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I recently got a book which I intend to give to a friend of mine as birthday present.  Since I haven’t seen him yet, I decided to flip through the pages and found myself stuck with it.  There’s this specific section that caught my attention which I hope to share with you.  Simply put, we Christians have come to view God as safe in the sense that almost reflects deism.  We believe that God is nice.  Whatever we might be doing.  Full stop.  Perhaps without even realizing it, we have come to prefer the far detachment of the Divine Being from our daily affairs.   I quote from Mark Buchanan’s powerful book, Your God is Too Safe (2001, p. 33):

"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 borderlan 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, winkling 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 groun, 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 the common folk needed a sweet, understanding mother to turn to, to hinde 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."