Edgework

Whenever the words of “Awesome God” appear on the big screen during worship in the church where I am a member I stop singing. While others are singing heartily, I bow my head and wait for the next song to begin.

AWESOME GOD

When He rolls up His sleeves
He ain’t just puttin’ on the ritz
There is thunder in His footsteps
And lightning in His fist
Well, the Lord wasn’t joking
When He kicked ’em out of Eden
It wasn’t for no reason that He shed his blood
His return is very close and so you better be believing
that our God is an awesome God

REFRAIN

Our God is an awesome God
He reigns from heaven above
With wisdom pow’r and love
our God is an awesome God

And when the sky was starless in the void of the night
He spoke into the darkness and created the light
Judgment and wrath he poured out on Sodom
Mercy and grace He gave us at the cross
I hope that we have not too quickly forgotten that
our God is an awesome God

(Michael W. Smith)

So what is wrong with me? What keeps me quiet? Nine pages of internet comments I checked are filled with unlimited praise for this great song. Only three or four cite some reservations. There were many testimonies about how this song had ministered to believers and drawn non-believers to God. “So just get on board, Jack, and stop “puttin’ on the ritz!”

But for me the lyrics of this song simply don’t do justice to my understanding of what makes God “awesome.” And I find it disconcerting that so many good people sing the song with great conviction and proclaim it to be the most powerful song ever. Even Smith acknowledges, according to one blogger, that “…it’s one of the worst-written songs that I ever wrote; it’s just poorly crafted.” Yet everyone else seems to love it!

The problem in the song is that God is presented as being schizophrenic: one part a powerful despot ready to stomp on you, another part love and mercy for those who get it just right.

I understand where this duality comes from. When you pull various texts out of the Old and New Testaments some appear to affirm that God is a God of “wrath” while others suggest that God is the essence of “love.” So some Bible teachers have insisted that we must keep our understanding of God balanced properly between these two defining characteristics. A 50/50 proposition, perhaps. It is thought that such a “stick and carrot” image best describes the God we serve.

It is of interest to note that all the pagan gods in Old Testament times were gods of “power” who stomped around on their enemies and those of the people who worshiped them. So it is not surprising that that is how the people of God sometimes perceived their God. But when we step back from the text we can quite readily perceive a progression of thought away from such thinking. God loves and wants relationships; therefore provides the Ten Commandments. God is “…slow to anger but abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 145:8).

When we consider the purest form of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus, we see a God of out-stretched arms. No parable describes this better than that of “The Prodigal Son.” When the son who has wasted his inheritance and ruined his life returns home, the Father runs to meet him with open arms – not even permitting him to beg for mercy. And then he goes out to his elder son, who is upset at his father’s generosity, begging him to also come in. He loves them both equally. It would be appropriate to title this story, “The Parable of a Loving Father.”

The parable appears to contradict the common understanding that the wrath of God is foisted on all of humanity because they are tainted with “original sin.” Steve Chalke says in “The Lost Message of Jesus,” “To see humanity as inherently evil and steeped in ‘original sin’ instead of inherently made in God’s image and so bathed in ‘original goodness,’ however hidden it may have become, is a serious mistake” (p. 67). This mistake has dogged the church in the West for centuries and fed the notion of a 50/50 God. It is interesting that the Eastern Church never accepted this doctrine, believing that the work of God is to appeal to the image of God alive in everyone.

I think the Eastern Division got this one right. In the Western Church, this awesome love didn’t even get into the creeds. Chalke comments about Western creeds as follows: “Forged over the centuries to lend expression and clarity to its faith, they have universally failed to explicitly set out the sublimely simple statement found in I John 4:8. As a result, the fact that the God of the universe is the God who claims, not only that he loves, but also that he chooses to define himself as love has become one of the world’s best kept secrets”(p. 55).

Jesus demonstrated that divine love by eating with sinners, touching the unclean, hanging out with the marginalized, feeding the hungry and healing the sick. He makes real the statement in John’s Gospel that God loved the world so much that he sent his son – not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:16)! And that the entire Kingdom he has come to establish is based on love, not power.

I am taken in by the grandeur of this love. So I find it difficult to sing about an awesome God who stomps on wretched humanity and smashes them with his fists. And then threatens them with the eternal damnation they deserve for the sin of having been born to the descendants of Adam and Eve.

I’m sorry, but I will continue to wait quietly for the next song to begin.