A God Better Than You Imagined
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 14-75
The shock of the real God is almost always the same: He is gentler than expected and more holy than wanted.
The book that underlies this post series makes an observation worth sitting with: “When people first begin to see the real God, the shock is almost always the same: He is gentler than I expected and more holy than I wanted.”
I want to tell you about the God most people have never met.
Not the one they rejected. Not the one they argue against at dinner parties or cite in their deconversion videos or blame for their childhood trauma or use as a punchline. I am not interested in defending that God, because that God is not real. I have read enough primary sources to know the difference between a caricature and the thing it is supposed to represent, and I have spent enough years working through the New Testament to know that what most people rejected looks almost nothing like what is actually on the page.
I have no degree. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, and somewhere north of 1,300 audiobooks consumed in earbuds on job sites across this country. I came to theology the same way I came to everything else: start with the primary sources, test what you find, follow the argument wherever it goes, and do not let anyone tell you what to think before you have done your own reading. A carpenter tests whether a joint holds weight before trusting it. I applied the same logic to claims about God.
I first encountered that observation in research that eventually became the backbone of my second book, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real. It is the kind of sentence that does not announce itself as significant and then refuses to leave. Gentler than expected. Holier than wanted. Both at once. Not the tame grandfather who winks at evil and calls everything fine. Not the cosmic critic who stands over your life with a ledger and a red pen. Something stranger and better than either, and something that most of the people who think they have rejected God have never actually encountered.
C.S. Lewis said of Aslan that he is not safe, but he is good. It is the most economical description of the Christian God I have ever read. Not safe, because holiness is not safe, and goodness that takes evil seriously is not the same thing as comfort. But good, in the bone-deep sense, in the sense that his movement toward you is not conditional on your performance, not dependent on your having sorted yourself out first, not waiting for you to deserve it.
That is the God I want to introduce you to. And I want to do it the way I know how: by going to the primary sources.
What the Gospels Actually Show
If you want to understand what the New Testament presents as the character of God, do not start with systematic theology. Start with Luke 15, which is three consecutive stories that Jesus tells in response to the same provocation. The Pharisees and scribes are grumbling because he is eating with sinners. Tax collectors and notorious people are drawing close to hear him. The religious establishment is watching this with the expression of people who have eaten something unpleasant.
Jesus does not defend himself. He tells three stories.
The first is about a shepherd who has a hundred sheep and loses one. He leaves the ninety-nine in the open country and goes looking for the one. When he finds it he puts it on his shoulders, carries it home, and throws a party. Not because the one sheep is more valuable than the ninety-nine. Because it was lost and now it is found, and that is sufficient reason to celebrate.
The second is about a woman who has ten silver coins and loses one. She lights a lamp, sweeps the whole house, searches carefully until she finds it. Then she calls her neighbors and throws a party.
The third is the one everyone knows, the prodigal son, and it is worth reading more carefully than most people do because the details are doing a lot of work.
The son takes his inheritance early, which in the ancient world was roughly equivalent to telling his father he wished him dead, and leaves for a distant country where he wastes everything. He ends up feeding pigs, which for a Jewish audience in the first century was as low as the story could place him. He comes to himself, which is Luke’s economical way of describing the moment of clarity that arrives at rock bottom, and decides to go home and ask to be made a servant. He has rehearsed the speech. He knows he is not worthy to be called a son.
Here is what Jesus does with this moment.
The father sees the son while he is still a long way off. This detail matters. The father is watching. He has been watching. He spots his son on the road while there is still a significant distance between them, and he runs. In the ancient Near Eastern world, a patriarch running was an undignified act. Robes had to be hiked up. Legs were exposed. Running was for servants. A man of standing did not run. He waited to be approached.
The father runs. He reaches the son before the speech can be delivered, before the prepared apology can be presented, before the boy has had a chance to ask for servant status. He falls on his neck and kisses him. He interrupts the rehearsed words with a robe and a ring and sandals for his feet, which are the symbols of sonship not servanthood, and he throws a party before the son has done a single thing to earn restoration.
This is not an allegory about moral improvement. This is not a story about what happens when you get your act together. This is a portrait of a God who moves first, who goes looking, who covers the distance before you have earned the right to ask him to, who interrupts your rehearsed apology with a party.
The son came home prepared to negotiate for servant status. He received sonship instead.
That is the pattern. It runs through the Gospels like a thread.
The Doctor Who Came for the Sick
Matthew 9 contains one of the sharpest statements Jesus makes about his own mission. He is eating at Matthew’s house, and Matthew has invited his friends, which means the dinner table is full of tax collectors and people the religious establishment has written off. The Pharisees ask his disciples why their teacher eats with such people.
Jesus hears the question and answers it directly. The healthy do not need a doctor. I did not come for the righteous. I came for sinners.
This statement is so familiar from centuries of repetition that its strangeness has worn off. But sit with it for a moment. He is not saying that the sinners deserve his company. He is not saying they have earned it. He is saying that their need is the reason. The doctor does not require the patient to be healthy before he will see them. The patient’s sickness is precisely the reason the doctor is there.
The religious system of his day worked differently. Cleanness was the prerequisite for proximity to God. You sorted yourself out and then you approached. The unclean were kept at a distance until they had undergone the appropriate rituals. The tax collector, who worked for the occupying power and was therefore a social and religious traitor, was not the kind of person you ate with unless you were willing to be contaminated by the association.
Jesus eats with him anyway. And then he says: I came for the sick.
The implications of this are enormous and mostly unexplored in popular Christianity. It means the entry requirement is not righteousness. It is need. The person who knows they are broken is closer to the door than the person who has convinced themselves they are fine. The person who has failed is more qualified for the physician’s attention than the person who has not yet realized they are ill.
This is not the God most people rejected. Most people rejected a God who requires performance before proximity. Who keeps the broken at a distance until they have cleaned themselves up. Who is essentially a very demanding employer who might extend some grace if your record is good enough and you ask politely.
That God is not in the Gospels.
The Woman at the Well and the Logic of Grace
John 4 is one of the most carefully constructed encounters in the New Testament and it rewards close reading.
Jesus is traveling through Samaria, which is already unusual because respectable Jewish men did not travel through Samaria if they could avoid it. He stops at a well around noon, which matters because noon is when you go to a well if you do not want to be seen. The women who go at dawn and dusk do so together, in the cool of the day, as part of the social fabric of the village. A woman going at noon is going alone. There is a reason for that.
A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Jesus asks her for a drink. This is the first surprise: he is speaking to her at all. She points this out herself. Jews do not speak to Samaritans. Jewish men do not address women publicly. He is breaking two conventions with a single sentence.
The conversation that follows is one of the most remarkable in the Gospels. He tells her things about her own life, five husbands and a current relationship that is not a marriage. She does not deny any of it. He does not use this information as a weapon. He uses it as a door.
By the end of the conversation she has left her water jar at the well, which is the detail that always strikes me, and run back to the village to tell people about the man who told her everything she had ever done. She is not hiding anymore. The person who came to the well at noon to avoid people is now the one calling the whole town to come and see.
What changed? Nothing about her history changed. Nothing about her situation changed. What changed is that she encountered someone who knew the full account and moved toward her anyway. Who did not use her brokenness as a reason to keep his distance. Who offered her something before she had done anything to deserve it.
She left her water jar. That is how you write a conversion.
The God Skeptics Rarely Reject
Here is the line from my research that should stop every Christian apologist cold: this is the God skeptics rarely reject, because this God is rarely presented.
I have spent years in conversations with people who do not believe, and in those years I have noticed a pattern. The God they describe when they explain why they left, or why they never arrived, is almost never the God of Luke 15. It is a God of performance requirements and conditional love and moral accounting and tribal favoritism and cosmic indifference to suffering. It is a God who seems to be primarily interested in compliance and only secondarily interested in the person doing the complying.
Where did they get that God? Sometimes from bad theology. Sometimes from bad churches. Sometimes from people who claimed to represent a God of love while behaving in ways that made love look like a threat. Sometimes from the long tail of cultural Christianity that has retained the vocabulary of grace while operating entirely on the logic of performance.
I do not want to be glib about this. The pain behind those departures is real. The specific harm done by specific people in the name of God is real. I am not asking anyone to dismiss their experience. I am asking them to check the primary sources.
Because when you go to the primary sources, you find the father running down the road. You find the shepherd carrying the sheep on his shoulders. You find the physician at the table with the tax collectors. You find a God who seems to be constitutionally incapable of waiting for people to qualify before moving toward them.
That God, when presented honestly, produces a different reaction than the one most apologists are prepared for. People do not usually argue against him. They say they have never met him.
I have no degree. But I have read the book. And I want to tell you what is in it.
Why Both Things Are True Simultaneously
Scholar Nancy Pearcey makes an observation that deserves its own sermon, and I am going to give it one.
Christianity is the only worldview that fully accounts for both the dignity and the brokenness of humanity. Not one or the other. Both together, held simultaneously, without collapsing either side.
Think about what the competing accounts do with these two realities.
Secular humanism is built on human dignity. Every person has inherent worth, inherent rights, inherent value. This is a serious and important claim and it has produced serious and important results in the history of Western civilization. But secular humanism has an accounting problem. It cannot explain why humans are so consistently, predictably, structurally broken. Why every utopian project staffed entirely by humans who believe in human dignity has eventually produced a bureaucracy of cruelty. Why the gap between what we know we should do and what we actually do is not a gap that education or prosperity or therapy has ever managed to close. Secular humanism affirms dignity and then has to look away from the evidence.
Pure determinism goes the other direction. Everything you do is the product of forces you did not choose: genetics, environment, neurological wiring, social conditioning. On this account, the brokenness is fully explained, and the explanation is thorough and in many ways compelling. But it destroys dignity in the process. If you are entirely the product of forces you did not choose, you are not a person. You are a process. You cannot be held responsible for anything, praised for anything, loved as a self rather than as a mechanism. Determinism accounts for the brokenness and loses the person.
Therapeutic culture, which is the water most Westerners swim in without noticing it, tries to hold both by affirming that everyone is basically good and the brokenness is a wound that can be healed with sufficient care. This is in many ways the kindest of the secular accounts and it produces genuinely kind people. But it cannot explain why the wound keeps reopening. Why the healed person keeps doing the thing they were healed from. Why the pattern persists across generations, cultures, economic circumstances, and therapeutic interventions. Therapeutic culture is permanently surprised by human nature.
Moralistic religion, which is the water most churchgoers swim in without noticing it, knows that the brokenness is real and has a system for addressing it. Do better. Try harder. Follow the rules. Perform the rituals. Accumulate merit. The system is internally consistent. It is also exhausting and it does not know what to do with shame, because shame is not a performance problem. Shame is the conviction that you are the problem, not just your behavior, and no system of moral improvement has ever successfully addressed that because moral improvement is precisely what shame makes impossible.
Christianity says both things and means both things and holds them together without resolving the tension in either direction.
You are made in the image of God. This is not a metaphor or a therapeutic affirmation. It is a metaphysical claim about what you are. Every human being you have ever met carries the image of the God who made the world. That is the source of your dignity and it cannot be removed by your behavior or your history or what has been done to you. It is structural. It is prior to everything else.
And you are broken, in a way that goes all the way down, in a way that you cannot fix by wanting to fix it, in a way that has persisted across every culture and every century and every system designed to address it. The physician is not here because you are basically fine and need some encouragement. The physician is here because you are sick and you need a physician.
And the response to both is the same God. The one who runs down the road before you have delivered your apology. The one who tells you the full account of your life and moves toward you anyway. The one who does not require you to be healthy before he will sit with you at the table.
The physician does not withhold treatment until the patient deserves it. That would not be medicine. That would be cruelty dressed in a white coat.
Holier Than Wanted
I said at the beginning that the shock of the real God is that he is gentler than expected and holier than wanted. I have spent most of this piece on the gentler side because it is the side most people have not encountered and it is the side the primary sources spend the most time on.
But holier than wanted is real too and it would be dishonest not to sit with it.
Gentleness is not the same thing as permissiveness. The father who runs down the road and throws a party is not a father who has decided that the son’s choices did not matter or that the far country was fine or that there was nothing to come home from. The party is not a party because nothing went wrong. It is a party because the son was lost and is found, was dead and is alive. The lostness and the death are real. The return is real. Both things are true.
The same God who weeps at Lazarus’s tomb is the one who says that the eye that causes you to sin should be removed and that it is better to enter life maimed than to enter destruction whole. The same Jesus who blesses the poor in spirit and the meek and the merciful also says that whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung around their neck and be thrown into the sea. The gentleness and the holiness are not in tension. They are the same thing, because a God who is genuinely good must take evil seriously, and a God who takes evil seriously is not safe.
What most people mean when they say they want a God without judgment is that they want a God without holiness, and what they mean by that is that they want a God who will agree that their particular version of broken is acceptable. That God does not exist because that God would not be good. A physician who tells every patient they are healthy is not a kind physician. He is a dangerous one.
The real God is the one who looks at the full account of your life, the whole of it, nothing left out, and runs toward you anyway. Not because the account is fine. Because you are his, and that is sufficient reason.
That is harder to receive than either the grandfather who winks or the critic with the ledger. Both of those gods are, in their different ways, manageable. You can negotiate with them or dismiss them. The God who is simultaneously more holy than you wanted and gentler than you expected is not manageable. He is not safe. But he is good.
And he has been here the whole time.
The God You Have Not Met
I want to close with the thing that has stayed with me longest from years of working through these questions on job sites and in books and in arguments and in prayer.
Most of the people who left the church did not leave because they encountered the real God and found him wanting. They left because they were handed a version of God that was smaller, colder, more conditional, and more transactional than the one in the primary sources, and that version of God was not worth staying for. They are right that it was not worth staying for. They are wrong about what they rejected.
Most of the people who never arrived never arrived because no one introduced them to the one who runs down the road before the apology is finished. They were offered performance requirements and tribal membership and cultural Christianity and the god of political movements and the god of prosperity and the god of self-improvement. They declined all of those, reasonably, and concluded they had declined God.
They declined a sketch. They have not met the subject.
The subject weeps at Lazarus’s tomb. The subject tells the woman at the well the full account of her life and offers her living water before she has asked for it. The subject eats with the tax collectors before they have repaid a single person they cheated. The subject tells the thief dying beside him that today, not after improvement, not after proving it, today, you will be with me in paradise.
That is the God most skeptics have never rejected. Because that God is rarely presented.
He is gentler than expected. He is more holy than wanted. He is not safe, but he is good.
And if you have never met him, you have not yet rejected Christianity. You have rejected something else, something smaller and colder and considerably less interesting.
The primary sources are available. They are shorter than you think. I have no degree and I read them on job sites in between running wire and pulling pipe, and what I found there has not stopped being interesting since.
Go read them. Test the joints. See what holds weight.
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