In Christian culture it is common to speak of "doing God's work," as if we are His servants. But this begs an interesting question, "Why would an all-powerful God need servants?"

 

Attempts to answer this question are rationalizations, not reasons. An all-powerful God can have anything He wants, just by wanting it. So He does not need servants. He does not even need us to be the instruments of His will. So why would He play with us, putting us through the painful trials and tribulations of life on Earth, just to see how we will react? Such is not the nature of a loving God. So here we have paradoxes in our conception of the Master who we faithfully serve. Either God is strange, or we are confused. It's more likely that we are confused, having made logical errors somewhere in our attempt to know Him. So what is the source of these logical errors?

 

Distortions in our perceptions are almost always evidence of vanity. Having conceived of an all-powerful God, we selfishly seek our place next to Him, as we vainly think that we are worthy of it. Here the personification of God does us a disservice. An all-powerful being, in human form, conjures up the image of an authority figure of some sort, like a parent or a politician. We think that we understand when the Old Testament tells us that He is a jealous and angry God, who punishes those who defy Him, while rewarding the labors of loyal servants. But these are not godlike behaviors, and a loving overlord who leaves us in doubt so much of the time, and punishes us severely (such as burning us in hell forever, ouch) when we get it wrong, while having the power to do anything He wants, is a hard thing to comprehend. The confusion is a simple artifact of the distortions created by our own vanities. We are not God's servants. We are guests in God's house. He doesn't need us. We need Him. We're not doing His work. We're pursuing our own interests, but if we get with Him, we will prosper. Yet He is not our servant. He is the teacher, not the master, and not the slave. And if He punishes us, it is not because He wants us to work harder for Him — He already has it all. He is trying to teach us the right way to live.

 

Is the conception of God as Master just the product of a personification seen through vain eyes? Actually, it has deeper roots.

 

Tertius Chandler, a noted author on ancient archaeology and religion, proposed a plausible series of steps by which spirituality first emerged.¹ He contended that ancient gods were not born as conceptions of ideals in the modern sense. Rather, they were local rulers, whose exploits were exaggerated even in their own times, and after they had passed, their powers grew with every re-telling of the stories. Before long they went from extraordinary to superhuman, and eventually, to godlike. Furthermore, ancestor worship was ubiquitous in the ancient world, as the natural extension of respect for one's parents. Longing for the counsel of a departed relative is universal, and with a little bit of wishful thinking and/or superstition, we might even sense the presence of our ancestors, perhaps even continuing to influence our lives, as ghosts or spirits. Hence attributing supernatural powers to the departed is not unusual, even in modern times. In the case of a departed ruler who seemed bigger than life even while alive, and who has grown all the more powerful in the afterlife, and who might even still be wielding those powers, the reverence and worship thereof approaches a practice that is recognizably religious.

 

As ancient rulers typically named their eldest children as their successors, subsequent rulers could claim to possess all of the powers of the deceased (and deified) ancestors, as they came from the same stock (even if the bloodline was indistinct). We now think that a ruler claiming to be directly descended from God is incredibly pretentious, but the ancient believers were fewer steps removed from the origin of such assertions, and it's possible that they accepted the hereditary claims, perhaps with a raised eyebrow that anyone could ever live up to the tall tales of the exploits of their ancestors, but not with the suspicion that we now have in retrospect.

 

Yet worldly rulers do not always act in a godlike way, and the continued distillation of the concept of godliness eventually led to a split between religious and secular authority, with priests and politicians vying for control over the hearts and minds of the people. Hence the high priests might be heard proclaiming, "Pharaoh is not your lord — Yahweh is!" And pharaoh might then be heard responding, "Hey priest, here's an all-inclusive ticket to the afterlife — the rest of you, obey me or follow the priest!"

 

Jesus, always the pacifist, is later heard saying (in Matthew 22:21), "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." At this point, the split has become a metaphysical duality, wherein God is the king of the heavens, with priests as the gate-keepers, while the worldly dimension is ruled by politicians who have their own rights. Despite Jesus' unwillingness to engage the Romans head-on, the Jews were resentful of Roman domination, and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the messiah who would re-establish the nation of Israel.² So everybody begged Jesus to proclaim himself as the leader of the insurrection against the Romans. Jesus skillfully evaded the issue, never actually calling himself the Son of God (which would have been claiming royal powers in the ancient world), but he did speak of "God the Father" in a provocative way.

 

John 14:6-9

⁶ Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

⁸ Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." ⁹ Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?

This was enough for the local secular ruler (Pontius Pilate) to spring for Jesus' airfare to the afterlife. But instead of invalidating the concept of God as Lord, this solidified the metaphysical bifurcation between worldly and other-worldly. The wisdom of Jesus' teachings guaranteed their persistence, while the Roman Empire was not destined to last, and as secular power eroded, religious leaders filled the void. In the Middle Ages, an ascension to any throne that was not ordained by the Pope, and thereby allied with all of the other powers in Catholic Europe, was doomed to fail. So "lord" in the religious sense still meant "lord" in the secular sense, though at that point it was a forced redirect. This was not challenged until Martin Luther, and later John Calvin, reintroduced the split between religious and secular authority, claiming that the Holy Scriptures are the source of all truth (not Church leaders).

 

In modern times, the conception of godliness is fully evolved into a sense of perfection emanating from the other dimension. Descartes tells us that we are not perfect. For example, we look at a circle, and think it to be a perfect circle. Yet if we look closely, we find that its radius deviates from perfection, if only at a fine scale. By what means can we perceive that it is perfect? This can only prove the existence of God, who is perfection, and who has taken an imperfect circle, seen through imperfect eyes, and infused it with His perfection.³ This is no longer the angry and jealous God of the Old Testament, who gets giddy with adulation and lavishes lands and money on those who suck up to Him. For Descartes, God was distinctly inhuman in His absolute absence of flaws of any kind. Theologians have been wrestling with the relationship between God and humans ever since.

 

With so many unanswered questions in the Christian definition of God, everyone is going in different directions. Recently there has been a resurgence in the belief in Jesus as the miracle worker, who will give us anything we want if we praise him enough. So here is the all-powerful Son of God who likes it when people suck up to him, and who rewards people with worldly goods. This is just a gate-keeper scam, and those vulnerable enough to succumb to such tactics can be taken for all they're worth. And sometimes the victims become the perpetrators. Thinking that they have already prayed hard enough, and that they deserve to be rewarded, some people feel justified simply taking whatever they want. People like this have given Christianity a bad name. Janis Joplin sarcastically sang in 1970, "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?" Three days later she was struck down by an angry and jealous God, who has been buying color TVs for devoted admirers ever since, or so some believe. Such is not ethics by any rational standard, and therefore it is not religion, nor theology. It's an excuse to be amoral. We could all put on our best suits and walk down the street looking for sinners, and say, "Give me 5 bucks and I'll forgive you for your trespasses, such as stealing from your neighbors." At the end of the day, we'd all have a thousand dollars in our pockets. But what justice is that? The sinners keep sinning, the victims keep getting victimized, and the gate-keepers get richer by the day. There's nothing ideal about that.

 

God is not our servant, nor is He an emotionally immature authority figure who responds generously to praise. He is the Wise One, who sees all and knows all. If we think that we have absolved ourselves of guilt by laying 5 bucks on a preacher, God shakes His head in disgust at us and the preacher. And even though there are those who conduct themselves in such a manner and who prosper in this world, if we look closely, we find that they are deeply unsatisfied with themselves. They know that they are kidding themselves, and cheating the world. They are not at peace with themselves, and they recklessly careen through life, bouncing hard off the walls. We should not be jealous of such people. We take just what we need, and we are satisfied. We don't have to lie, steal, and cheat for what we want, where our worst fear is what we know to be true deep in our hearts. We are at peace with ourselves, and God smiles at us.

 

The most important thing for us is that the clarity of mind we get from God allows us to see right through people like that, and we are not vulnerable to their tricks. We are all human, and we feel a pang when we see cheaters prospering. But this does not mean that they will cheat us, and it does not mean that we must cheat them. The skillful ones are passed over when cheaters are looking for victims, and we can still get enough money to survive by doing honest work. And we don't have enemies to outrun.