The Blubbering God

God is love. The scriptures state it, I believe it, Christians have proclaimed it since the days of John. And yet, that's not quite the same as saying God is warm and fuzzy and has no edge to him. In fact, God is scary. He's absolute, there is none that can deliver from his clutches, and his absolute mastery over all of us and all things is punctuated by the ultimate unavoidable reality--death! And a lot of us die, suddenly, without hope in this world or the next. Yet, God doesn't seem to care or even shed a tear.

There are a few things that bring this into clear focus:

• Biblically mandated genocide
• Mass casualty natural disasters
• Pestilence
• The judgments of the Apocalypse

The writer of Hebrews said it was a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The fact is, we're all there whether we want to be or not, or regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not. There is only one sure palliative that cures our shakes and makes the frightening God approachable--the blood of the Lamb. So stop trying to make God into a big, soft, stuffed animal. The real God is a consuming fire, only gods fashioned in the imagination blubber.