Nobody loves the light like the blind man. — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
The deceptions surrounding who God is are perhaps the most pernicious because any distortion in our view of God affects everything else. Since God is over all, our view of his character and person affects how we see the world, people, events and ourselves. Thus God was careful to instruct us, starting in the first and second of the Ten Commandments, that is, before anything else, to warn us to avoid making an idol, a caricature of him, which is all even the ‘best’ images will ever be. He wanted to make sure that we did not distort or minimize him.
But our proneness to make caricatures of God stems from our desire to take the role of God for ourselves, deluding ourselves that we could be in control, and so relegating the true God to a cartoonish, ‘manageable level.’ Consequently, in our minds, his otherwise all-sufficiency shrinks and the delusion of our self-sufficiency proportionately grows.
The good news is, when we start seeing God aright, everything else adjusts accordingly, and when we start to see the value that God places on the human soul, including our own, we will be properly humbled before his majesty and will end up adoring him. See LIE: The meaning of life is an unfathomable mystery. When we finally see that God really does love us and that there is nothing we can do to cause his love for us to decrease or increase, we will stop demanding that he relate to us on our own terms.
Once we believe in the true God, love, joy and peace will naturally flood over us, despite the trials and hardships we surely will face along the way.
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