Praise God, He is not just like us!

We human beings are rather strange creatures. Sure there are many other non-human creatures that are pretty strange. But we have special kinds of strange-ness.

One strange-ness is this: We have this adversarial relationship with God where we think we can play a game, and win. One side of the game is for us to pretend that we are God; pretending that the world actually revolves around us, and supposing that our words should have the force of divine fiat. We are surprised and often angry when these things do not happen. At times, God might actually put us in our place. He might humble us.

The other side of the game is that we bring God down to our level. We ascribe to Him our kind of anger; our kind of vengeance; even our kind of love. Now to be sure, God possesses an anger and vengeance and, of course, love. But none of these are patterned after how these things tend to function in our human world. We have to share these words at both our level, and God’s. But we should know that, at each level, they are quite different. And the problem is not new! Psalm 50:21 says, “You thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes.”

Men lie. All men lie. Psychologists say that we start lying as infants. We lie on purpose, and we lie accidentally. We lie when we don’t know all the facts, and we never know all the facts. But God does. I’ve underlined Titus 1:2 in my Bible: “in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, ..”

God’s purposes do not change, and thus He does not change His mind (repent). In His interactions with humans, He works with us, or through us, certainly for us, sometimes against us - and so God can certainly change directions, but not His purposes. But, we do. Few people there are who are single-minded, perhaps even more so in this frenetic age. But God is constant; never late; never in a hurry, always on course.

Someone says, “Will you pray for me?’ And you say, “Sure, count on it.” But sometimes, maybe only once in a great while, you forget. God keeps all His words, even the ones we don’t know about.

So let’s not play games with God. But let’s instead, worship the One who is, thankfully, not just like us.