Galactic Cop or Loving Father?

This is going to be a long one. Hold on to your butts.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a professional driver, in the sense that I get paid to drive. A few days ago I drove to Pittsburg with eight other drivers to drop off cars at the airport. While we were driving around the airport (we missed our turn) a cop came flying up towards us lights flashing. Being someone who has gotten a ticket before, I near wet my pants for fear of another ticket.

On the way back to Columbus, the people in my van were talking about it, and how we all were worried that the cop was coming for us. I couldn’t help but think of the picture that floats around on the internet that says something like, “When we see police we should feel protected not scared.” While I agree with this, I feel there can be a deeper meaning to this.

When police show up in our rearview mirror, or we see one sitting in the median, or one patrolling around town, we snap to our best behavior. We act and drive perfectly, or as close as we can get.

How often do we do the same thing with God?

“Oh God is watching, I have to be on my best behavior or he’ll stick me with something bad.”

I am sad to say that this has been engrained in us from the generation that has raised us (who may have gotten it from the generation above them, not blaming, just stating what I found in my own life). We grow up with thoughts of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and God (and no, I’m not saying that God is imaginary. So don’t jump down my throat about this). But we grow up being told to act good, and as perfect as we can because Santa is watching and if we are bad we won’t get presents. Then while in church we were told we had to behave or else God will punish us and we won’t get into heaven.

We then grow up with a “Big Brother” idea of God: The all-seeing, all knowing, all powerful cop, always watching, waiting for us to mess up so that he can punish us, give us a ticket if you will.

And we fear God, but not in the way that he intended.

And more importantly, we forget grace.

Before I tackle grace, I want to tackle fearing God.

As stated a couple of days ago, I’ve been reading through the OT, and in it there are a lot of mentions of “fearing God.” Most take it as needing to be shaking in your boots because God will punish you if you don’t stay on the thin line. Yes, God detests sin, and he’s fully Just, but is also full of mercy. He is completely capable of obliterating us for our sin in the most painful way ever. And we should understand that, fear that, respect that, and stand in awe of it.

One of my favorite definitions of fear is “regard in reverence and awe.”

There is also “a mixed feeling of dread and reverence.”

This is what I think it means to “fear God” -to respect and be in awe of his power, with the knowledge that his power is immeasurable. This is the proper fear of God, not scared that Big Brother is watching us waiting for us to mess up.

As stated above, I said that we have forgotten grace.

What I mean by that is that we have either forgotten that we have grace, or we have forgotten the meaning of grace.

A few months ago I took a class on Romans for my grad degree, and while we held class my professor Stephen Pattison (I want to give him the credit) said something that blew my mind.

“If grace was preached properly it would be considered heresy.”

He then went on to explain grace in a way which I have never heard it spoken about before. The easiest way to explain it how he did is: Grace covers all sins, past, present, and future. But that’s not enough to grasp the true meaning of it.

I’ve been baptized, and I have grace, so my sins are forgiven. “Momma, I just killed a man. Put a gun up to his head, pulled the trigger, now he’s dead.” And that sin is already erased because of this grace that I have. All the sins I will commit are already washed away, because I have grace. It makes it seem like it doesn’t matter if I sin at all anymore, because I have grace. Which, according to my professor, is exactly the case.

But with that idea of grace people can take it and say that they can do whatever they want because they have grace. So we have to go see what Paul has to say about it. (Now this is a big topic, if anyone would like me to go further into it, I can at a later time, just let me know.)

Romans 6.1-2: Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? NO!

This is the strongest way Paul can say no, he may as well have thrown some explicative words in there to get his point across. We have grace, which covers our sins, but we shouldn’t keep sinning because as Paul writes, we have died to sin and have come alive with Christ. Sin in our life is dysentery for the soul. If you don’t know what that means, look it up. It is an embarrassing and horrible way to die.

When we go to Christ and are baptized, we die with him. We are giving him our lives, giving him everything, telling him we in fact believe he is God, that he died on the cross, taking our place and our sin, and that he rose again, defeating death and sin. We claim that he is our God, and that we will do all we can to worship him and praise him, putting nothing before him.

Yet sin does the exact opposite of that. We put ourselves before God. “I trust you with my life, and believe that you know what is perfect for me and what is not. But I don’t like that you tell me not to have sex outside of marriage, so I’m going to do it anyway.” I’m going to put myself before you. I’m not trusting you with that. That is the root of sin. Idolatry of ourselves. A conscious decision. Hypocrisy.

“But under grace it’s covered so what does it matter?”

Grace comes with the surrendering to God, the dying with Christ to sin, and coming to life in him. How can you say you died to sin when you purposefully do it?

Here’s the point.

God is not a police officer; one who we fear is watching and we’re on our best behavior when we know his eye is on us. He is our perfect Father, our heavenly Father, our close Father. He is there with us in our high times and low times, always there for us. He’s never looking for ways new to tax on punishments for us.

Yes we mess up, yes we still sin, yes he absolutely hates sin, but he gives us grace. He doesn’t have a quota to meet every month. He doesn’t watch for us to mess up. He is constantly rooting for us to succeed.

When we fail and mess up, he is there to pick us up, set us on our feet again, and help guide us. It is us who walks away, not him. But he still follows, wanting to help us.

He is the Father who has given us grace, which washed away our sins. All of our sins. We are to fear him, but in a respectful, awe filled way.

So how do you view God?

Galactic Cop? Or Loving Father?