Seven Things People Get Wrong About God
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 10-75
You might be rejecting a God that no serious Christian theologian has ever believed in either.
Here is the pattern I keep encountering. Someone says they cannot believe in God because of X. And when you ask them to describe the God they cannot believe in, the God they describe is one I also cannot believe in. Angry by default. Anti-pleasure. Anti-science. Obsessed with rules. Pulling strings from a distance, indifferent to suffering.
That god is not worth believing in. He never was.
The question is whether the God they have never actually examined is the same one they think they are rejecting. In most cases, He is not. So here are seven misconceptions, addressed directly.
God is anti-freedom. This is the image of God as cosmic killjoy, an authoritarian who restricts human potential for the sake of His own control. But Jesus said: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The confusion is about the definition of freedom. Modern culture defines it as the absence of constraint. But a fish that has liberated itself from water is not free. It is dying. The water was not a prison. God’s commands are not arbitrary restrictions. They are design specifications from a Creator who knows what His creation was made for and what will destroy it.
God is anti-pleasure. This misconception comes largely from the church, not from Scripture. The God of the Bible invented wine, food, sex, music, laughter, and beauty. Psalm 16:11 says in His presence is fullness of joy, at His right hand are pleasures forevermore. God is not anti-pleasure. He is anti-addiction, anti-destruction, anti-the-cheap-substitutes-that-leave-you-hollowed-out. There is a difference.
God is anti-science. This one evaporates under basic historical examination. The founders of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, were not atheists fleeing religion. They were believers who expected the universe to be rationally ordered because they believed in a rational Creator. John Lennox puts it plainly: science asks how. It cannot ask why. Those are different questions requiring different tools.
God is angry by default. Scripture says He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Psalm 103:8. Not “sometimes slow to anger.” Not “slow to anger when you behave.” Slow to anger, full stop, as a settled description of His character.
God is a hypocrite. This one is actually a complaint about Christians, not God. Which is fair. Christians are frequently hypocrites. But the standard by which you are calling them hypocrites, the sense that it is wrong to say one thing and do another, that integrity matters, that people should practice what they preach, that standard came from somewhere. It came from Jesus. You are using His ethics to criticize His followers. He agrees with you.
God only cares about rules. Jesus was asked directly what the most important commandment was. His answer was two things: love God, love your neighbor. Everything else is commentary. The heart is the center of God’s concern. Rules do not exist to replace relationship. They exist to protect it.
God wants to control you. Love does not control. Love invites. The God of Scripture gives human beings genuine freedom, including the freedom to walk away, because He is not after robots. He is after relationship. You cannot coerce love. He knows that better than anyone.
Every one of these objections is real. Every one of them is aimed at a god who does not exist.
The God who has never been put on trial is still waiting for the conversation to begin.