Tell Him he doesn’t know what He’s talking about.
Seriously. That’ll do it.
Make fun of His created order, of His rules for living, and of how He organized His Universe in general and our world in particular.
Look God right in the eye and tell Him He’s an idiot. Better yet, lay this one on ‘im: “You’re not real; hee-hee-you don’t exist. You’re just an imaginary construct of pathetic, weak people who can’t think for themselves.” Say it with a sneer on your face and in your voice. Curl your lip when you look at Him. I know; the pic is a fanciful idea of what God would look like. In reality, you don’t want to know what an irate God looks like. Yeah, really.
“Ho– hold on a minute. Look. I’m pretty liberal in my philosophy and my core beliefs. I’ll grant you that. I don’t walk very far with you on this Biblical Christian stuff, although I respect you because you’ve never let my leering and ranting dissuade you. I’m what you call a ‘progressive’. But I’ve never said God’s an idiot.”
With respect, yes, you have. You do it every time you claim that the Bible’s full of lies, made-up stories that men wrote to support their own notions. You do it every time you dismiss something in the Bible as “being from the Old Testament and therefore not applicable to today” or “That only applies to Bible times; it’s meaningless now.” Nice and neat, right? Excuse for everything.
You tell God He’s a fool every time you say the Big Ten are outdated and, besides, nobody can live that clean. It’s impossible, you say, for any of us to live the kind of life the Bible says we should. Therefore, it’s The BIBLE that’s wrong, is sheer idiocy and needs to be ignored. Can’t be us . . .
Well, see, God says the Bible IS His Word. I read recently that the closest thing we’ll ever have to God’s resume is His Word, the Bible. And could it be–I mean, is it possible that, as a wise Creator, God put all this together with the bar consistently high enough that those who wish can keep climbing, stretching, reaching for the excellence outlined in The Bible?
So when you say it’s full of fool’s gold and men’s fables, you’re calling God Himself into question. And He’ll only put up with that for so long.
Ask Noah.
“So, Noah, ol’ buddy. What was it like to hear God say that out of everyone in your entire generation, you were the only righteous one – and He was going to recycle everybody else?”
“Well, I gotta be honest. At first it really stroked my ego, man. Put yourself in that situation. How would you react if God did a BZORP! right in the middle of your scene and said, “You’re it. You’re the only one even making the attempt to please Me. Everyone else has become so stinking rotten I’ve decided they’re all toast! I’m sorry I ever created ’em, so they’re outta here and I’m going to make a brave new world out of YOU and your family!”
“A-a-at first . . .”
“Yeah. But then things got real. It hit me that every friend I’d ever had was going to die. The butcher where we got those real good chops. The elders who gave hours every day to teach our boys. For that matter, all of their friends–gone. The pet sheep they’d raised for the fair . . . The eagle with a broken wing they’d nursed . . . The ant farm our grands sat and watched by the hour . . . The musicians who played and sang in the marketplace . . . The neighbors across the wadi I kept meaning to go get to know better. Everybody. Everything. All of it–just . . . gone.”
Think about this. Those who sneer at we who uphold common decency, morality and right living as the Bible outlines them are getting more strident and demanding, increasingly pointing at us as the consistent wrongdoers, derisively labeling us as troublemakers and calling us every intolerant brand of -phobe imaginable. They know it’s not true, that it can’t be. It’s the smelliest form of hypocrisy, yet they keep pushing: against God’s people, God’s Word, and God.
That’s the other thing I want you to think about. Nobody’s constantly, totally, irretrievably evil other than Lucifer himself. We humans are God’s own creation. Therefore, there is in every one of us a spark of the Divine that could reach out in mute pleas for help and salvation if we chose. Hold onto that word ‘choose’. No man nor woman is always totally wrong, bad, depraved or evil.
We all live out our lives as we each choose to live.
Is it possible for humans to actively turn their backs on God and choose to progressively slide faster and farther away from Him, becoming SO depraved that ONE MAN ALONE, with his family, would be in God’s eyes “holy” and pleasing to Him? Only one?
According to this account, the sad, dangerous answer is yes.
We know the rainbow is God’s pledge that He’ll never again wipe out the entire human race. Yet we also know God never has for long put up with our headstrong, bullheaded, undisciplined impudence while we thumb our noses at Him. Our earthly parents didn’t. Why expect it of Him?
Think about it. What would you do if you heard it? “Out of everyone in this generation, you’re the righteous one.”
So, what does it take to really tick God off? Well, for way more than I’d like to think, I guess just keep doing what you’re doing now.
We’re slouching in the direction of “NOAH DAYS” again. God’s soon going to take a hand in it because too many are standing with fingers in ears, yelling, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA . . .”
It really doesn’t matter what you or I think or believe.
What matters is what God says.
© D. Dean Boone, April 2016