Do Christians want God to change?

http://sarahglassmeyer.com/?p=767

In addition to my study of Jeremiah, I have begun to study the Gospel of John.  Though God's mercy and love is demonstrated throughout the totality of the scriptures, reading of the "Lamenting Prophet" Jeremiah and his difficult life of proclaiming the judgment of God can wear on a man's heart.  I found joy in God's Word, but my empathy for Jeremiah can actually cause me to feel a bit depressed.  We must always read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus' love for us.  In my weakness I have found it challenging to do that lately, so I am reading through John to better understand Jesus' love and His involvement in the Old Testament.

Many opponents of the Holy Scriptures say that God is very different in the Old Testament from the New Testament.  It is difficult to ignore the seeming change in His personality, but I am on a personal mission to understand God's character in the fullness of the Scriptures and not just the "happy-go-lucky ones" that evangelicals like to quote.  I do not believe God's personality changed at all.  I believe He has remained the same throughout the Bible and throughout all of time.  I know that God is the same God in the Old and New Testaments and that He is always loving, from beginning to end.  We as disciples must stand by our God in all He has done, not just since 01 A.D.

The answers to the accusations of the non-believing are found in the scriptures.  This is why we must "meditate on His word both day and night" like the psalmists did.  In His Word, we find Him.  I want Him - the real Him - not the universalist Him of post post postmodern church (how many posts are we at now?) or the hippie Jesus of the Emergent Village or the overly Caucasian one who looks like Richard Simmons holding sheep on the stained glass windows of the orthodox churches.  I want Him as He is, not as we would like Him to be.

I do not stand by the theology of The Shack, where God will portray Himself as we need Him to be so we can hear from Him.  God will never portray Himself as anything else than His true self and His true self is beyond sufficient, beyond perfect.  Christ followers, like me, need to repent of asking God to be something that He is not but ought rather to seek Him as He is.  So many people are offended when someone else "tries to change" them.  We see relationships fall apart, friendships and families broken, businesses splitting and churches crumbling - all because we feel someone or something is "trying to change us."  "I can't date him, he was trying to change me" or "She didn't love me for me, she loved me for who she wanted me to be."  The examples of this are endless.  We like that God accepts us as we are.  So many churches have broken off from other churches because they found the original church to be judgmental and did not allow people to "come as they are."  Yet, do we allow God to come as He is?  We ask that God accept us as we are but are we willing to extend the same courtesy to Him?  Or do we want Him to be different so that way we can come as we are?

I believe that God is always loving.  I believe that we can go before His throne by the Name of Jesus and if we pray with a genuine and sincere heart, He will wash away our inequity and He will listen to and even grant our prayers.  I believe that God has infinite patience with His children, that He relents from sending calamity but is not hesitant to discipline those He loves.  I believe that Jesus is not really concerned about the exterior presentation of ourselves, but is more concerned about the matters of the heart (the exterior presentations change when the heart changes).

Because of the aforementioned character qualities of God, He has permitted us to each approach Him individually and uniquely.  I believe that in His mercy and wisdom He has allowed some of us to better understand certain character qualities about Him than other character qualities about Him.  My girlfriend better understands His mercy and that is characterized in her life and spiritual gifts.  I better understand His justice and His discipline and my relational and teaching style demonstrates my identification with that attribute of God.  However, we must be careful not to morph God into our preferred character of Him.  It would be a sin for me to say that God is without mercy and it would be a sin for my girlfriend to say that God is without justice.  And each of us ought learn how to allow each of the character qualities of God to infiltrate our hearts.  I know Lauren would desire for me to be more merciful.  And she is right, I need to be more merciful, patient and compassionate.  Yet it would be a sin if she desired God to be more merciful and less just (she does not have this desire, but I write this for illustrative purposes only).

So many of our ministries and churches experience schisms and pain because of our preference for how God ought to be portrayed because we believe that the Bible is insufficient in allowing God to defend and portray Himself.  Christians often say that our teaching and churches ought to bring the Scriptures to life, but the Scriptures never died.  The Scriptures are the Words of Life.  Where God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, He is perfect and loving.  When Jesus dies on the cross, He is just and wonderful.  When God curses the creation because of Adam and Eve's disobedience, He is fair and affectionate.  When Jesus heals the blind man, He is jealous and magnificent.  We cannot say that God is one quality at one time and then another quality at a different time if we mean that he ceases to be other qualities during that time.  We can say that Jesus was merciful when He healed, but that does not mean He ceased being a vengeful God.  We can say that God was jealous and just when He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but we cannot say that He ceased to be loving and caring during that time.  He is always all things and He never ceases to be faithful to any part of His character.

I write all of these things because I personally struggle with understanding God and His different character qualities.  The Cross is the best example from the Scriptures that I can think of where so many of God's character qualities were portrayed at the same time.  His love and compassion for mankind was shown when Jesus died for our sins.  His justice and wrath were satisfied by the brutal beating of His only begotten Son.  His mercy was extended to all people through the Cross, but only because His vengeance was fulfilled by Christ.  He is holy and did not compromise the standard of perfection, but was perfectly humble when the Word became flesh and lived among us.

I hope that through prayer and study I can come to a better understanding of God.  I hope this not only for my own personal walk with Him, but so I can better teach about Him and share about His total goodness with others.  He's my Father - not a far off distant one, but He has raised me since my teenage years.  He has taught me all that I know.  He has gifted us all with various gifts and permits those who repent of their wickedness to enjoy intimacy with Himself.

In our journey towards greater intimacy with God, we must not change anything about Him so we are more comfortable with Him.  I can't help but wonder how different Christianity would look on the earth if we allowed God to simply come as He is, rather than changing Him so we can come as we are.