Believe in God? What Do You Mean?

I assumed all the members of the church would say, “I believe in God.” But one afternoon, a member of the church I served stomped into the pastor’s office to unload her anger on me. Before she arrived, I knew nothing of the issue igniting her explosion. She was erupting over something neither I nor any of the church staff had done. Yet in her mind, it was the church’s fault. I apologized and offered a solution to rectify the problem. Before she departed, I asked if I could pray with her. She said, “I don’t pray to the same God you do.” I said, “Well, I will pray to the God to whom I pray.” And I prayed. She stood at my side with head bowed. When I finished, she stormed down the hall.

What does a person mean when he says, “I believe in God”? People speak the same language but have very different understandings of what they mean when the subject relates to God. When expressing beliefs, our back story gives meaning to our words. I fear we often try to create God in the image we expect him to take. Nevertheless, even people with firm beliefs in God vary in their descriptions of him and the way he works. One evangelist, John Wesley, told another evangelist, George Whitefield, “Your God is my devil.” They both preached salvation through trusting Jesus as Savior, but the way they understood God differed.

In What Kind of God Do You Believe?

J. B. Phillips painted a verbal picture of the way people define God.  In his book, Your God is Too Small, we discover the grand-old-man god, a grandfatherly, white-haired, indulgent god who smiles down on men, winking at their adultery, stealing, cheating, and lying. Next, Phillips presented the resident policeman god, whose primary job is to make life difficult and unenjoyable. Then the god-in-a-box, a private, sectarian god. To these descriptions, he added the god of the deists who appears as a managing director god, a god who designed and created the universe, started it spinning, and now stands far away watching it run down. 

Paul Froese and Christopher Bader wrote America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God & What That Says About Us. Their work addresses four common ways Americans define God in the twenty-first century. They summarized their findings with four labels:

• The “Authoritative God” is engaged in human affairs and dispenses punishment.
• The “Benevolent God” rescues and provides alternatives in crises.
• The “Critical God” does not intervene in human affairs but will judge us in the afterlife.
• The “Distant God” is unengaged.

Pew Research surveyed people asking what they mean when they say they believe in God. They discovered 9 in 10 Americans say they believe in a higher power, but only a small majority could identify some version of the God of the Bible. One challenge Christianity faces today is that each person creates his or her image or concept of God. 

Confrontations Over Differences in Belief

Many in the church carry unread Bibles. God has become a mixture of truth and myth, feelings and fiction, biblical verses and folk sayings. Some see God as the “forgiver of their sins” and the “arranger of their afterlife.” Unfortunately, for some, God has little to do with what happens between their conversion and their death. For others, the God of the Bible makes his presence known and experienced in the seasons of life. They know him as the source, Savior, and sustainer of life. His presence defines their days of discovery as they experience the joy of getting to know him.

What You Believe Affects How You Live

If you have stayed with me this long, I want to leave you with a quote. R. C. Sproul reminds us, “The issue of faith is not so much whether you believe in God, but whether you believe the God you believe in.” Remember, even the demons believe in the existence of God. (James 2:19) How do you define the God you believe in?