wrong approach to religion and God — Iain Duguid

“Many people think that they can strike their own bargains with God. They say, “I like to think of God as . . .”—as if they can decide what God will be like. They want to pick and choose what they will believe and what they will do—and they certainly don’t want a God who makes too many demands on them. “My God isn’t like that,” they will tell you. In other words, they don’t want a God who is God. The real question, however, is not what you would like God to be like God to be like, but what He is really like. And He has revealed Himself as the God who has made a covenant with His people. When the great king comes and offers to establish a covenant with you, you really have only two choices: you can accept the covenant relationship on his terms and receive its benefits, or you can refuse it and face the consequences.

Many people approach religion as if they were interviewing God for a job, the position of “personal deity in my life.” “I want to find a philosophy that works for me,” they say. But if God is really who He claims to be, Almighty God, then that is what He is, whether the idea “works for you” or not. You can interview idols and ideologies, but the God who created the universe offers you only two choices: surrender on his terms of face the consequences.”

— Iain Duguid, Living in the Gap Between Promise and Reality: The Gospel According to Abraham