The Form vs. The Function

The God Behind the Curtain

In the Garden of Eden man and woman walked with God. There was no need for religion, instead we enjoyed a genuine trust relationship with our Creator which was as close as a child walking hand in hand with their parent.

But that closeness was shattered by sin. I am sure you can recall a time in your childhood when you did something wrong of which you were so ashamed that the last thing you wanted was to be close to mom or dad?

So, just like any child who has deeply wounded their parent by violating their trust we try to distract mom or dad with innocuous and irrelevant chatter to fill the void we created.

   "Look at the birds daddy."

   "I know my ABC's"

   "Where's mama?"

What ever it takes to aliviate those deafening silences where once had been laughter. It's bargaining for the restoration of the relationship we poisoned. Yet, notice that as children we never really address the root issue. We never say,

"Hey dad, about me stealing my friends silver dollar and burying it in the back yard,  I am really sorry. It was wrong of me, and blaming the dog was ridiculous as well. You taught me better and I let you down. Will you forgive me?"

No, we're going to every length to avoid the consequences of our culpability, our guilt for failing to be good, the cost of our sin.

That was exactly how all of humanity has responded in our feble attempts to get right with God. We will pay the tithe, fill the pew, bake the cookies for the missionaries in whatever that place is called, and make our kids do everything our parents did to keep God, our Father, distracted from those very few times, and such minor things they were at that, that we screwed up. Surely, we could cajole, negotiate, or "cute" our way back to good, couldn't we?

Well, yes and no. We can be restored to our trust relationship with God but it has little to do with our fumbling, inadequate, infantile efforts, far less than we are lead to believe.

We say, "I quit drinking, chasing after the women who were left when drinks stopped being served, and then lying to her about how much I cared for her "company" in the morning. All of this I did when I became a Christian." But in truth, God was doing those works within us because we were letting Him be in charge of our lives. Picture a three year old who has just had her shoes tied by her father and immediately turns to her mother and says,

    "Look mama, I tied my shoesez."

The parents know that their beautiful little peanut had little tangible input in the shoe tying process, besides staying still long enough for dada to do it, which is no small amount of effort for any three year old.

This is how God works for and with us. He is ever mindful of our weaknesses, our lack of understanding, and our general desire to "be good", but we just don't know how. So, rather than letting dada tie our shoes, we are trying glue, staples, and maybe an occasional clump of schnauzer poop that we found on our morning walk which mama became inexplicably so worked up about, after all it did seem to be holding the laces together for a bit. In a word, God knows what we are about as smart as a salad bar, but we have a lot of potential, and that's why God loves us.

That's a really tough issue with most of us, to be acceptable to God, let alone loveable to Him. But we forget that we were Created by Him. So if we are unacceptable to our Creator, then God would be a poor craftsman.

Our God is perfect. We are merely incomplete, works in progress. When He is finished he will pull back the curtain and reveal His work.