I am reminded of this question from time to time, but today I have been thinking about it again - the question is simple: If we change anything about who God or Jesus are, at what point do they cease being the actual God/Jesus and instead become idols of our own making?
I've been very clear, if you go back and read past posts, about my own sinful history. For most of my life, I struggled with pornography. It is always something that will be there crouching at my door - like an drug addict is never truly free from addiction, so this will follow me around the rest of my life. With that being said, I used to read a verse like 1 Corinthians 6:9 ("Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God") and I think "surely that can't mean someone like me."...as if what I was doing wasn't sexually immoral and therefore disqualifying me from the kingdom. To be clear, I know there is a lot more to it that this simple statement, but nevertheless...my point is, mentally I was trying to make Scripture into something I wanted, rather than something that is objectively true and requires me to change me life in response to it.
We have no problem conceiving of Jesus as a kind-hearted, loving, jovial person. What we often fail to recognize, however, is that sometimes his words were very direct and difficult. "Many will say to me 'Lord, Lord, did we not (insert great things here) [...] and I will say to them, 'away from me you evildoers, I don't know you.'" (Matthew 7) or "He replied, "I tell you that everyone who has will be given more; but the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. And these enemies of mine who were unwilling for me to rule over them, bring them here and slay them in front of me." (Luke 19)
Another thought - how Jewish is our concept of Jesus? How much does the fact that he was from the tribe of Judah, that he lived a Torah-observant life, that he observed the feasts and celebrations of the Jewish calendar - that He taught from Jewish scriptures...how much does that factor into our conception of who He is? What if He is like that when He comes back (breaking news: He will be)? How will those of us who are not Jewish relate to his Jewishness?
You can see where I am going - Jesus is who He is. God is who He is (He literally said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am", Exodus 3:14). I'm pretty sure I've written these words before in the course of this blog, but the bottom-line is, it doesn't really matter all that much who WE think God is. It is our task to figure out who He is and what he is like. In an ideal world, we would have a Jewish brother or sister helping us (Romans 3:2), but even without that available, there is still plenty to draw from. What really matters is 'what does God think of us?' In light of who He is, how ought we live our lives? If we don't really know who Jesus is, or who God is, then we are really in danger of making our own God and our own Jesus and then following that - a God/Jesus that really doesn't bear much resemblance to who they actually are. That's a scary prospect and it makes me want to know more about Him.
If you've never read the story of the Ship of Theseus, it gets at the same thing I'm getting at here. The modern effort seems to be to replace or reinterpret the parts of Jesus/Scripture that don't suit us. Suddenly, the Bible condones whatever we want it to. Or we use justifications like "well, the Hebrew Scriptures weren't written to be a literal history" or "a lot of the Old Testament is poetry" in trying to get around some of the difficulties there. We have to be very careful when we come up against something that rubs us the wrong way. What is it, about _____ that is bothering us, and why? In my experience, more often than not, it is our own sinful nature that is at the root of our distaste for some commandment or principle in Scripture.
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