Let God be God

By the early twentieth century much of the church's theology had quietly cut God down to a manageable size. He had become, in too many pulpits, a polished reflection of the age itself, an endorsement of human progress, a tame deity who could be counted on to agree with whatever the modern world already wanted to believe. Then the guns of the First World War tore the optimism to shreds, and the tame god proved useless in the wreckage. A Swiss pastor named Karl Barth, standing in a village pulpit week after week before ordinary people who needed an actual word from an actual God, found he had nothing to say to them out of the domesticated faith he had been handed. So he went back to the text and was struck by something like a thunderclap. God is God. Wholly other, free, not the echo of our values but their judge, the living One who speaks. And His word, when it comes, does not flatter; it is sharp as a sword, dividing soul from spirit, cutting where it lands. The recovery that followed reoriented a generation away from a god made in their own image and back toward the One who could not be domesticated at all.

Your rebuilt faith is quietly tempted to do the same thing that pulpit did: to shrink God to a size you can manage and a shape you can predict. A god who reliably endorses your plans, who shares all your politics, who is conveniently scandalized by exactly the people you dislike and pleased by exactly the people you are, is not the LORD. He is a mirror, and the bracing recovery here is the discovery that the real God will not fit in it. His word is living and active, sharp enough to cut you, not just the people you were hoping it would cut. There is a deep relief hidden in this, not only a rebuke. If God were only ever your echo, you would be alone in the universe, talking to yourself. That He is wholly other means there is Someone genuinely there, who speaks, who can correct you and therefore can actually meet you. Let Him be larger and stranger than your categories. A god who never once unsettles you is one you have made; the living One addresses you, and His word divides before it heals.