You Don’t Get Your Own Personal Jesus

Today on Summit Life with JD Greer. What we're afraid of, we come up with a God to take care of. Israel created this image because the promises of an invisible God were not enough for them at this point.

Not when there were real needs and real enemies to be met. Counterfeit gods always grow out of distrust. Those places where we feel like we need something beyond God and His promises. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of Pastor JD Greer, and I'm your host, Molly Vidovich. Sometimes when we're afraid or in a bind, we try to bargain with God. Be honest, you've probably been there trying to get Jesus to line up with our needs and demands. But today, Pastor JD helps us get our theology right. He's in a series titled Not God Enough, and today's message explains that you don't get your own personal Jesus.

Let's go. If you've got your Bible, take it out and open it to the book of Exodus, Exodus chapter 20, where we find a record of the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20. This is the series called Not God Enough, which corresponds to a book that I have by that same title. One of the stories that I tell in the book is of a talk show that I was watching several years ago where there were two people on this talk show. It wasn't a Christian talk show, but it is two Christians on there that were debating some moral issue. And one of them, to her credit, was trying to show what the Bible said. And the other one, also claiming to be a Christian, he kept interrupting her and saying, oh, but my Jesus would never say that, my Jesus would never do this, my Jesus would never say this. And finally, this first woman who was using the Bible, exasperated, looks back at this other guy and says, you don't get your own personal Jesus. That is the kind of the idea that we're talking about.

You don't get your own personal Jesus. This tendency that we have to reimagine God in a form that is more appealing to us is not a uniquely American problem, of course. We Americans may have perfected it, but that tendency was so common that the second commandment of God's big 10, his big 10 commandments, was explicitly about this. Incidentally, we will also see this is the first commandment that Israel broke after receiving the commandments.

Literally, while Moses is getting the commandments, before the concrete is even dry on the stones, Israel is breaking this commandment. The second commandment that I'm talking about, it reads like this. You shall not make for yourselves a carved image.

Why? Because I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. The key word in this commandment is the word image. It is talking about adding an image to God, a shape to God, a description to God that God has not given to himself. People sometimes read this commandment and they assume that it is just a restatement of the first commandment. The first commandment, the previous verse, verse three, you shall have no other gods before me.

And they think, well, okay, what he is saying is have no other gods and also don't make any graven images. It is true there is indeed some overlap between the two commandments, but there's also an important shade of difference. The first commandment focuses on worshiping the wrong gods. The second commandment is about worshiping the right God, but in the wrong ways. We violate the second commandment when we add something to God, some image, some characteristic, some attribute, some description that goes beyond or contrary to what God tells us about himself and his word.

You see, we might also be tempted when we read this command to think, well, I think I'm clear on this one. I don't really own any graven images. I don't have any gold statues at my house that I bow down to. My kids have some Superman figurines or some Barbie dolls, but I don't really worship them, so I think that I'm clear on this one.

But not so fast. We break this command not by worshiping gold statues. We break this command whenever we assign to God a form or an attribute that God did not give to himself.

If you're taking notes, you want to write stuff down, write this down. We break this commandment whenever we define God as we want him to be rather than as he actually is. We break this commandment whenever we define God in our hearts and minds as we want him to be rather than as he is or when we elevate our preferences about God above God's statements about himself. And again, I would suggest to you that there is probably no command in Scripture that we as Americans more consistently and routinely break than this one. It comes out in statements like this. The way that I see God is dot, dot, dot, or I don't think God would really have a problem with you fill in the blank or I prefer to think of God as dot, dot, dot after that.

I mean, honestly, y'all, no offense, but what does that even mean? Who cares how you prefer to see God? I mean, ironically, one of the best mockeries of this is that scene in that great theological movie Talladega Nights where Will Ferrell and that other guy whose name I can't remember go on this rampage about how they like to see Jesus.

You remember that scene? I think Will Ferrell starts it off by saying, I like Christmas baby Jesus best. So that's who I pray to. Eight pounds, six ounce baby Jesus all snugly there in your diapers in your crib yet still omnipotent.

And then the other guy breaks in. He's like, well, I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt because it says I want to be formal, but I'm also here to party because I like to party. And so I like to think of my Jesus as like in the party too. He goes on, or I like to picture Jesus as a figure skater.

He comes out wearing a little white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances that somehow represent my life's journey. Y'all, even Hollywood seems to recognize that picking out one angle on Jesus and saying that is how you like to see him is ridiculous. And folks, I'll just tell you when Will Ferrell mocks the inconsistencies in your theology, that's a problem.

The bottom line, the bottom line is this. It does not matter how you and I like to see God. God is who he is. And when God appeared to Moses, Moses asked him, what is your name? God did not say, Moses, I will be whoever you need me to be. He said to Moses, I am who I am. Notice in verses four and five in this command that God equates adding an image to him, adding a description to him that he doesn't give to himself. He equates that with hating him, hating him. It's hating him because you're basically saying, God, I don't like the real you. God, I need you to be this other thing in order for me to really love you and desire you. That's not hard to get your mind around, right? I mean, ladies, imagine if your husband found out that routinely you told your set of girlfriends something like, I like to see my husband as a six foot four jack from This Is Us.

He loves to lift weights and he has a passion for Victorian era romance novels and his perfect idea of a date night is perusing the aisles at Target with me. You keep repeating that to your girlfriends, your real husband, who is probably more like five foot six Terry who works in IT, wears penny loafers and likes fantasy football. That guy might get upset and he probably has a right to ask you why you have to reimagine him as somebody else in order for you to love him. It is an insult to God when we have to reshape God into something else in order to love him or desire him. I've got a litmus test that can help you determine whether or not you're actually doing this. One question you can ask yourself that'll help you see if you are guilty of this.

Here's a question. How often does your God contradict you, confuse you or make you mad? If your God is not routinely contradicting you, making you mad and confusing you, chances are you're not really letting God be God.

You're just reimagining him as you would want him to be. Because see, anytime you're in a relationship with a real person, they are going to confuse and contradict you. It is why our first years of marriage are often so difficult. Amen?

Right? It's why when people ask me, it's why when people ask me how long I've been married, I always tell them I've been married for 16 wonderful years and two other ones for a grand total of 18. Because when you start to date somebody, psychologists tell us that you get to know a part of them, a part of them you like, a part of them you're attracted to, and so you keep dating them. But what happens in the dating stage is you fill in all the gaps of what you don't know about them with what you want them to be. And that all gets shattered in the first six months of marriage, right?

Which is why I've heard it said, and you've probably heard this too, that love is a dream and marriage is the alarm clock because suddenly you're awakened to a real relationship with a real person and real people and real relationships do things that surprise us and contradict us. Y'all, if it's that way with another human being, how much more so would it be with an almighty, all holy, all wise God? Do we really suppose that God is just a bigger reflection of ourselves who is just here to like what we like and affirm what we affirm, who every time we post something on Facebook just hits the like button and says, oh, I like that too? Karl Barth, the German theologian, he used to say, if God never, if your God never contradicts us or makes you mad, then you're likely not worshiping him.

You're just worshiping a reflection of yourself. As I mentioned, we Americans might be the worst at this because we Americans assume that we are at such an advanced moral stage that if there is a God, well, of course, he's going to see things like we do and, of course, he's going to like what we like, us and our enlightened state. Y'all, but why would we assume we're at a place where we don't need correction and that everything in us that feels right actually is right? I mean, we know that wasn't true of previous generations, right? We know, for example, that it felt right to some of our grandparents that the races be kept separate.

I mean, you may have heard them say something like that. Well, it just doesn't feel right that we're all together. And we say, well, it doesn't matter how you feel, that wasn't right. It feels right in certain cultures for women to not get educated and to be kept in the home. And we say to them, that may feel right to you, but that is wrong.

In the Viking days, we know that they conducted honor killings because it felt like the only way to even the score if somebody insulted you. And today we say, well, yeah, you felt like that was right, but it wasn't right, it was wrong. Why then do we assume that we're the first generation in history whose instincts are 100% reliable? Honestly, y'all, do you think that 100 years from now our great-grandchildren are going to be looking back at us and just admiring what an advanced moral stage that we had gotten to in our era?

I mean, think about how you talk about your great-grandparents. I'm sure you feel some sense of kinship and love to them, but you also say things like, man, I can't believe that they thought that. I can't believe they did that. How'd they go along with that?

How did they not see that blind spot? So do we think that 100 years from now our great-grandchildren are not going to be doing the same thing to us, that we're the first generation in history where all future generations will look back and admire us for our moral foresight? I've told you before, the Bible offends every culture in every generation, usually in different ways. I think I've told you before that one of the most fascinating things or interesting things to me was when I lived overseas in a Muslim culture, observing where the Bible offended them. I mean, the Bible really offended them, but in totally different places it offended, you know, the American culture I grew up in. I'd read it in the story in John 8 where Jesus forgives the woman that has been caught in adultery, and I'm telling you all, they were legitimately scandalized by that story. They were like, you can't do that.

I mean, maybe not kill her, but you got to do some kind of punishment because if adultery doesn't have consequences, then the whole fabric of society will unravel. They were genuinely offended by that. Now, when I tell that story to Americans, nobody ever gets offended.

We kind of shake our heads and say, yeah, that's great. That's awesome, a God of forgiveness, but we get offended by the Bible's sexual ethics. So why do we assume that everybody else's instincts need to be corrected but not ours? The Bible is an equal opportunity offender, and that is what you would expect from a Bible that really is the word of God if we are a fallen people. You see, as Americans, the Bible confronts both sides of our cultural divide.

On the one side, it confronts our nationalism and our pride, and on the other side, it confronts our craving for moral and sexual autonomy. In other words, the Bible offends both the conservative and the liberal just in different places, and in order for you to really know God, regardless of your background, you gotta be willing for God to say some things to you that you don't wanna hear, and if your God is not saying things to you that you don't wanna hear, you're not worshiping God. You're worshiping a figment of your imagination. Only then when you are open to a God saying things to you that you don't wanna hear, only then will you be able to hear from Him the things you desperately do want to hear, and I'll explain to you what I mean by that toward the end. Well, like I mentioned, this was the first commandment that the children of Israel broke, so I wanna walk you through that story of where they broke this commandment because it will give you insight into where the temptation to distort God comes from, and then it'll also show you the spiritual damage that distorting God causes in you and also in your children, as the commandment says, and your children's children. Exodus 32, so leave you there at Exodus 20. Go 12 chapters to the right there in your Bible to Exodus 32. Chapter 32, verse one, when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and they said to Aaron, up, make us gods who shall go before us, because as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.

Here's the cliff notes version of the story. Moses had gone up into Mount Sinai to be with God and to receive the Ten Commandments. Well, Moses ends up being gone a little bit longer than he had planned on. He's a few days tardy on his return, and so everybody freaks out, thinking that God and Moses had abandoned them, which was totally insane when you consider all that God had done literally in the previous month to bring them to this point.

God had delivered them miraculously from the most powerful empire in the world through ten supernatural plagues. And then, just as a little finishing touch, as they're marching out, he moves inexplicably in the hearts of the Egyptians to take off all their jewelry and to go out and hand it to the Israelites and leave flush with gold. Then God leads Israel every day with a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night.

Sometimes you're like, well, how do I know the presence of God is with me? They literally could see it, a pillar of cloud and pillar of fire. Then he splits the Red Sea in half so they can walk through on dry ground and then closes it behind them so that the Egyptian army can't follow. And then he miraculously supplies them day by day in the desert with meat and with food and with drink. This all happened in the month leading up to Exodus 32. But now they think that God has abandoned them because Moses is a few days tardy.

Verse two. So Aaron, who was Moses' brother, the associate pastor or campus pastor of Israel, you might say, said to them, take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives. Where did they get those rings of gold? That was the gift from the Egyptians.

And out of your son's ears, which evidently they were in earrings too, and your daughters, and bring them to me. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it and Aaron made proclamation and said, tomorrow shall be a feast to... To who? To the Lord.

That's a very important thing to see because what you see in him saying that is it's not like they'd switched teams altogether. They were still trying to worship the Lord. In fact, the bull was something God had told them to use to sacrifice and worship to him. The bull represented the part of God that they felt like they needed most right then.

You see the ancient peoples, the bull represented strength. And that's what the Israelites most wanted right then in that moment. So they were attempting to reshape God into a form that guaranteed to them that sense of power and protection that they craved. You see, that's what graven images or that's what counterfeit gods almost always do.

They elevate one attribute of God that we're attracted to above all the other attributes of God. So verse five, Aaron makes the calf and he declares a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. Those are the very offerings that God had instructed them to give to him. So again, they haven't gotten into a brand new religion.

This is just a new and improved version of their religion. And the people sat down to eat and drink and then they rose up to play. The word play there in Hebrew has clear sexual connotations. After this new and improved worship approach, in other words, they all got hammered and then got jiggy with it, I guess you would say. And that is not typically how God prefers for his worship services to end. So it's not going well. So God tells Moses, verse seven, Moses, you better get down there.

You better get down there. The people have corrupted themselves. Verse 19, we'll skip Moses' prayer that he prays there, verse 19. As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot. One of my friends pointed out last night that this is like Veronica. When she sees me dancing, her anger burns hot, but for different reasons.

I'm just embarrassing her and so she tells me to stop. But Moses gets mad because he knows what they're doing and he throws the tablets out of his hands and breaks them at the foot of the mountain. Then he took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire. And then he put it in his Vitamix and ground it to powder and he scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.

It was a false God smoothie. Then, then, y'all, in one of truly my favorite scenes in the Old Testament, Moses then turns to Aaron and says, Aaron, what have you done? And Aaron said, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Let not the anger of my Lord burn hot. You know the people. Mm, you know the people. Moses is like, yep, I know the people. And Aaron's like, yeah, we know the people that they are set on evil.

And they said to me, and what could I do? Make us gods who shall go out before us and there's a lot of them, not many of me. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don't know what's become of him.

By the way, that's what they call passive aggressiveness right there. You see what he's doing? He's blaming Moses. What, you weren't here? You were supposed to be back here and you weren't here and so you were late. So what was I supposed to do, Moses?

Not my fault. You going, so I said to them, let any who have gold take it off. So they gave it to me and I threw it into the fire.

This is the best part. I threw it into the fire. Out came this calf.

I mean seriously y'all, is Aaron in middle school? I just threw it into the fire and boom. What could I do, Moses? I had to worship it and we had to worship it. There was no other alternative. You see the difficult situation I was in, Moses, you were late, threw the gold in, out came the calf.

What else could I do? I've heard some really dumb excuses for bad behavior in my life. Y'all remember a few years ago when Winona Ryder got caught shoplifting? You remember that debacle?

And you remember how she was like, well, my producer of my next movie told me I needed to get some practice shoplifting so I'd act it out more naturally in the part I'm gonna play. That's why I did it. That's a dumb excuse but I'm telling you this excuse by Aaron ranks among the dumbest. Anyway, this whole terrible story, this whole debacle, what it reveals to us, the reason that it's in scripture is it reveals to us three genuine truths, I believe, about counterfeit gods. Three genuine truths about graven images. Number one, what we see from this story is that counterfeit gods almost always correspond to our fears. What we're afraid of, we come up with a god to take care of. Israel created this image because the promises of an invisible god were not enough for them at this point. Not when there were real needs and real enemies to be met and they felt like they needed something more than an invisible god and his promises to protect them. Counterfeit gods always grow out of distrust. Those places where we feel like we need something beyond God and his promises. So what we do is we reconstruct God in a way that guarantees he will give to us those very things. You get that?

I feel like it's a tad bit deep. But what happens is you feel like, you feel like, God, I'm not sure I need this thing and I'm not sure you're gonna give it to me or you're not giving it to me. So instead of walking away from you all together, I'm just gonna reshape you so that you guarantee to give me the thing that I want in the first place. By the way, this is how the first and second commandment are interrelated.

The first commandment, you should have no other gods. When you break that one, when you say, well, God, I've gotta have this also. You and your promises are not enough. I don't trust you enough.

I've also gotta have this. So rather than just walking away from God all together, you don't wanna leave him behind. You say, well, I don't wanna leave you behind. So what I'll do is I'll just reshape you into a form that guarantees you'll give me the thing that I need or want. For example, we feel like we have to have money and prosperity to be happy. So we invent a God that will guarantee those things to us. This is literally called the prosperity gospel and it leads to books like Your Best Life Now. Or we like to see ourselves as good people, better than other people.

So what do we do? We invent a God who is angrier at the kinds of sins that other people struggle with more than he is the kinds of sin that we struggle with. This is the counterfeit God of a lot of conservative cultural Christians. Or for example, we really need family stability to be happy. So we invent a God who guarantees family stability and we get angry at God if he lets something go wrong. Or we wanna have unchallenged sexual freedom so that we can do anything and everything that we want so long as it doesn't hurt anybody. So we invent a permissive God who is okay with that and then we write angry blogs about how evangelical Christianity wronged us when God wouldn't let us have those things. Or I've known people who really wanted, for example, to be out of their marriage. And so they invented a God who was okay with that even though it went against what God's word says. Yes, I understand, there are places and times that the Bible indicates divorce is an acceptable choice and I know it's a complex question, but I'll tell you, in my experience, a lot of people aren't concerned about what the Bible actually says at all. All they're looking for is a God who will justify what they've already made up their mind to do in the first place.

Believing in the self-image God is a trap that we've all fallen into at some point, but we don't get our own personal Jesus. Wow, we're just a few messages in and already this has been a challenging teaching series. You might want to catch up on broadcasts you may have missed or listen again to let it really sink in.

Visit us online to re-listen and download complete, unedited transcripts at no charge at all when you visit JDGrier.com. J.D., I'd like to switch gears a little bit since this is the last week for our listeners to get your new book. I understand that the Great Commission's call is to go and make disciples and that applies to all of us, but what now? What do I do to make that true in my life? Well, what it means is that you ask yourself, where does God have me? What has he given me? And how does he want me to use that to help people understand Jesus more? In the book, I talk about even how in a moment of pain, God intends that pain for you to use that to direct people to Jesus. If you are a college student or a young professional, it means you ask the question, what talents do I have and how are they supposed to be used as part of the mission of God? I realize not everybody's called to do what I do and not everybody's called to be professional or full-time Christian minister, missionary or pastor, but all of us are called to be a part of the Great Commission.

Jesus said, follow me and I will make you a fisher of men. This book, at whatever stage you are in your career, whether you're starting it, whether you're at the halfway point, whether you feel like you're at the tail end of it, thinking about retirement and that chapter, it'll help you ask the questions of, am I wasting my life and am I investing my life in eternal things in ways that I will be grateful for for eternity? We would love to get you a copy of this book. You'll become a gospel partner with us, which enables us to get this program into places where the gospel is not as well known. We'd love to get you a copy of this book.

It comes from devotionals that we wrote to go along with it that will take you deeper into some of the Bible passages. You can go to jdgeer.com and reserve your copy today and start that process, but we'd be grateful and I'm looking forward to you reading it and even hearing what you think about it. There's only one more day to request this book, so reach out to us today. I'm Molly Vitovich inviting you back tomorrow when Pastor JD picks up in his message titled You Don't Get Your Own Personal Jesus. That's Friday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.