God is Better Than You Think, Part One: A Better Parent

I grew up in a church that didn’t believe the theology of the Rapture, so I never had a true fear that some of my late-nineties teen contemporaries did, especially after the Left Behind books. I never worried that I’d wake up one morning and find my house empty except for myself, all my family blissfully raptured away while I was left behind (“I wish we’d all been re-eady”).

But other fears of God crept in. Was I really “saved”? If not, what fate awaited me if I died in a car crash tomorrow? Eternal torment? Even if I was “saved”, how could God be a safe refuge if he’d devise a threat such as unending hell to make me “choose” Jesus and accept a “free” gift? Is it really a gift if God has a gun to my head ultimately saying, Choose Jesus or suffer the eternal consequences…?

There’s no getting around it. I tried hard to go with the churchy flow. I nodded and smiled in acquiescence as I sang hymns and completed my daily Bible reading plan and sighed over the “lost.” I agreed that God was good and loving AND so holy that none of us sinners deserved to be in his presence.

But come closer and I’ll tell you what was really brewing in my recently baptized adolescent brain:

This God person was really harsh, scary, and to be honest, sounded more vengeful than loving.

Thank that same God that I don’t view him in all the same ways I did as a teenager or young adult. God keeps showing me a few things: 1) That whatever is true about the good in any of us is infinitely better in him; 2) that whatever my current perception and understanding of God is, he’s better than that; and 3) he reveals his better nature sometimes in the worst of earthly circumstances.

Perhaps in our quest for truth, which understandably has a high value to the Western evangelical church, we set in stone what truth means. We write statements of faith and catechisms because we want to know we are grounded in the things of God and test our feelings, experiences, and responses against those truths.

But sometimes our desire to keep God safely in a bubble we can understand inhibits us from being open to the ways he can show himself to be even better than we currently perceive him.

What we perceive to be true about God is not necessarily bad, harmful, or incorrect. Whereas our perceptions of his love and goodness are finite, his actual love and goodness are infinite. It only makes sense that on our life journeys as we grow and change, we will be able to perceive new and better truths about God. When we’re faced with the worst, and God looks to us as if he is absent or uncaring, the truth is that even in that trauma or loss, his “better-ness” is a part of our anchor of hope in Jesus.

We are going to think. Our brains are literally wired to process information, filter out what we accept from what we reject, and to build beliefs and actions based on that data. We are going to think something. I want to share ways God is better in my thinking than he once was, and maybe challenge you to let your thinking be shaped, reframed, and molded into a more beautiful and accurate perception of the God who loves you. This article is the first in a series of explorations of how God continually shows me that he’s better than my previous conception of him. This is exciting because no matter how good I perceive him to be in this moment, he’s even better than that! He will unveil his goodness to me as I can accept it and comprehend it. I wonder if eternity will be a never-ending unveiling of his goodness—it could last forever because his love and goodness truly know no end!

Part One: God is a Better Parent Than You Think

We’re here at the end of November, wrapping up Thanksgiving celebrations. In our house, November is stacked with two birthdays and then Thanksgiving. There are lots of celebrations, lots of food, and lots of family.

Family is maybe most synonymous with Thanksgiving and Christmas, at least in the U.S. People drive or fly hundreds of miles and spend thousands of dollars to be with loved ones. Often these loved ones are parents and children seeking to reunite for the holidays.

But as the holidays bring memories and connection, they can also bring out some complicated losses. Often, it’s during the holiday season that it’s more highlighted who we are not with-our parents, our children, our other family or loved ones. Perhaps they moved to another part of the country. Perhaps they’re estranged from us. Perhaps they died.

Family relationships are complicated, especially the parent/child relationship. In my work writing online courses for foster parents, our learners learn about vectors, the seven most influential forces on any person’s way of viewing the world. Guess what is vector number one? The family of origin.

But we also are not bound just to the constraints of what happened to us in the past. We all have or had parents, and they left their imprint on us, for good or for bad, and sometimes just for the quirky and unique.

Jesus called God Father as his favorite description, even going as far as “Abba”, equivalent to calling our fathers “daddy.”

This familial way Jesus referred to God outraged the Jewish leaders. They understood God as their Father the way a potter might be called the father of his clay creation (see Isaiah 64:8). But Jesus viewed God as his “Abba, Father” the way a child views the parent who begot him. To the Jewish leaders, this was blasphemy worthy of capital punishment, because “he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).

And astoundingly, Jesus, the “only Son from the Father” (John 1:14), wanted all his disciples, then and now, to also relate to God as our “Abba, Father.” When Jesus provided us pattern for how to pray, what Christians down through the ages have called the Lord’s Prayer, the first thing he taught us was to address God as “our Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:9)

This is the focus of my first “better” about God. I used to perceive God as a punitive parent, but now I believe he’s better. I most perceive him as a nurturing parent.

I think sometimes we’re under the mistaken impression that God is exasperated with us. That, yeah “God so loved the world” BUT at the expense of his own son. His love that saved us was one of anger and disappointment. Maybe some of you had earthly parents who were punitive-a type of authoritarian parenting in which caregivers are harsh, strict, and punish children for their shortcomings. This contrasts with another extreme-permissive/absent-in which parents don’t really parent but let children have free reign. In between is nurturing-or authoritative parenting, in which parents lovingly delight in their children and use constructive discipline to guide, not to punish.

There are certainly passages in the Bible which could be framed to view God as punitive. And undoubtedly many fire and brimstone sermons over the centuries have been drawn from these images. There is a place for fear of consequences managing our choices and behavior. I know when I’m tempted to speed while driving when I’m in a hurry, I remember the times I’ve gotten a speeding ticket, and I think better of it for fear of those same consequences.

But taken to the extreme, a healthy understanding of the consequences of our actions can quickly turn into seeing God our Father with a punitive, authoritarian lens. Without delving too much into the topic of hell, I must comment that I consider that theology to be the most pervasive and erroneous example of painting God as a punitive, rigid, authoritarian parent. For his inability to forgive sinners to be so absolute as to warrant eternal conscious torment, as many churches’ statements of faith graphically spell it out, reveals a perception of a harshly punitive parent.

Christians who hold to this theology try all sorts of mental acrobatics to explain how God’s justice must be satisfied in this situation and how God can still remain all-good and all-loving. They cite that he is just too holy to look on sin, so if people have not accepted Jesus, God justly allows them the consequences of their own refusal of Christ. Which somehow equates to being tormented forever.

But can God be good if this is true?

We all rightly recoil at the collective remembrance of the Holocaust. Reading Night by Elie Wiesel or watching movies like Schindler’s List or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are barely inklings of what the suffering really was like. But many traditionally-minded Christians hold to the view (even if they don’t like saying it out loud) that anyone who has not accepted Jesus does not go to heaven. Which means, in these folks’ view, they go to hell. People who follow the Jewish religion do not, by definition, accept Jesus as their savior. So, the traditional view of hell can’t get away from the fact that if the greatest moral monster of our age, Hitler, would torture, starve, and gas human beings, then those victims left Hitler’s holocaust up on their deaths only to enter God’s never-ending holocaust. If this were true, our Heavenly Father would be worse than Hitler!

This cannot be. I hope if you’ve never given yourself permission to doubt this dogma, you will give in to doubt now.

Because Scripture reveals a Father who goes to every extreme to rescue each and every one of us. There’s not space here to debate what does happen after death for those who don’t know Jesus as Savior (and I would argue that the Bible does not succinctly spell it out). But you can rest assured that devising an existence unceasing torture does not fit the character of our Heavenly Father.

So, what kind of Father did Jesus reveal him to be? We who live on this side of the cross have the benefit of looking at God through the lens of Jesus Christ. And what a benefit that is to us!  

Generations past have latched on to passages of God’s judgment and exasperation with humankind. But as we look through the lens of Christ, we see that God’s parent love toward us is kind, utterly patient, and accepting of us exactly where we are, flaws and quirks and all. Research has shown that the type of parent a child grows up with makes a profound impact on their development. If that is true of children and their biological parents, it’s also true of us as children of our heavenly parent. In this case, how we think about God as parent impacts our spiritual development.

If we perceive God as a permissive parent, if he’s indifferent, nonexistent or uninvolved, then there really is no rhyme or reason or safety in the world. Children who grow up in chaotic home environments in which there are no expectations or affection, or the expectations and affection swing wildly from one extreme to another, develop a coping mechanism called learned helplessness. This comes from intermittent reinforcement from a caregiver. Children discover things like, “Sometimes my mom loves my singing, sometimes she yells at me for it. Sometimes my dad wants my help in the garage, sometimes he tells me to shut up and go away.” Learned helplessness in children results from more than just normal human moods. The parent who they need to be steadfast and reliable acts like a child themselves. Kids who grow up in this environment eventually stop trying to achieve a parent’s affection, and they either go numb or act out in destructive ways.

If we mistrust or misunderstand who God is as revealed through Jesus, we can just as easily stop trying. Is he really good? Is he really listening? Is he really acting on my behalf? Is he really protecting me?

I think within the confines of historical Christianity, the pendulum swung far to the other extreme in seeing God as a rigid authoritarian parent. There are certainly passages in the Bible which could be framed to view God as punitive, the parent who punishes. Many folks over the centuries have been scared into accepting Jesus for fear of this God. I was one.

One famous example of this type of portrayal of God is from puritan revivalist minister Jonathan Edwards, who lived in the 1700s. His sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” begins with: The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.

In contemporary evangelicalism, the portrayal of God is perhaps not as graphic as Edwards’ description, but I still find undertones of a punitive God in the common “penal substitution” way of perceiving Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Basically, penal substitution says that God couldn’t look at us with all our sin without punishing someone, and that someone was Jesus. So now God can look at us through the righteousness of Christ, because Christ took our punishment.

I’m not saying there aren’t threads of truth in that view, but that view does not define the whole truth of who God is as our Father. It can’t. It still latches on to punishment as the basis for a relationship. A relationship built on punishment (or the threat of punishment) is no relationship at all.

But the advent of Jesus is, indeed, the way we best mold our thinking to who God our Father is. One of my favorite authors often says, “God always looks like Jesus.”

So, who is God our Father when viewed through the lens of Jesus?

Hebrews 1:1-3 says, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”

Jesus says in John 14:9: “Have I been with you all this time and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Colossians 1:19-20 says, “For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in [Jesus], and through Him to reconcile everything to Himself by making peace through the blood of His cross whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

God was pleased for all the fullness of God to dwell in Jesus, pleased to reconcile to himself all things.

The Greek word for pleased is eudokeo, which can mean: it seems good to one, is one’s good pleasure, think it good, choose, determine, decide to do willingly, to be ready to, to prefer, choose.

Pleased does not mean enjoying or liking everything a person does. I know that as a parent I can feel hurt, disappointed, and even angry at the poor choices my children sometimes make. But God is pleased in the outcome of his self-emptying love for us: making peace through the blood of Jesus’ cross. He’s pleased not because his wrath and need to punish someone was fulfilled in Jesus, but because we are at peace with him through Jesus! He wants us as close as we can be to him, and Jesus Christ is the literal embodiment of God getting as close as he can. The basis for our relationship with our Heavenly Father is PEACE, not punishment!

I think God is a nurturing parent who delights in us, and I think it’s important to allow ourselves as children to see him accurately. Seeing God as a punitive/rigid/authoritarian parent or an absent/unpredictable parent can keep us trapped in a cycle of fear.

1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” Luke 12:32 says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights to give you the Kingdom.”

Do you believe that God your Father is only and always on your side? I hope so. Being on your side means he may use constructive love and consequences to guide you out of harmful behaviors, just like any good parent would. And I think fear is a powerful motivator in some cases, but the enemy would also like to use it as a snare. Fear inhibits the freedom of a real relationship.

Instead, trusting God’s nurturing heart, even in trials, sorrows, consequences, there need never be fear of HIM as your father. He was pleased to take on the form of Jesus for you. He is pleased to have you as his child.

If you have been estranged from your true, eternal Father, remember his side of the relationship is always waiting for you. Maybe this season is the time, no matter the state of your earthly relationships with your biological family, to embrace what freedom a life fully following Jesus is calling you to. Jesus found his identity in the Father and he’s calling us to do the same.

1 John 3:1: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”