How easy we make our own God!

It has always been an article of faith for me that God is most present in the things that are opposite of what I think.  Because I believe that we have an incredible ability to make God into our own image. That we tend to claim God's actions in the things that happen as we hope they would, and to ignore the things that do not go as we would like them to.

There are lots of examples of this creating God in our own likeness. There is the prosperity Gospel where God is made into a large Warren Buffet who wants everybody to be rich and happy. There is that false assumption as well that riches make you happy.  There is the political God who is a great American patriot.  There is the nice liberal God who wants to have everybody get along with everybody and does not seem to have anything that constitutes sin.

So those things that go against what I think, what I want, what I think God would be doing, suggest to me the presence of another force, another power, another personality who has another agenda.  It is what happens when I read the Old Testament and see there a God who is much more violent, much more partisan, much more righteous than a God I would like to see.  Who wants to try to be friends with a God who expects his Servant king to slaughter whole towns?

There are those who want to claim that the New Testament and Jesus makes that Old Testament God obsolete. But still the New Testament God is a God who expects his son to be willing to die. The New Testament God is God who makes his own son suffer on the Cross and does nothing to help him.
It is very enlightening when we start to look at the God who is our opponent first, the one who moves against us, the one who puts up road blocks first as the nature and personality of God.  It would certainly result in a whole different direction in faith for a lot of us.