I sometimes wonder why God doesn’t make Himself more obvious. It’s not that He hasn’t done quite a bit of that already: creation testifies to His existence; Scripture proclaims His deity; amd His presence can be seen and sensed in every blazing sunset, each newborn mewl, all of the intricately woven “coincidences” that set a wayward soul on the path towards His welcoming embrace. The Lord is everywhere, of this I have no doubt.
But I see how questions lurk within the hearts of those blind to the Lord’s subtleties. And I find myself wishing for their sake that He might be a little louder with His self-proclamations.
A recent reading of Exodus reminded me that the obviousness of God does not preclude doubt or even outright defiance and disobedience. Not long after Moses led the Israelites out of slavery (a time that itself was replete with obvious miracles, from the devastation of plagues to the supernatural parting of the Red Sea), he was called to spend forty days on the mountain of God, where he would receive the Ten Commandments. In her book The Deconstruction of Christianity, Alisa Childers describes the scene this way: “from the vantage point of the Israelites below, this would have been a powerful and magnificent sight, with the glory of God wrapping around the mountain like a cloud and blazing like a devouring fire at its pinnacle.”
Moses was still on the mountain when the Israelites grew impatient and asked Moses’ brother, Aaron, to make them a god who would go before them. Childers writes, “they wanted a god who would meet them on their terms, not his. They deconstructed their view of God (and literally deconstructed all their gold) and reconstructed a god of their own making. But this was not a god who had any power or ability to love them and care for them. It was not a god who could challenge them, correct them, or (conveniently) punish them. It was impotent. It was simply a hunk of melted gold they could look at, and they could project on it their own emotions, desires, and opinions.”
After all they had witnessed, there could have been no doubt in the Israelites’ minds that God existed, yet they still chose to put their trust in an intimate object of their own making. The problem for them was not a lack of evidence, but an unwillingness to trust in the goodness and worthiness of a God they certainly believed in but chose not to follow.
The notion of worshipping a golden statue may seem ridiculous to modern readers, but how many of us have done the same? We might not be bowing before the metallic hooves of sparkly livestock, but we replicate the Israelites’ sinful disobedience, abandoning worship of the one true God as we pursue idols of comfort, pleasure, and conformity to cultural ideals—ideals that, like God Himself, have been remolded and mis-defined to reflect our (sinful) selves and not our holy God.
One such ideal that gets a lot of play this time of year is love. Sadly, I fear that our modern understanding of love—like our modern understanding of God—has been manipulated beyond recognition. Scripture gives us clear and concise guidance on this subject: love is patient, kind, humble, enduring, and grounded in truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-7); love is sacrificial and invested in the interests of others (John 15:13); and love is rooted in the character of God (1 John 4:7-8).
Instead of honoring what God has said about love, we go with our own easier definition of love as “anything that makes us happy or helps us feel good.” Forgetting that love is enduring and immutable, we pursue “love” based on ephemeral emotion. We set aside love’s inextricable ties to truth and chase “love” built on feelings that are notoriously untrustworthy. We prioritize “love” that celebrates sin, abandoning the reality that love can never delight in evil.
It’s yet another instance of humans abandoning what God has made obvious in favor of an undemanding but inferior replacement. We acknowledge that God is love, but instead of shaping our understanding of love to fit the character of God, we change love’s definition and try to reshape God to fit within these reconstructed parameters. Is it any wonder that our society looks anything BUT loving, when we’ve willingly forsaken the One who is love?
To return to the question I asked at the beginning, of why God doesn’t make Himself more obvious. The question itself reflects my desires to have a God who is easily understood, who fits within my framework of who I think God should be and how He should appear. But God is bigger than my fragile human understanding. He is better than my limited expectations. And He is more loving than my most audacious definitions of love. It is this love, HIS love that I want to seek and understand and pursue and emulate and embrace. For God so loved the world . . . with a love beyond the most spectacular of miracles.
