Competing Versions of God

Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, "What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." (John 11:47-48)

I find this passage to be a telling revelation into the truth about the nature of evil versus good. It is so easy to become confused about the nature of unbelief and to become infected by it. But we all suffer from some level of unbelief because we all have been infected with lies about God that have influenced how we relate to Him and to each other.

The greatest resistance that Jesus encountered when He walked this earth came not from the open sinners or even from the pagan Romans. The people who had the most animosity toward Jesus and His revelations of the truth about God were the very people whom God had chosen as a people to represent Him on earth and particularly the religious leaders of those people. How ironic that the ones who claimed to know the truth about God the best turned out to be the most fierce opposer's to His ministry to save sinners and demonstrate the goodness and compassion of the Father.

Jesus had just finished demonstrating compellingly the reality that God really did care about hurting people far more than anyone had thought. He had also revealed that what seemed to be an impossible obstacle in the minds of humans was no problem at all for God. God is not stymied or thwarted by incidental problems like sickness or death; the greatest obstacles that God is up against is in the stubborn resistance to His love in the deceived hearts of people who think they know God better than His own Son knows Him.

I believe that today we are in a very similar situation. We are deeply deceived about the real truths about God, how He feels about us and how He wants to relate to us. Religion today is little different than the religions of the world in the times of Jesus really. We still build our constructs of reality and our views of God on human reasoning which is based on pride and selfishness rather than on trusting in the revelations He has provided in His Word and in His Son. Because we have the added testimony of the life and death of Jesus more beyond what the Jews had, we assume that we are not deceived like they were. But that only adds more layers to the deceptions that blind us because we still refuse to acknowledge the underlying truths about the real nature of God's goodness and kindness and forgiveness.

The problem we run into is that we either think God is obsessed with our behavior and rule-keeping and is constantly looking for mistakes for which to punish us, or He is passive and willing to ignore and excuse sin while we claim that the death of His Son allows us to let sin remain in our lives unchallenged. We tend to take this to one extreme or the other which is exactly what the devil intends for us to do. But in doing so our lives begin to reflect the same attitudes exposed in these verses where the religious leaders revealed their true allegiance. Their focus was not on the principles of God's kingdom but on the priorities of the world as embodied in the methods of Rome. The context in which they couched their statements was the reality and principles defined and practiced by the Roman empire rather than by God. They revealed in their words that their greatest fear was of losing power and influence and social status and that these things were the highest priorities in their lives.

In the kingdom of fear and darkness that Jesus came to expose and displace with His new kingdom, force and shame and fear and intimidation have no place. In the kingdoms of fear, decisions are based on who has greater power to exercise force to get their way. Rome epitomized the use of force more than all the previous empires that had existed although they too relied on it heavily. Rome in Scriptures is a symbol of reliance on force to gain dominance, and even the great church that emerged from Rome is marked by this fundamental philosophy up to the very present. In Satan's kingdom force is considered not only a legitimate means of advancing one's agenda but it is claimed that God uses the same methods whenever it is useful and convenient for Him.

This is where all of the world is terribly deceived about the nature of God's kingdom and methods and character. God has been misrepresented more by religious people claiming to act in His name who utilize the methods of His enemy more effectively than any other group of people on this planet. When any of us indulge in the use of force and rely on fear to sway the minds of others to join our religion or conform to our demands, we are blaspheming the reputation of our God and are perpetuating the web of lies about Him that Satan has been circulating from the very beginning of sin.

Without a proper understanding of this greater context it is difficult to grasp why these leaders reacted the way that they did. It is important that we be more aware of the stark contrast between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of force and darkness. To allow our minds to remain infected with lies about God's methods and God's attitudes toward sin and sinners is to continue to misrepresent Him and ultimately to find ourselves in total opposition to Him. Ultimately we will find ourselves reacting just as these men reacted in fear and hostility toward the One who revealed the truth about God so plainly.

Logically, at least in a mind not too blinded by lies about God, it would seem that after Jesus had performed such a miracle of grace as raising a friend back to life from the dead, that anyone with any heart at all would respond in wonder and awe and appreciation for such a revelation of the goodness and love of God. How could people, especially those claiming to know God better than the average person, be so virulently hostile and angry about such an innocuous miracle as this? What fault did they see in Jesus bringing to life a man of the character of Lazarus? Did they hate Lazarus for something he had done or did they think he didn't deserve to be shown such favor?

Clearly the character and reputation of Lazarus or even of his sisters had little to do with this intense reaction of hostility on the part of the religious leaders. The underlying issue that rankled them so deeply was the fact that Jesus was openly promoting a picture of God as one who had far more compassion than any of those claiming to represent Him officially had, which made them look very bad by contrast. It was the fact that the picture of God revealed by Jesus was in such sharp contrast with the pictures of an austere, stern, condemning and controlling God promoted by the religious people that caused them to become so irritated. And ironically, in spite of all that Jesus did to show us the Father's heart religion still maintains the same lies about God that were so prevalent in the days of Christ.

I too struggle at the heart level to believe like I should in a God as good as what I am seeing in the life and practices and teachings of Jesus. The reason I have to keep coming back daily to immerse myself in the Word and meditate on the life of Christ is because my own heart is still so infected with deeply rooted false notions about what God is like. I am also surrounded by people who share similar lies or even worse some who feel compelled to impose their views of God on others to keep them living in fear. Yet the God that I have been discovering in my own examination of the Word is so different from the representations of Him by nearly all the religious people around me that I feel constant tension as these opposing views contend for dominance in my own life.

In these verses I catch a glimpse of the end results of not expelling from my heart the lies about God that Jesus came to expose. I see in the example of these stubborn men who were more interested in their own survival politically than in coming to know the truth about God, the end result of anyone who resists the revelation of what God is like in the life of Jesus. God will not utilize the tactics of His enemy to advance His kingdom, for to do so would be to legitimize the claims of Satan that force is necessary to operate the universe. But to force people against their will to make them believe truth totally destroys the very atmosphere necessary for love to exist; but God will not accept a universe where love is not the compelling power holding it together.

What I see emerging from this story is the basic issues in the struggle between the lies about God and the truth about what God is like. It is the titanic struggle for men's hearts and minds, the struggle to compel people to believe in a God who doesn't mind utilizing force and fear when it is to His advantage verses a God who refuses to indulge in the deceptive and diabolical methods of His opponents but rather relies on winning hearts only through demonstrations of love and freedom.

To all of us under the pale of sin, it seems bizarre to think that love has enough power to win over the philosophy of force. Oh, we think love has a lot going for it alright, but we also don't hesitate to resort to forcing people and overriding their freedom to choose whenever it seems it might advance our agendas. I believe we are observing the delusional aftereffects of our ancestors eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We assume that mixing a little evil in with the good when necessary is acceptable. But in God's kingdom a little poison mixed in with the sweet is a deadly proposition and God will not tolerate that formula for it only leads to death.

These religious leaders found their control, prestige and influence over the minds of the people being so eroded by Jesus' revelations about a caring, loving God who values freedom and love more than conformance to arbitrary rules, that they reacted out of intense fear and desperation. But in this very desperation they were actually revealing the weakness of the kingdom of darkness. Far from being wimpy and weak and powerless in the face of force and fear and evil, true selfless love is the most powerful force in the universe. Jesus came to reveal the self-sacrificing nature of true love by demonstrating that a person did not need to rely on any of the false principles of Satan's kingdom to live. Jesus came to expose the fallacies of these false principles and to show us the love of the Father so we could be transformed back into the original function and joy for which we were designed.

These men had the freedom to choose and could have embraced the fresh revelations of God that were so graciously offered to them. But their selfishness caused them to reject the clear revelations about the Father and they chose instead to cling to lies about God that allowed them to keep their own agendas firmly in place. They chose to live their lives based on the principles of force and fear and rejected the Son of the very God they claimed to follow. In making that choice their lives become molded into the nature of the enemy of God and their hearts became so hardened through choosing darkness over light that their characters reflected the demonic principles of Satan himself. The same will happen for everyone who continues to resist the revelations of truth about God in any age.