Some has seen God as if he were a machine responding to their commands. They have done with God what they do with a Machine Teller.
They come to God with a password which was given to them, inculcated, and press the “buttons of the secrets of God” and try to get what they want.
Many are the promoters of this kind of gospel, gospel of passwords, keys, secrets, movements, the gospel of those who have found out “what to do to have what they want”.
The God of the Bible has never been an instrument in the hands of anybody, never was obliged to do anything, never betrayed His own words that we could press Him to get what we desire.
Yet, we have to have in mind that if we want to enjoy the facilities of a Machine Teller, we have to have credit. The money we cash there is fruit of our work, the result of what we do for living.
I remember once that my son said: Dad, it’s just to press the button, so why don’t you take out more money?
My son could not realize that to take money or more money out, we would have to have worked for that. First we work, produce (bare fruit) and then we have what to take out.
I suppose that with God it is not different. If we want something from Him, we are not going to have it if we don’t have credit with Him, if we don’t deserve it.
Deserve here can’t be understood that we can reach something from God by means of our deeds, but it has to be understood that the undeserved favor of God, His grace, is within us because we are in Him by free choice and now the grace brings forth fruit in us glorifying God.
Deserve here is understood as we have to understand Jesus’ teaching to the woman he delivered from her sins and from the Pharisees’ hands to kill her, “go and do not sin anymore”. There was condition for things continue going well for her, it was not sinning again as a result of following Jesus with all her soul.
It doesn’t mean that God is demanding something in exchange for what He did and yet is going to do for us; it is that there isn’t any way of following Jesus without being with our whole soul and heart. If our following Him is not this way, it can not produce legitimate fruit and consequently it will not bring legitimate God’s blessings upon us.
Deserve here is to serve Him without bargaining (only Him knows which is our intention) and then His mercy simply makes us deserve his blessings. How to bring forth fruit and receive his blessings without faith? It is the simple, dependent faith, unclothed of any self-interest that makes us be in credit, credit which is not our ultimate goal, but that it is at our reach justly because it is not our major goal. Our ultimate goal is to be with Him because He is our all in all. This is the kind of fruit, the sort of production that must appear in our lives if we want to be targets of His love, and we only can get this fruit and production when we depend on Him (which is a constant battle within us).
Back to which I was discussing before, and reinforcing what I have already said, we have credit with God when we produce truth, integrity, and sincerity. This is to seek the kingdom of God firstly and have the other things added.
God is not a machine that simply responds to simple codes such as: I determine, it is done, it is broken, I order, get out this, get out that; how to receive if there isn’t enough fund and maybe my account is already blocked?
We can only reap what we have planted. But many have taught to reap, to have, to determine victory, prosperity in order to acquire a car, a house without sowing true gospel, planting the true gospel, and so by God’s mercy reap.
Look, he who lives the true gospel has his search centered in the truth, in the Lord, and not in that that He can give; the center is who He is.
Therefore, God is not a cybergod at our disposal with a pleasant interface and whether it is not pleasant we adapt as we wish.
The Lord said: I am the Lord and there is no one but me.
How to cope with this?
Choosing whom to serve, to God and His Christ and His word or to a gospel of appearance only, which has been transmuted from time to time according to the will of self-seeking people. Pity that many people of good will allow themselves to be taken by what is apparent only.
It is time to us to ask ourselves if we are evangelicals only (evangelicals only have allowed themselves to go into any context of newness) or if we are of the Gospel. It seems that being of the Gospel is old-fashioned today, it is to have lost track of the “glorious walking of the church on the face of the Earth”, it is not understanding the times, understanding the “final anointment”.
How to cope with this?
Making a choice for what is true even that we have to go out of scene, even that we have to stop (apparently) doing what everybody was used to seeing us to do and for which we were praised. If what we used to do and still do was not or is not centered in being of the gospel, it’s not worth going on.
But whether the case is not to stop, let us change our attitude, even that our attitude change makes us to be stopped.
We will be doing more for God if we are able to live more intensely the truth, which doesn’t necessarily means appearance, signs, to be prosperous, the way it is emphasized nowadays.
How to cope with this?
Rejecting a sort of steward god, the robotized Christ, man’s servant that the evangelical religion of many has tried to put as true in these days of lack of discernment.
Some time ago, I read an article about the three Rs of victory (not three Vs, and also not an article concerning simple victory keys) that fits well in this context. They were:
R of recognizing, R of rejecting, and R of resisting.
We can only win (or at least we fight to) recognizing the situation we are involved in; we can only win rejecting such situation; we can only win resisting the offers belonging to which we recognized and rejected.
So, if we realize that the kind of gospel I described in the beginning of this text is not a gospel that really feeds the soul, it is not true and from the truth, we have to recognize that it isn’t of any good, leaving to us, to reject it and resist it.
When the Lord is not the primacy, we end up like those who Paul the apostle didn’t dare to compare himself with and didn’t want those following Christ’s teachings, who he preached to, did: “For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” (2 Corinthians 10.12).
Therefore, whatever we do spiritually can only be associated to which predominates in the religious world, in the evangelical world, if it passes in the test (specifically and exclusively) of association to and comparison with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this only occurs when we are ready to lose for gaining (Mark 8.35), because according to the Gospel there isn’t real gain just because the majority, apparently, is gaining; on the contrary, what really is taken into account in the Gospel is the legitimacy of the gain.
To conclude, it is worth reminding that “the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, And the haughtiness of men shall be brought low; The LORD alone will be exalted in that day” (Isaiah 2.17), because “[…] know this day, and consider it in your heart, that the LORD Himself is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deuteronomy 4.39).
May God give us victory so that we may transmit with all our heart, with all our strength, something more resembled with which Jesus taught, the apostles taught than what we have seen and may have lived.
José Martins
