God is holy, God is Most High, God is All Powerful and All Knowing. But the more I search the scripture for information on what God is like, and how God has been moving in the lives of his people through the millennia, the more I realize that one component of God’s persistent frustration with humanity is our inability to adopt a fuller picture of who God is and what it means to cooperate with him in the ongoing administration of our world.
We find other gods, instead of finding more of God. Consider that idolatry is often trading the Great God for some lesser deity. Where Yahweh is Lord over All, including Sex, Money, and Power, the false and foreign gods usually claim authority over sex or money or power. They claim a fraction of Yahweh’s power, and yet we consistently run to these lesser gods because their promises are so much more immediate. They promise to satiate our desires, whereas Yahweh promises to imbue us with the strength to earn our desires honorably. But instead of investing ourselves more deeply in Yahweh, learning from him to discover the holiness of human sexuality, we turn quickly to the lesser gods while they turn tricks in back alley temples.
We ignore God altogether, instead of exploring God all together. Sometimes we turn away from God, concluding that God is either not real or not trustworthy. We surmise that if God is real he has no real power, and therefore is unworthy of our time. But this is rather like meeting with a millionaire and asking for money. When we don’t get what we want, we storm off and dismiss any ongoing relationship, advice, or coaching we might otherwise receive.
So don’t ignore God, explore God.
The church of the future will abandon her solitary pursuit of divine insight and instead explore God with others, knowing that someone else has asked these questions before, someone else is asking these questions now, someone else has already found a partial answer that will assist you, someone else has found a fuller expression of faith that will bolster you.