As Skye Jethani writes, there are four common misperceptions. The first “sees the world as governed by the capricious will of God.” The second “places immutable natural laws at the center.” The third “assumes the world orbits around self and its desires.” The fourth “sees a divine mission at the core of all things.”
There are probably other misunderstandings, but Jethani sees these four as the most common. Each of the four can take many different forms.
What the four errors have in common is a mechanization of God. Each fails to attribute full personhood and agency to Him.
Whether a person sees God as an arbitrary despot, a collection of abstract equations in physics and chemistry, the one who provides for individual whims, or the taskmaster who sets quotas and goals for moral strivers, in any case, these visions of God ignore His personal relational attributes.
These misunderstandings objectify God and ignore that a relationship occurs between two subjects, not between two objects. As Skye Jethani writes,
If we peeled back the physical and metaphysical layers of time and space and peered into the very core of the universe, we would not discover divine will, natural law, personal desire, or global mission.
God is the core of the universe, and God is a person. Personhood entails having emotions, memories, plans, preferences, desires, and other aspects of truly sentient agency.
In relationship with human beings, God gives guidance and blessings. Anything good has its ultimate source in Him. God offers His wisdom as we seek meaning or purpose in our lives.
But God’s guidance is not “a list of rules and rituals to follow,” and His wisdom is not “the implementation of useful principles.” God’s way of helping us is not “a genie to grant us our desires,” and not “a task to accomplish.”
Skye Jethani points his readers in a different direction: God isn’t trying to help us reach some goal; He is the goal. God doesn’t help us as we seek something: He is what we seek.
Each of these four errors “seeks to use God to achieve some other goal.”
We should therefore let go of the idea that if we act in a certain way, then God will bless us; we should let go of the idea that God is giving us principles for successful living. God is present neither to grant us our desires, nor to have us grant Him His desires.
God is present so that He may relate to us, and we to Him. That is the ultimate goal.
Words, ideas, and even images only make sense when we have a frame of reference for them. While our problem of relating to God is far more than semantics, it has been my experience that when most people hear or think about God, they have a less than complete, and sometimes entirely flawed, vision of who he is. As a result, they do not tend to desire him. At best they see him as a useful instrument for achieving something more desirous.
Our primary goal is not to understand the universe and apply that understanding in order to manipulate nature to meet our desires. Neither is our primary goal serve a demanding God as mere slaves, hoping that He might notice and grant us a few crumbs of blessing. Likewise, our goal is not to enjoy God’s products and see how many of them we can obtain. Finally, our goal is not to expand God’s kingdom by our own efforts and missionary zeal.
Our goal is to be with God. Jethani titled his book With for this reason. Our goal is to spend time with God, to speak with Him simply for the purpose of sharing our thoughts with Him, not for the purpose of achieving some objective. Our goal is to listen to God, and to hear what He’s expressing to us.
