Distorted Images of God part 2: God the Indifferent Creator

(Read Part 1 here.)

Continuing my ramblings on the different ways our mental picture of God gets distorted, I’d like to focus on another common distortion–one that I call “God the Indifferent Creator.”

People commonly form this image of God in their minds for a variety of reasons, but in my experience one of the main catalysts for it is prayer that seems to go unanswered. When someone earnestly prays for something to happen, and God seems to fall silent or does not answer the prayer the way we think He ought to, we get disappointed.  When this happens repeatedly, we can get jaded, and may start believing that He is largely indifferent to our needs or desires. I know one person who claims a belief in God, but seriously questions the purpose of prayer. He figures, if God is going to do, or not do, whatever He pleases, anyhow, what’s the point of asking Him for anything?

Others look at a bigger picture, looking at all the injustice and suffering in the world, and wonder how a loving God could allow these things to happen. This leads some to conclude that if there is a God at all, He apparently takes a much more passive role in the affairs of men.

This picture of God is not a new one; for centuries now, Deists have believed that God created the universe and set it in motion, but now sits idly by and does not intervene in any way. (Analogies are frequently made to a clockmaker who makes a clock and watches it run.) Deists find too much order in the universe to completely rule out the existence of God, as atheists do, but perceive too little divine intervention in the here and now to believe that God takes an active interest in our lives. Even when something supernatural occurs, a Deist thinker will usually try to find a way to rationalize it.

There are several reasons why this is a distortion. First of all, seeing God as an Indifferent Creator really requires us to rule out several key things Jesus said about the Father–for example, that God numbers the very hairs on our heads, that no sparrow falls to the ground without His knowledge, etc. (Why would Someone that indifferent to His creation be that intimately acquainted with it?) The Bible paints a very different picture of God than one who is indifferent, so Deist thinking really requires a person to discount the validity of Scripture, usually in favor of personal experience.

Perhaps a factor in our modern times that contributes to this distorted image of God is that we’ve wrongly painted Christianity as a consumer product, like almost everything else. We’ve inadvertently painted faith as a mythical utopia where God exists solely to make us happy, and we’ve convinced people to follow Christ based on what He can do for them. When God doesn’t stay in that box, it shatters our illusions. When God turns out not to be the sugar-daddy we were told He was (another distorted image, for another post), we exchange one distortion (God the Sugar-Daddy) for another (God the Indifferent Creator).

One other thing I must point out (and my apologies in advance to atheists and Deists who may read this, for I’m not intentionally name-calling)–I find a great deal of arrogance in the way we draw these particular conclusions about God. The reason I say this is because this conclusion begins with the assumption that God can be figured out by our finite minds, that we can take our limited perspective as specks on a piece of dust in a vast universe, and draw sweeping conclusions about what God is like based solely on our experience. To form a judgment of God’s intentions (or draw conclusions about His existence) because He failed to meet our expectations–I don’t think we can do that without over-exalting our own capacity to understand Him. That’s why I think it smacks of arrogance; it makes us a lot more self-important than we really are.

And yet, on the other side–I fully understand our need to try and reconcile what the Bible says about God with what we see around us. So when it seems like God is silent or unconcerned, where do we strike a balance? How do we keep it from distorting our image of God?

A friend of mine recently shared something that really put this in perspective for me. He addressed a particular notion many Christians repeat nowadays: “God is in control,” and pointed out that we often interpret this subconsciously as “God is a controller.” We start with a presumption that if God were really in control, He would stop all the bad things from happening, He would stop us from making horrible mistakes, He would do this, or that, or the other thing to fix whatever is wrong on our planet.  It really starts with a false presumption of God, one that Scripture has never actually supported.

My friend went on to say that indeed, God has set the universe up to run a certain way, and yes, He does not always intervene exactly the way we want Him to. But the Bible never describes God as a “fixer” or a “controller.” Rather, it describes Him very consistently as a Redeemer. In other words, for whatever reason, God has chosen not to deal with this fallen world from the standpoint of “fixing it”, but has chosen to intervene in ways that make good come from the bad. He did not stop us from sinning; He sent a Redeemer to redeem us from our sins. He does not stop us from making bad choices and reaping the consequences of those choices, but He can still cause good to come from them. If we can recognize this about God, and remember the promises He’s made about the future and the age to come, it makes it easier to trust Him that He has our best interests at heart, even when we doesn’t act the way we expect Him to. I think this also gives us eyes to see the times He does intervene, instead of explaining them away as coincidence. It also helps us to recognize that sometimes He is moving in redemptive ways we do not see, in ways that will eventually make sense. (A perfect example: Jesus’ death on the cross was no doubt disheartening for His disciples in the moment, but a bit of context soon revealed its purpose to them.)

The bottom line is, the fact that God does not always intervene in the way we wish He would does not mean He is indifferent, or that He does not intervene at all. It simply means that He knows, far better than we ever could, how to bring redemption in any situation, especially for those who call upon Him. When we stop expecting God to be a controller and a fixer, and begin seeing Him as a Redeemer and a Healer, I think the distorted image “God the Indifferent Creator” will fade away.