Untwisted: god of words
"They raise the letter of the law like a banner till You’re
small and far away."
-Nichole Nordeman
-Nichole Nordeman
“Maybe this life is just about love and tenderness.”
-Edwin McCain
"Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Let’s get something straight.
Your evangelical god is probably not the God of the Bible.
Or
The god of your evangelical friends is probably not the God
of the Bible.
That god is kind of a tool, so I’m glad he doesn’t exist.
There’s precedent to say all this. In a time of rampant
idolatry, the prophet Jeremiah makes fun of people who construct their own gods
out of wood and then bow down pleading for the thing they have just created to
save them (Jeremiah 10:3-5).
Most people do the same thing today.
Except
Instead of using wood or metal they use words.
Powerful words.
Words from the Bible.
It’s simple. You rip a few verses from Genesis to serve as
the base. Cut a chunk of the book of Romans out to be the body and extract the
end of Philippians to function as a head and seal it all together with the fear
of hell and the promise of heaven from Revelation.
One god ready to be worshipped. One god that just so happens
to reflect the truths we’ve always known! Or at least that someone has always
known…
Don’t like this god?
Me either. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressingly
corrupt.
How do I know this isn’t the God of the Bible?
Because these gods are abusive. The followers of these gods
are more concerned about the Sabbath than they are about the person for which
the Sabbath was created.
Because these gods don’t act anything like Jesus.
And Jesus is never abusive.
Many, if not all of us have been abused spiritually. There is abuse of the word of God in every tradition that stifles, twists, and chokes the life God has for us. This is not new. This is not an anomaly developed in the latter half of the 20th century. It is the picture of the way men run religion. Faith is polluted, made toxic, and forced to be drunk to the dregs in the name being right. Because if you are right, nothing else matters. The result is always abused, abandoned, dysfunctional people.
God calls us from this. Many of us have heard. But seeing the abuse and realizing this is what happened often leaves the residue of anger. In God's call, He asked us to forgive the unforgivable and to lay down the bitterness and hatred that we might pick up grace and love.
Many, if not all of us have been abused spiritually. There is abuse of the word of God in every tradition that stifles, twists, and chokes the life God has for us. This is not new. This is not an anomaly developed in the latter half of the 20th century. It is the picture of the way men run religion. Faith is polluted, made toxic, and forced to be drunk to the dregs in the name being right. Because if you are right, nothing else matters. The result is always abused, abandoned, dysfunctional people.
God calls us from this. Many of us have heard. But seeing the abuse and realizing this is what happened often leaves the residue of anger. In God's call, He asked us to forgive the unforgivable and to lay down the bitterness and hatred that we might pick up grace and love.
To be untwisted.
But these are deep wounds - old wounds. These are the places
where out of ignorance and mindless moronic evil our souls were torn. Forgiving
seems unjust. But it will be God, not us, who will straighten what is bent. To
forgive is to stop keeping score which is the only way to win this game.
Now is the time to love and be loved, to trust that what has been broken can be redeemed, and to hope for the coming of the God who is better than our ideological constructions.
Now is the time to love and be loved, to trust that what has been broken can be redeemed, and to hope for the coming of the God who is better than our ideological constructions.
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