October 8, 2010 by Mark Buchanan 0 comments

Posted in: Weekly Devotionals

Your God is too safe.

The safe god asks nothing of us, gives nothing to us. He never drives us to our knees in hungry, desperate praying and never sets us on our feet in fierce, fixed determination. He never makes us bold to dance. The safe god never whispers in our ears anything but greeting card slogans and certainly never asks that we embarrass ourselves by shouting out from the rooftop. He doesn't make us a kingdom of priests only a colony of Uzzahs.

A safe god inspires neither awe, nor worship, nor sacrifice.

A safe god woos us to borderland and keeps us stuck there. He helps us escape reality.

In C.S. Lewis's most famous Narnia chronicle, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the children--Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund--enter Narnia through a wardrobe in their Uncle's home. Edmund has already given allegiance to the witch and sneaks off to join ranks with her. The other three children go to the home of the Beavers, a wary but hospitable pair. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver tell the children that they will take them to see the King, Aslan.

"Is--is he a man?" asked Lucy.

"Aslan a man!" said Mr. Beaver sternly. "Certainly not. I tell you hi is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don't you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion--the Lion, the great Lion."

"Ooh," said Susan, "I thought he was a man. Is he--quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."

"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you."  (C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York; Puffin Books, 1978), 75.

Safe? Don't you hear what I'm saying? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he's not safe.

But He's good.

I did a funeral once for a lady who was a Christian, but few of her many children and grandchildren were. I thought I spoke the gospel clearly and boldly. Afterward, a woman came up to me. "Thank you," she said. "That was so nice what you said. It was really nice. I'm religious, too. The family always ask me to pray for the weather when we go golfing."

I reckon this: the idol of the nice god, the sage god, has done more damage to biblical faith--more damage to people coming to faith--than the caricature of the tyrant god ever did. The despotic god, howling his rage, wielding punishment with both ransacking destruction and surgical precision, at least inspired something in us. We were afraid. We wanted to appease. But this Milquetoast-Pampering deity is nothing but a cosmic lackey, an errand boy we call on to make our golf games pleasant or to help us escape reality for a little while and then summarily dismiss. Worship him? Revere him? Die for him? Believe that he died a cruel and bloody death for us? You must be kidding.

It is a strange habit of ours, that we fling so widely to the extremes but rarely find the middle. God's wrath and sovereignty we easily caricature into tyranny. And God's kindness and tender mercies we just as easily transmute into mere niceness. Meanwhile, the God who actually is--the God whose ways of speaking and acting and being are disclosed to us in Scripture--continues through Christ, "full of grace and truth," to come among "that which is his own." And, as before, "his own do not receive him" because they "do not recognize him" (John 1:10, 11, 14). Scripture elsewhere tells us that the "ruler of the air has blinded our eyes" to the truth. But one of the main ways the devil has done that is through the cult of the safe god. The safe god has pretty much killed the power of recognition in us, and so when the real God comes into our midst, we mostly don't even bother to look up.

The safe god has no power to console us in grief or shake us from complacency or rescue us from the pit. He just putters in his garden, smiles benignly, waves now and then, and mostly spends a lot of time in his room doing puzzles. Who would leave borderland for another kind of god? The excuse I hear most often when people continue in a confessed sin is: "I think God understands. The kind of God I worship isn't all hung up about this." It's as though God were a half-daft old uncle, hair sprouting from his ears, a bit runny about the eyes, winking at our little pranks and peccadilloes.

Well, that's nice.

But God isn't nice. God isn't safe. God is a consuming fire. Though He cares about the sparrow, the embodiment of His care is rarely doting or pampering. God's main business is not ensuring that you and I get parking spaces close to the mall entrance or that the bed sheets in the color we want are--miracle!--on sale this week.

His main business is making you and me holy. And for those of us who love borderland more than holy ground, whose hearts are more slow than burning, that always requires both the kindness and the sternness of our God.

Historians tell us the cult of Mary arose in Catholicism because the medieval portrait of God was so dark and punishing--the wrathful Father, always at the edge of a tantrum--that the common folk needed a sweet, understanding mother to turn to, to hide behind, to intervene for them. In Protestantism, I think we've simply substituted the safe god. But the biting irony is this: Neither the safe god nor the tyrant god are the real God. The God who truly is, who seeks you and me, who desires our holiness, is far more loving and comforting than the safe god. And the true God is far more fierce and fearsome than the bullying and petulant god of our imaginations. But His anger is not irritability: It is the distillation of His justice, His hatred of evil. It is what we would want, even demand, from a good God.

Adapted from "Your God is Too Safe" by Mark Buchanan