Reframing God—Introduction

“God, you’re overrated.” — Zachary Failla, age 11

“What a person thinks about God is the most important thing about them.” A.W. Tozer 

“Yi bu cuo, bu bu dou cuo.” Chinese proverb. 

Why a book on Reframing God? Why does God need to be “reframed”?

Recently, my 11-year old son and I were having a conversation and he started to vent to me, “If God is so good [loving, healing, and powerful], then why is the world like this [evil, hurting, heartbroken]?”  Then, the very next line that came out of his mouth was kind of a prayer, almost a lament/challenge. He looked up to the ceiling and said, “God, You're overrated!” He continued, “God, if You can heal hearts, then why are there so many racist people in the world? God, if You can heal bodies, then why do we have to be so afraid of the coronavirus?”  I appreciated the gut-wrenching honesty in which he shared. 

And it reminded me how we have these certain things that we tell ourselves about God that can sometimes cause us frustration, pain, and disappointment. 

In the Western world especially, we have these things we say about God, especially when we’re trying to comfort ourselves or others during a tough time: “God is in control…” “God knew this was coming…” “God is with us…” Sometimes we use more technical language for those things: God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omni-present (all-present). 

The thing we rarely think about is how these words and ideas don’t come from the Bible. They come from Greek philosophy (mainly Aristotle) and the Greek mythical system. Sometimes it can look like we have taken the best of all those gods, sandwiched them into a couple statements, and then we project that onto the God of the Bible, saying, “That's what God must be like.” Because if God is the ultimate god, then God must be the ultimate of all of these things, right? 

There are a lot of thoughts we have about God that are related to control, power, and rescue. Have you ever wanted God to just come in, wipe all this stuff away, rescue us, save the day, fix everything, and just make everything okay again?  

We have these terms that we say about God being a certain way and then, what it means. 

If we’ve been told that God is omniscient or all-knowing, then God knows what's going to happen and knows what to do. 

If God is omnipotent or all-powerful, then God can (and should!) control and fix anything. 

If God is omni-present (everywhere), then why doesn’t it seem like God is doing anything about everything that’s falling apart? 

But what we see in Scripture is such a different picture. We start to see that there are helpful and less helpful ways to think about who God is and how God is. We need a different starting point for our understanding of God.

The Starting Point Matters

The Chinese proverb I quoted above (“Yi bu cuo, bu bu dou cuo.”), when roughly translated, says this: if your first step is in the wrong direction, every step after takes you further away! 

My friend Bruce is a medical doctor, a general practitioner, in Australia. He told me the story of how, when he’s with a patient, he likes to listen to them while they’re describing their health situation, but he also has to take notes. Sometimes he’ll be typing away, looking at them, and then at some point, take a look at the computer screen. Every once in a while, he’ll see something like this:

Woiwhvw dhi dioqhe haifa nvaodfh peh iahf aidh apghi aidhpar kaehap afhp. Ueifa akq ncaihf ncvafh aih aeve fjief mfneivw piegq. (What?!) 

He explained that sometimes what happens is his fingers might be off by one key when he begins to type, and then everything he types is totally off! And isn’t that what can happen with our picture of God? If we try to fill out the picture of God from the wrong starting point, we can end up with something unrecognizable and unhelpful.  

Rather than beginning our understanding of God with Greek philosophy and words that feel reassuring but don’t work in reality, we need a better starting point in what we believe about God. 

That starting point is Jesus. 

He said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” “I and the Father are one.” So Jesus will be our starting point for how God meets us in difficulty, and what God’s power, knowledge, and presence are like. 

Instead of saying: “This must be what God is like…” we’ll ask “What does Jesus show us about what it means for God to be all knowing, all powerful, and all present?”  

A quick thought on the word “Deconstruction”

I’m writing this on Christmas morning. Last night we had a wonderful meal and then sat together in the living room as the boys opened presents. There was a lot of damage done. The floor was a mess. A lot of deconstruction happened, to the work and time that Sarah and I had put into wrapping the boys presents! But of course that wasn’t a bad thing. Yes, there’s a mess to clean up (still even as a I write this--don’t judge me), but isn’t that a necessary part of the beauty of unwrapping a gift? So one way to think about reading this book is like you’re opening a gift, of a way of seeing and relating to God, as revealed in Jesus. 

One way to look at this book is like we’re going to be “unboxing God”, but not in the sense of trying to yank God out of a box, but actually like we've been given a gift that we get to unwrap. On Christmas morning, when you see that big shiny present sitting there all wrapped up, you probably aren't thinking, “Oh, I'm about to do some deconstruction right here. I feel bad for this wrapping paper.” We know that things will get messy as we make our way to the gift inside. And so some of what we're doing might feel a little bit like deconstruction.  It might feel like some wrapping paper is getting shredded a little bit.  It might feel like some bows are being cut.  But hopefully what we're actually doing is unpacking this thing—this gift—so that we go deeper into the beauty of who God is.  Sometimes there are some truths and mistruths that need to be unearthed and exposed, in exchange for something more beautiful.  That process can feel very unsettling, and yet it may be exactly what we need to experience in order for us to unwrap the gift of, or unbox, who God is.   

I believe that when we’re willing to go on that journey; when we’re willing to let Jesus reframe for us what we think about God; when we see what Jesus wants to reveal to us about who God is and how God relates to us, we’ll find a sense of freedom, lightness, connection, and trust that surpasses anything we’ve ever known. 

Shall we?

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash