than the promises of an invisible God to protect them.
They weren’t the only ones.
Like the Israelites, our counterfeit gods always grow out of distrust and fear. We feel like we need something beyond God and his promises. We don’t want to get rid of God per se, but we aren’t willing to accept him on his own terms. So instead of completely walking away from God, we just reshape him into a form that guarantees he gives us something in the way that we want it.
For example:
We feel like we’ve got to have money to be happy, so we invent a God that will guarantee that for us. This is called the “prosperity gospel”—and it leads to books like Your Best Life Now.
Others like to see themselves as good people and better than others, so they invent a God who is angrier at the kinds of sins other people struggle with more than he is the kinds of sin they struggle with. This is a lot of conservative, cultural Christianity.
Maybe you really need family stability to be happy, so you invent a God who guarantees that, and then you get angry at him if he lets something go wrong.
We want to have unchallenged sexual freedom—where we can do anything and everything we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody—so we invent a permissive God who is OK with it. This is the God of liberalism, popular among many professing Christians today.
Reshaping God to fit our fears is incredibly easy. I know, because I do it, too. In fact, I made a list of all the ways I have reshaped God over the years to guarantee me something I wanted. I call it, “Who God Should Be, According to J.D.” It goes something like this:
“If I obey God, nothing bad will ever happen to my family and my church will always succeed.”
“If I tithe, God will make sure that I always have enough cash to afford nice things.”
“If I am a good pastor, God will make sure that people will always respect me and like me. I’ll never get slandered or falsely accused of anything.”
“If I pray for my kids, God guarantees that they will grow up, love Jesus, marry great spouses who love Jesus … and make lots of money.”
“God will make sure that every person who invented computer viruses that affect my computer will catch a real virus and die a slow, painful death.” (Don’t act holier-than-thou. You know you pray this, too.)
The tragedy with these counterfeit gods is that when God doesn’t do one of these things, we complain that he isn’t keeping up his end of the “bargain”—a bargain that we manufactured out of thin air. What’s worse, many people even conclude that because their counterfeit god doesn’t exist, then there is no God at all.
If we lose faith in a god that never existed in the first place, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, we should hope for more people to lose faith in the gods they’ve projected out of their fears and desires. What we must never do is lose confidence in the one true God because we evaluate his love according to our made-up terms.
If God really is infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, many of the ways he acts in this world will continue to baffle us. That doesn’t mean his love and control are not at work in our lives. That doesn’t mean we can’t trust him. It certainly doesn’t mean he’s not there. It means we’ve redefined his love and control rather than receiving the love given to us on his terms.
And if I had to choose between the love-I-expect-from-God and the Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love of the real God … I’ll take the real version every time.
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