We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.
God is Not a Monster
God is not a monster. There are monster god theologies, but they are mistaken.
Accusation and scapegoating, the ravages of war and the wages of sin, these are monsters. The cruel vagaries of chance — until they are tamed by Christ in the age to come — may fall upon us as monsters. But God is not a monster. God is love. Jesus reveals this to us. If we move against the grain of love we will suffer the shards of self-inflicted suffering — and we can call this the wrath of God if we like — but the deeper truth remains: God is love.
So don’t sit in the dark with the tormenting idea that God somehow harbors malice and ill-will toward you. It’s all a cruel fiction. Turn on the light of Christ and realize that the monster you imagined does not exist. Who exists is Jesus. And he is the one who says to you, “It is I, be not afraid.”
You can find the whole post here.
Photo credit: ScottSimPhotography / Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Attributes of God, Character of God, God is Love, Jesus
Related Reading
The Kingdom of God (Part 2)
The Church is called to be nothing less than “the body of Christ,” a sort of corporate extension of Jesus’ incarnate body. We are called to replicate who Jesus was by manifesting who Jesus is. And this is how we expand the dome in which God is king—the Kingdom of God. By definition, therefore, the…
On Attending to the Light in Darkness
Joe Spurr via Compfight Donald Miller has posted a reflection on his Storyline blog about highlighting goodness and thereby pointing to Jesus in the aftermath of events such as the bombing in Boston this week. We want to emphatically declare together that “an enemy has done this” (Matt 13:28). But we also want to be a people…
The Image of Cross-Like Love: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 6
In the previous blog I argued that God is cross-like love. In this blog I’d like to take this a step further by demonstrating why the cross alone could function as the definitive revelation of God’s true character and by showing how this revelation weaves together everything Jesus was about. If you want to know…
Podcast: Does a Jesus-Centric Theology Reduce God?
Greg challenges the traditional starting point of many theologies and defends starting our theology about God’s nature and character with what has been revealed about Jesus. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0325.mp3
Participating in the Divine Nature (Love)
When God created the world, it obviously wasn’t to finally have someone to love, for God already had this, within himself. Rather God created the world to express the love he is and invite others in on this love. This purpose is most beautifully expressed in Jesus’ prayer in John 17. Jesus prays to his…
The Law of Love
Without love, absolutely nothing is of any significance. Paul made this point when he wrote: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all…