Fear of Submission
(and God)
(cont’d)
Yearning for bankruptcy?
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom,” Jesus says (Matthew 5.3). It’s a Christianized rags-to-riches, trading-places promise that calls us to willingly discard every penny of self-righteousness that we have in our spirit. It also blows most of our religious paradigms right out of the water.
Personally, the call for poverty of spirit reveals an uncomfortable schizophrenia in me, an internal identity clash. I long for the kingdom, but detest the idea of being poor. Poverty is a condition I’ve worked hard to avoid my entire life. Spiritual poverty, in as much as I understand the phrase, appeals to me even less.
Everything in me strives to be spiritually wealthy, and at some level I believe I can be, or I should be. I naturally want to grow my spiritual portfolio, to accumulate personal holiness. I toil at the religious machinery of life, expecting a regular cost-of-living righteousness raise.
The schizophrenia is evidence that I hear Jesus’ words as a sales pitch. What’s the payoff? Does the upside outweigh the downside? Just how poor is “poor?” I embrace Jesus’ call as a means to my eternal comfort, but I find myself pushing back at the call when it places me below the spiritual poverty line.
Jesus’ words mark a line in the sand, and force me toward decision. To know the Kingdom, I must embrace an identity of lacking. To know what it means to be fully loved and empowered by God, I must stop trying to be God. I must yearn for a permanent spiritual bankruptcy.
Are you still comfortable not being God? I must admit I am not. Not that I have a God-complex, but it is easy for me to yearn to be God.
Too easy.
The gods of our own hands
It is natural for us to make gods of things. Whether they are things we admire, things we don’t understand or things we crave. We make gods of powerful things, attractive things and things that improve our standard of living. In short, we are idolaters.
That may sound like an archaic, pagan insult, but it’s not. Simply put, idolatry is mischaracterization. In other words, any divine attribute that is placed on something or someone else is idolatry. It is one of the most basic of human tendencies, and our history is riddled with it.
Idolatry has a couple of odd qualities about it. The first is that, quite frankly, idolatry is stupid. Isaiah the prophet talks at length about the nonsensical process of creating an idol. We go out, cut down a tree and chop most of it up for firewood. But we give a chunk of firewood to a craftsman, who carves it up, sands it down and sets it on a platform. We then bow down to it, give it our devotion and call on it to save us in times of distress.
Another oddity is that we create gods that have our own tendencies. Our gods are capricious. Our gods get jealous. Our gods aren’t quite in control of everything, so we need multiple gods to cover all our bases. Our gods have a dark, unpredictable side, so we make other gods to hold them in check. Our gods look a lot like us, only supercharged.
Today’s gods
Idolatry still exists in modern times, though we may think we’re above it. The Bible identifies greed as idolatry (Eph. 5.5). We worship the god of our appetite (Phil. 3.18). We place our satisfaction in material things, when only God can truly satisfy us. We build our identity on status and achievement rather than being a loved child of God. We place our assurance on our financial standing rather than trust in God’s care for us. We worship the forces and elements of the universe, rather than the One who knows every star by name (Isa. 40.26). I recall Carl Sagan’s iconic quote, “The cosmos is all that ever was, and all that ever will be.” The creation deified.
Our addictive processes that plague so much of our society have idolatrous characteristics. People living with substance addictions find security and identity in the substance itself. Those with behavioral addictions will sacrifice almost anything to fulfill their “worship” requirements.
Idolatry even finds its way into how we practice our religions today. We work hard to create programs in our churches to honor God, but we end up worshiping the program instead. We esteem the Bible as God’s word, and devote much attention and energy to understand it. Yet our worship points more to our knowledge of it than our obedience to it, or our transformation by it. The devotion of our church buildings is often greater than the devotion for any unkempt, smelly homeless people that might walk into them.
Control
It is uncomfortable to talk of such things, is it not? You may feel inclined to dismiss what I’ve said, or to judge it as overzealous ranting. Perhaps you believe I should get out more; take a load off. Lighten up.
Or maybe you feel like taking a shower.
Whatever your reaction, I’d ask you to consider one thing:
Can you make it your ambition,
your goal and daily pursuit
to be poor in spirit?
Before you answer that question, consider that the issue with idolatry is identity, not obedience. It is an issue of who we understand God to be, and who we understand ourselves to be. God is God, and we are not. Our nature makes this hard to accept, so we substitute a different kind of god in his place.
Idolatry creates a god that we can both worship and manipulate, so that worship of this god is actually coercion. When a virgin maiden is sacrificed to the volcano god, his wrath is satisfied and he is now compelled to respond and bring the fertile harvest, or withhold the oncoming hurricane, or … (insert desired response here).
As in the worship of the volcano god, we envision a Christian god who is compelled to respond to our manipulations. Our worship of this god often includes dutifully fulfilling our religious obligations. In turn, we expect God to solve a problem or ease life’s issues. We create a religion that allows us to be in control, even though we pretend not to be. We create not only a false image of God, but false images of ourselves as well.
To be poor in spirit, however, is to see ourselves as we really are: We aren’t God, and only he can be God. When we are poor in spirit, our response to God is submission instead of control, trust rather than rebellion and connection rather than independence. Declaring spiritual bankruptcy removes all opportunity for pride to take root. It does away with comparisons and competition. It eliminates self-measurement based on how tidy our spirituality appears. It allows us to see ourselves as valuable and loved apart from our own accomplishments, failures or successes. Our spirituality comes completely from God, not from the worship of any idol we’ve constructed.
Being poor in spirit creates a place where we don’t have to be afraid.
Less is more.
questions.4.consideration
- If you had to describe your perfect god, what would it be like?
- If our gods look so much like us, why do you think we create them in the first place?
- Do you think that the feelings of inadequacy and failure that we often feel might stem from the expectation that we should be like God? Explain.
-
Being poor in spirit is easier in some parts of our lives and harder in others. Can you identify an area of your life in which you find it easier to be spiritually poor? How about one that’s harder?
-
Does it make sense to you that the Bible would call “greed” idolatry (Ephesians 5.5)? Why or why not?
-
I think it’s safe to say that most of us feel it would be easier to follow God if he were in a form that we could see and touch, and know that he’s present and real. How much of our tendency toward idolatry might be due this desire?
-
In what ways (if any) does your perception of God look more like you than God?
Coming next: Submission and each other.
