When ‘God fails’ to meet our expectations

I hear two themes jux­ta­posed. In bib­li­cal the­ol­o­gy it is a theme of peo­ple who love and fear God ask­ing, “How can I bet­ter serve God?” In the Evan­gel­i­cal church, as prod­uct of our soft-sell evan­ge­lism, it is a theme of peo­ple who love them­selves ask­ing, “Why isn’t God serv­ing me accord­ing to my expectations?”

In qui­et time, I read of peo­ple in want joy­ful­ly prais­ing God for His pro­vi­sion and bless­ing. When I leave the house, I encounter peo­ple (myself includ­ed), who want for noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant but are mis­er­able and crit­i­cal of God.

We sing wor­ship and praise songs to and about an awe­some sov­er­eign God, who, must exist only until the final chord fades.

We have no need of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Har­ris to turn us into athe­ists. We in the Unit­ed States are doing just fine delud­ing peo­ple into dis­il­lu­sion of belief in God on our own using noth­ing more than the Evan­gel­i­cal the­ol­o­gy of enti­tle­ment and our false intrin­sic belief that God has some­how endorsed our god­less pur­suit of “The Amer­i­can Dream.”

To my mind, this con­sti­tutes a dou­ble-neg­a­tive. The delu­sion is becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned of some­thing that was nev­er illu­sion. We don’t need the faulty log­ic of the neo-athe­ists. We do per­fect­ly well on our own.

Why does­n’t it imme­di­ate­ly strike us as the pin­na­cle of hubris and fool­ish­ness when we even begin to think in terms of “God fails”?

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