Letting God Be God

Mark Roberts writes of his initial disappointment in finding, while reading the New Testament book of Romans when he was 17, that God wouldn't conform to his notions of what God should be:

I must confess, however, that I still don’t find everything in Romans to my liking. I would like God to be so much nicer. But my liking is not the point! Knowing God in truth is the point. And, not surprisingly, the real God is not the same as the god of my likes and dislikes. If I want to know this real God, then I must choose to receive him on his own terms.

This means that I must take seriously the passages of Scripture that I don’t like. I need to wrestle with them and their truth. In some cases, I may very well find that what had bothered me earlier was actually a misunderstanding of Scripture. In other cases, I may need to surrender my wishful thinking in order to embrace the real God. In a day when so many people create God in their own image, this might seem counterintuitive. But it is the way of faithfulness for those of us who are committed to knowing God through his revelation in Scripture.

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