A DEMONIZING RIGHTEOUSNESS: Condemning God
Job 40:8 (NIV 1984) “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
When our understanding of right and wrong develops outside of God's understanding of right and wrong, we eventually become adversarial with God. If we are to remain righteous within a moral framework that develops outside of God, God has to become unrighteous; He has to become unreasonable and unjust, and our worldview has to replace His. This is the essence of the secularization of morality, where morality develops in a vacuum where God is not. This causes us to become accusers of God, which might lead us to say things like, “My God would never...,” or to ask accusing questions such as, “How could a loving God...?” This is anti-salvation, the opposite of what is required at conversion, where we confess His lordship over our lives (Rom 10:9-13). Anyone can accuse God. We can certainly reason with the Lord, but within limits (Isa 1:18). When we counter Him with our own wisdom, or when we say things like, “Lord, I know what Your Word says, but…”, we step onto shaky ground. Once we add the word “but” to a sentence with “Lord”, the Lord part gets canceled.
When God offends our senses, we are tempted to confront Him; or, if we can't stomach making God our enemy, we will redesign Him into something He isn't, but we want Him to be. If we do this, we inevitably develop a moral framework outside of God's, increasingly embracing a secularized view of right and wrong while deceptively ascribing it to God, or at least our version of Him. The problem with a secular view of morality is that it causes us to be more “moral” than God. We define compassion in a way that makes us more compassionate than God, or we define tolerance in a way that makes us more tolerant than God, and this permeates every aspect of our morality. We become more just, more fair, more caring, more forgiving, more patient, and even more loving than God, and this is nothing short of idolatrous and blasphemous.
May we never be at risk of condemning God to justify ourselves. We only have one viable option when we discover that we possess a moral framework that has developed outside of God’s: we must adjust our understanding of God to fit God's understanding of God, and this requires that we relinquish control, along with our demand to always understand things. For Jesus to be our Lord, we must trust Him, which requires that we trust His worldview as well.
