A bad default

Years ago, I realized I saw God through very jaded lenses.

 When I read the Bible, I would default to questioning God’s justice and righteousness until He proved me wrong. Though I’m reticent to say it, I really saw God as an aloof, unjust, unfair God who sat up in a throne room watching the world burn or, even worse in my eyes, causing it. 

 My bias infected my reading as every verse that contained something that I didn’t understand, like Jobs suffering or the murder of the Canaanite people, made me question God’s character. This led me to develop a very unhealthy and untrue view of Him. Doubt of His historical goodness soon followed with me pushing Him away in my own present life. 


 Romans 8:7 “The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God”

But one day, through God’s work alone, I came to the realization that I had this bad default. I don’t remember exactly why I decided to do it, perhaps it was studying something I didn’t understand and coming to a deeper knowledge of the Lord’s love or justness, but I realized I was wearing these jaded glasses and that I needed to take them off. 

They were holding me back from running to the Father and wrapping my arms around him. From receiving His great and immeasurable love for me that he had proven again and again and again in my life. 

My lack of faithfulness did not affect His. As the Word says in 2 Timothy, “…if we are faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself”. My faith would never move forward, as proven at the time, until my default view of God was dealt with. So I determined to change and to try my best to read God’s Word defaulting to these truths: God is good. God loves me. 


John 6:44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”

Thanks be to God that He helped me to see it and do something about it. 

For as Romans 8 says, “The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God”. Yes, I am free of the flesh’s grip on me, but without God’s ongoing work, would quickly embrace it again. 

How quickly the choice began to bless me as I opened to the book of Genesis and read of God’s love and faithfulness to us. His love when he spared us. When He removed Adam and Eve so that he could start a great plan of redemption. That He was a God who held evil to account and dealt with the injustice of the world and so I could trust Him with the injustice in my own life. A God who didn’t sit aloof in heaven but close on a cross on earth. 

I didn’t have to stop asking any of my questions. I didn’t have to walk in blind faith or ignorant religion. But, oh, how kind He was to bare my weakness. 

Then upon seeing Him as He truly is, how sweet was His embrace.

James 4:8 “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”