I think we face a problematic dilemma when we say God and Jesus are one, yet we admit that Jesus said to love everyone, while our idea of God's wishes is to kill certain ones. A friend of mine wrote about this, and I quote part of his writing here.........
Imagine you are back in high school or college and the prettiest or most handsome person, the one who is intelligent and witty, outgoing, the one everyone wishes they could have as their boyfriend or girlfriend comes to you and says, “I want you to know that I really find you attractive, in fact, I love you. I love you so much, so deeply, it astonishes me. I want to be with you forever, you light up my life, you are the reason I exist.”
Wouldn’t that be just amazing? One of the reasons for the popularity of romantic comedies is that the boy/girl is in these circumstances and they end up with the one they so desire. Imagine spending your life with such a person who was absolutely devoted to you, who loved you with an undying love, who cared for you in ways you could not imagine or dream in your wildest dreams.
Now before you could respond with a “Yes” or a “Hallelujah, thank you Jesus!!” suppose they went on to say “But I also want you to know that if you will not love me in return I will make your life a living nightmare, a hell on earth. I will spread rumors and lies about you; I will trash your home. I will make it my life’s goal to punish you in every way possible if you won’t accept my love for you.”
Wouldn’t you go to the authorities and at a minimum get a restraining order on such a person? Sure you would. Who wants someone this obsessive to ruin their life? Then why is it that Christians tell essentially the same story with regard to the way God loves the world? We say God loves the world but if God’s love is spurned we will be punished with an everlasting punishment. Where can one take out a restraining order on this kind of a God? Job had trouble with this kind of a god and three times in the book of Job he threatens to file a lawsuit against God.
Sadly, most of what Christians think and believe about God is exactly the opposite of what Jesus believed and taught about his abba. Have you ever wondered how it is that the Bible says God could command genocide, attempt murder (Exodus 4:24), authorize the killing of innocent children, races and peoples, burn entire cities to the ground like Sodom and act like a terrorist all the while? Yet we accept such a God because whatever the Bible says about God must be true. God has the right to act however God wants because after all, God is God.
Today such a god has been put on trial. People no longer blindly accept that God can do anything God wants to do because God is God. Such an arbitrary deity is now seen as so totally different from Jesus that people who might have an affinity for Jesus can’t follow Him thinking he believed in this kind of a god. “Jesus Yes! God No!” is something I hear everywhere I go. If we do not accept these behaviors from our fellow human beings why do we accept them from God? If God looks more like Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein than Jesus, something has gone gravely wrong with our understanding and portrayal of the Maker of heaven and earth. Even when God looks more like the most benevolent leader, i.e. Abraham Lincoln, than God looks like Jesus, there is a problem.
The popular understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God looks more like a good cop/bad cop routine than the abba-child relationship we find in the Gospels. Muslims and Jews have rightly accused Christianity of tri-theism, a belief in three separate gods. The way we talk about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and their distinct ‘roles’, ‘attributes’ and ‘temporal manifestations’ lends itself to such critique. When we so differentiate the Father from the Son (and the Spirit), when God can kill and justify all sorts of violence, and yet we also claim that Jesus reveals God, yet Jesus is non-resistant and non-retributive then we have a problem of epic proportions. Either Jesus does not really show us the character of God or Jesus was deluded to think that he manifested the reign of God in his person and ministry.
We cannot say that Jesus is the full revelation of God and not have to reckon with the fact that Jesus as the revealer of God is quite different than what we find in certain stories about God in the Jewish Scriptures. This is why it was so important for us to see that Jesus read his Bible critically, selectively, just as did many of his contemporaries, and in fact as all Christians do today. No one has ever managed to take the entire Bible literally; it must be interpreted. What we have failed to do is to recognize that if Jesus ‘imitated the abba’, the Maker of all that is, then God is like Jesus. I frequently say on my website and in talks I give that what really blew the apostolic church’s mind was not whether Jesus was like God, but whether God was like Jesus. The apostolic church started the biggest intellectual shift in human history when they recorded their gospels and letters and throughout had to reckon with the fact that it was Jesus who was recognized as Lord of heaven and earth by virtue of his resurrection and ascension. They began working out the parameters of what a Jesus centered God would look like. We take our cue from them, for their work is not complete and that is why we also, like them, follow Jesus. In fact, we follow them as they follow Jesus.
