Don’t Argue with God

I’ve seen countless efforts to identify where in the matrix of our human behavior we become culpable before God. All of it assumes an existing objective standard of right and wrong separate from God’s Person. Thus, should God blame someone when they meant harm, or when they didn’t care, or…? It’s all a tangled mess. God has revealed the answer, but we keep ignoring it. Let me use myself as an example, since I know me better than I know someone else.

My earthly dad is long gone; there’s no one to embarrass by telling the truth now.

He had a very rough childhood. However, he made the mistake of assuming that the evil done to him was okay, and he did it his own kids. I was convinced at times that he hated me; all of his discipline was from personal anger, never according to some clear standard. Confusingly, he insisted that it was a clear standard. But I never knew when something I did was going to set him off and he would physically abuse me. And to this day I believe he enjoyed doing it sometimes. I’m also convinced he never felt guilty about much of anything; he was borderline sociopath.

So, I was trapped. On the one hand, I had learned to be cruel and capricious like him. On the other hand, I had a very tender conscience. I was driven to act vicious and then would hate myself, in the same way I was convinced he hated me.

I know a thing or two about guilt. And because of my religious upbringing, all of my guilt carried an uncontrollable factor of fear when I thought about God. Yet, I could not avoid God, because I was Elect and I knew it rather early in life. Try to imagine how deeply I had to hide inside my own head in order to accept all the Sunday School teaching, the Baptist college education, and all my ministry training after college. I was in my 30s when I finally got past the worst of my damaged psyche.

Part of getting past it was the realization that most of the stuff that still haunted my conscience wasn’t really me, but someone very evil using me. It’s not that I get off Scott free. It’s a matter of discerning what my actual failure was. Regarding those individual acts that I still remember as evil, those were mostly a matter of being wholly misguided by my earthly father’s influence and the wider context that supported him. I could not have known better.

Nor was there anyone around to help me understand myself. I really was enslaved by multiple factors of the twisted psychology of my youth. There comes a point where you realize that the person acting wasn’t really you, but some perverted slave master using you. I didn’t even realize that I had the option to be free. All things considered, it’s unlikely I could have done much better.

Yet, I am still on the hook for being fallen. David had it right in Psalm 51 (where he reveals God’s outlook). Not only did he confess that his sin was against God alone, but that he had no excuse on the grounds of having been born fallen. David had no sense of false guilt for the details of having Uriah killed. To be honest, Uriah was being stupid about that whole scene. It would be wholly wrong to read our cultural sense of morals back into David’s situation; they lived by their own culture. Rather, David had shamed his army (not going to war with them), he shamed his throne and he shamed the whole nation and the Covenant (coveting Bathsheba without making her part of his harem in the first place). Most importantly, he shamed God.

Notice that God didn’t condemn David for having sex with Bathsheba, but for how he went about it. The first child of this union died, but a subsequent child became the greatest king in the history of Israel.

Stop thinking about the individual sins. Try to see all of them as symptoms of something far more serious. What do you expect from sinners? Sin. Jesus said that about tree roots and fruit (John 15). Each sin act has its own consequences, but the real issue with God is whether or not you care what He thinks. And the simple truth is that you won’t — cannot — care what He thinks unless you have His Spirit in you. So the broader question is whether you are living in the flesh, which cannot impress God ever, or walking in the Spirit. It will take the rest of your life to work out the changes required.

Part of getting past the ghost of my dad’s abuse was forgiving him. It was also committing myself to acting better than he taught me, and letting people imagine I was raised well. I would simply give credit to my Heavenly Father. And then I had to forgive myself. I still have a fleshly nature; it is fully due any wrath God wants to put on it. It’s His choice to be patient and rather indulgent with me in my heart and restore the damage to my soul. That mitigates the wrath He justly pours out on my flesh.

I had to ditch the western ways of false guilt and learn the biblical path. Yes, I was a whiny obnoxious little turd at times, but the real issue was the burden of a fallen fleshly nature. Fallen people are annoying because they are mortal. All the different flavors don’t make any difference in the fundamental fact that they are doomed. We become accountable to God when He sets us free to choose. Until that point, we are not free. We shame Him when we can hear Him, and then we argue.