In my upcoming memoir, I wrote this line:
“God could be a God-awful God.”
Have you ever thought God was awful?
Be honest.
If you can’t be honest, why not? Do you fear God will punish you? Are you afraid that even thinking those words might put you in jeopardy?
If you answered yes to either question, you may be worshiping a God defined by fear.
I don’t blame you. It may be the God you were taught to believe in.
As a young child, perhaps your Sunday School teacher taught you the story of Noah and the ark. In that story, God becomes so angry that He kills the entire population except Noah and his family. Why does He kill everyone else? Because they were bad and made Him angry.
At that age, you may not have connected all the dots. But perhaps you wondered how a loving God could drown all those people.
In your teenage years, you read the Bible as instructed. You began noticing other troubling stories like the one about Uzzah and the Ark of the Covenant.
When the oxen stumbled, the Ark lurched. Uzzah thought it was going to fall, so he reached out to steady it.
Boom.
God struck him dead.
As you grew older and listened more attentively to sermons, you began noticing words wrapped in fear. You were told that if you didn’t stop doing bad things or start doing good ones, you were in trouble. You were a sinner, and sinners went to hell—to burn forever and ever.
Eternally.
And perhaps you began to wonder: Is this a God I should run toward or run from?
Have you ever stood beside the casket of a loved one during a funeral visitation? Well-meaning people file past and try to console you. One person says, “We don’t know why God took your daughter, but we know He has a plan.” Another softly assures you that your son is in heaven because God needed another tenor in the angelic choir.
Did your anger at God rise to the level of an inner scream?
It wasn’t only the church that reinforced this frightening picture. We still use the phrase “acts of God” to describe hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters that destroy homes and kill people.
There it was again. That subtle suggestion that God could be a God-awful God.
“God could be a God-awful God.”
I wrote that sentence in my memoir. I didn’t write it because I believe God is awful. I wrote it because the God I was taught to fear often appeared to be.
But don’t overlook the subtitle. It does some heavy lifting:
The God I Feared Wasn’t the God I Found.
After nearly forty years of ministry and a lifetime of study, I began to see that the God I feared didn’t exist. That frightening image had been created by misinformation and people who meant well. Sometimes it was shaped by people who used the fear of God as a motivational tool to keep you in line or ensure that you gave money to the church.
I discovered that it takes years to shed the fear of God. But once I embraced the boundless love of God, fear ran for a place to hide and found none.
That’s why I wrote my memoir. It isn’t because my life is special. It is because my story traces a transformation from fearing God to loving Him.
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