Is God Out to Get Us?
“The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to third and fourth generation.
And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped. He said, ‘If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.’
He said: I hereby make a covenant. Before all your people I will perform marvels, such as have not been performed in all the earth or in any nation; and all the people among whom you live shall see the work of the LORD; for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you.”
Exodus 34:6-10 NRSV
This question/Deep Thoughts comes from a few places.
First, I’ve been listening to our conversations in Sunday school, Pub Theology, social media, etc. and it stands out just how much we still view God as a behavior modification tool. Instead of God’s inspirational love in Christ Jesus lifting us up to higher ideals, we “stay away from sin in case God sees me.”
Second, in our journey through and to healthy relationships in worship this semester there is another air of “not messing up.” Instead of an inspiration towards wanting the best for the other person, language is often used of “happy wife, happy life” or similar phrasing that suggest walking on egg shells to avoid the inevitable pitfalls.
Third, today marks the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington D.C., and what ended up to be a field in Pennsylvania thanks to some brave airline passengers. Much of the language from the attacker stand point was religious in nature, that the USA was the enemy of Islam. However, there were religious people within the USA who tried to make their own sense out of the attacks, coming to the conclusion that we must have deserved them due to some national sin.
- Is God out to get us?
- Do we assume the worst?
- Are we expecting failure?
- And how does that affect what we do in relationships?
This passage from Exodus could be considered “the preamble” to the Ten Commandments. It’s a conversation between God and Moses right before God gives the commandments and renews the covenant with Moses that God had made with Adam/Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In it, we learn three things:
- God is incredibly patient, loving, and wants this to work.
- God knows the impact of sin for the long term and reserves right to straighten things up.
- God knows who he’s working with and still chooses to go forward.
That right there ought to be enough, in my mind, to realize that this God is different from all the other gods that surrounded the popular religion around the Hebrews in that day. Gods like Baal were storm gods and detrimental changes in the weather were thought to be Baal’s anger at the people and Baal’s vindictive, transactional response. Gods like Baal didn’t care about the posterity of the people. Kind of like Zeus, later in Greek mythology, the gods didn’t care about the people, the gods wanted to rule and benefit from the people.
Moses meets a God who cares about the people. Cares about the long-term future of the people. Cares about helping them live the best, most full life.
Moses meets a God who knows what kind of knuckleheads he’s about to engage with and chooses to commit anyways.
All that to say, if God wanted to erase and punish all the people who cause hurt in this world, God would have done it by now. If God wanted to teach us lessons through punishment and violence, there’d probably be even more horror stories. If God was a retributive God that was always looking to catch us, then why send Jesus into our lives and take the sin for us?
It just doesn’t make sense to think that God is out to get us, and it would do us a world of good to stop looking over our shoulder for the inevitable punishment. Because it trains our brains to operate the same way in our relationships.
Think about it this way, “which task do you exert maximum amount of effort for? The task you love, or the task you don’t want to get caught doing it wrong?” My guess is “the one you love.” If our relationships are lived with a fear of getting caught, how little energy are we spending on the inspiring and uplifting actions towards that person? If we allow for grace and forgiveness, does that not allow the other person more freedom to blossom and grow?
God bookends the preamble with “I am patient and forgiving” and “I’m going to make a covenant with you, even knowing your flaws.” In the middle is the reality of God’s divine power and perfection, but on both sides of that is the truth about God’s way of relating to us.
God isn’t out to get us.
God isn’t punishing us along the way.
God isn’t causing terrorist attacks or making you lose your job because you did something bad.
God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.”
How might accepting the love God gives you change how you love others?
How might freeing yourself from God’s vindictive watchfulness change the way you perceive other’s judgment or judge others yourself?
Need more proof? Meditate on these verses this week:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
John 3:16-17
Peace,
David Lessner
