Ever feel like God is playing this childhood favorite with you?
You wouldn’t be that out of line if you did. Quite a few people have thrown their hands up in frustration over trying to please who they perceive to be an unpleasable God, an unreachable God—a God who hides.
So, is it true that God is playing a game with mankind? Since this experience is common to nearly everyone at one time or another, wouldn’t an argument by sheer numbers seem to prove this to be the case? In fact, because so many have this same experience with God a lot of non Christians and Christians alike have this to say about the case,
Case closed.
‘God doesn’t care. When I pray I feel like I’m just talking to myself. When I do good things I do not feel any closer to Him than when I am bad. When I purposely try to live in such a way that I feel is—at the very least—better than most—God doesn’t seem to care. So I might as well live for the only thing I know—my favorite three people—me, myself and I.’
You know what? It’s always a huge tragedy when we think like this about God. What happens here is really pretty simple—yet very, very tragic. What happens is that we rewrite the rules, rewrite the Word and recreate God in our image and finally walk away from what we’ve created because it sickens us.
And it happens a lot.
But what happens if God never really is playing ‘Hide and Seek?’
Most of us played this game a lot growing up and the rules are relatively simple. One person counts to fifty or so while the rest of the players hide. After the counter is done shouting out the digits, he is supposed to come looking for everyone.
Have you ever played this and had the seeker give up in frustration while you were yet to be discovered?
Frustrating, wasn’t it?
What a lot of us do with God isn’t much different than a Hide and Seek game gone bad. Think about it with me.
First of all, we add a bunch of rules that aren’t in the real game—things like wearing certain clothes, listening to certain music, having only certain kinds of friends, carrying around a certain mental checklist of do’s and don’t’s in order to please God…
…I don’t have time to go into all the rule alterations that people have added over the years. Each of us has a different list and for some it’s a scroll thirty feet long for others it could probably wrap around the earth a few times.
That’s a lot of trouble to go through in order to have a successful game of Hide and Seek with a God who isn’t even playing, isn’t it?
We need to talk about this.
More on this tomorrow.