god

A very wise man once said that a false god was anyone or anything other than God to whom we assigned the power to declare our worth to us. He was telling me this while I was going through a divorce a decade and a half ago. I was feeling so worthless because one person in this world decided that I wasn’t who she wanted to be married to anymore. Without knowing it, I had assigned that one person the power to declare my worth to me by whether or not she loved me, liked me, wanted to be with me, etc. It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t applied for the job. Nonetheless, she had become, for me, a false god. That’s god with a little “g.”

God, capital “G,” is God by virtue of his Godness. God was from the beginning and will be after the end ends. No one appointed God to be God because there was no one there to appoint God. God, for mysterious reasons that outstrip our human capacities to rationalize, always has been.

God then, for mysterious reasons beyond our human capacity to rationalize, created us to experience his Godness, even share in it (made us in his image). We even get to look at all God has created and stand in awe of God (worship) and even use it to make a living and help others (stewardship). God’s very first warning to us was that we should exercise holy caution about letting anyone take God’s place in our lives. God told us of the dire consequences of worshipping at the feet of false gods because of their consistent tendency to destroy us instead of enliven us.

The rest is redemption history. Because we thought we knew better (pride), we did what God warned us not to do and God’s been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Adam and Eve took the first bite and we’ve been shopping at the same road side fruit stand ever since.

As false gods go, I’ve never had trouble with apples. Chicken fried steak and gravy, maybe, but not asparagus or broccoli. My biggest problem, though, has been with the church. Since before I can remember, that’s where I went to feel good, to feel worthy, to feel like I mattered (all exclusive rights of God, not god). When the church is your false god, getting rejected by a church (not the Church) feels like, well, being sentenced to hell. The most dangerous thing in any church is a pastor whose false god is the church.

Maybe this last year has been worth more than I realized. It’s made me realize I had a false god in my life that needs to be dethroned. The church is not God. It can be our false god, but only if we assign it that power. The church is not Jesus. The church, when it’s at its best, is nothing more than a group of people who are tired of shopping at roadside stands for what God alone can give (never sell) and who have gathered to stand in awe of God, therein discovering their reason for being and living out of that accordingly.

If all of this has been worth that one discovery, then all these years haven’t been wasted after all. Maybe I’m just now getting ready to truly worship and serve (and even laugh again).