God is….a teacher.

Many people who identify as atheists were once Christians. Or at least they once used to attend church.

And yet, sadly, I’ve found time and time again that they don’t have even the slightest understanding of the character or intentions of the God they say they don’t believe in.

Why might that be?

Children often tend to view God as just a bigger and more distant version of their own parents. This means that the way they perceive their parents will often have a powerful influence on how they see God.

If their parents are patient, loving and willing to forgive misdeeds, they may find it easier to understand God as a being of love and mercy. On the other hand if their parents are distant, angry for no apparent reason, or even abusive, a child may find it difficult if not impossible to conceive of God in the way the Bible describes him.

I’m quite certain that in most cases a person who identifies as an atheist and pours out streams of invective about how cruel, unjust or hateful they think God is (despite claiming not to believe in him) is really just using God as a proxy for their own parents, especially their father.

At least one Christian psychologist has suggested that there is a link between outspoken atheism and a poor or non-existent relationship with one’s (human) father. That may or may not be true, and it certainly wouldn’t apply to everyone who lacks belief in God, but nevertheless I’ve yet to encounter an atheist who understands what the Bible actually teaches about him.

How do we get it wrong?

By far the most common misunderstanding I’ve seen is the perhaps naive view of God as a parent who lays down a strict set of rules for us to live by, and who then punishes those who fail or refuse to keep them and rewards those who do.

According to this view, being a Christian is about keeping the rules and consistently being a good person. By the same token, when a Christian fails to keep the rules or behaves no better than everyone else, this is proof that Christianity is a sham. Christians are hypocrites, claiming to be better than everyone else while covering up both their own misdeeds and those of the church as an institution.

This view is often held by atheists who have either never been to church or stopped going in their teenage years, and therefore never had the opportunity to hear any more of the gospel than the childish notions they may have picked up in Sunday school.

Now to be fair, it’s not exclusive to atheists. There are some Christians who seem to fall into this trap as well, thinking that that we are better than everyone else, thinking that our keeping of God’s rules has resulted in us enjoying a comfortable and prosperous life.

Neither of those things are true. The difference between Christians and the rest of the world is not that we’re better. We’re still sinners as much as they are. But we are forgiven sinners. That’s the difference.

We could argue that our beliefs and values are better, or that the object of our faith (i.e. God) is better than anything other people might believe in, but that doesn’t make any of us instrinsically better per se.

The foundation of everything

We are sinners who need to repent and be forgiven.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve quite possibly seen me write that a hundred times. I make no apology for that. It’s the central point and foundation of the entire gospel.

And it is the one thing people who reject Christianity never seem able to grasp. I’ve yet to encounter one who does.

Much of the Bible text was never intended to be a set of rules which could result in either reward or punishment. It was intended to teach us that one simple truth: we are sinners who need to repent and be forgiven.

That’s why the Old Testament’s narratives show us the lives of men and women from thousands of years ago. We see their faith, their failures, their obedience and their struggles. We see how none of them were able to live up to God’s standards. Even titans like David or Abraham or Moses made mistakes – in some cases really bad ones.

God as a teacher

God isn’t the kind of teacher who writes down a list of facts on the board and then hands out a test to see how successfully you memorised them, then gives you a pass or fail.

He’s the kind of teacher who shows you the best way, who lets you fail, so that you can learn from your mistakes and try again.

It isn’t a matter of whether or not you’ll fail. You will fail. The question is whether you are humble and receptive enough to allow your failure to teach you the true right answer to God’s test: you are a sinner who needs to repent and be forgiven.

Sadly, many people can’t or won’t learn that. Sometimes they abandon the faith entirely. Sometimes they remain in the church, convinced that they have to portray themselves as champions of the faith who never put a foot wrong while condemning those who do.

How does Jesus fit in?

And this is why the New Testament’s message doesn’t portray Jesus’ sacrifice as a sort of “get out of jail free card”. You failed God’s test? Never mind, just believe in this guy and you get a free pass anyway!

Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t some legal trick to expunge your guilt from the record. It didn’t remove some barrier that was in God’s way and preventing him from forgiving you.

It was an object lesson in love, namely that the only person who ever lived who did pass God’s test willingly suffered an agonising death he did not deserve, to teach you.

To teach you what? To repent. Because nothing else could inspire you or me to recognise our own failures and come to God in complete humility and repentance. Mere words on a page, mere cognitive understanding of sin, couldn’t do that. It’s only the knowledge of what Jesus was prepared to do for you – out of love – that makes it possible for you to learn that right answer.

Many of the people Jesus met and taught didn’t understand this. They thought he had come as a military leader to deliver them from the occupation of the Romans. They thought that as biological Jews they were guaranteed a place in his Kingdom. They didn’t realise that they first needed to repent of the sins he had really come to deliver them from.

And us?

The same is true today. Many people still don’t understand that. They think that God should be fixing all of the problems in this world and rescuing us from the consequences of our actions. When he doesn’t do that, they hate him. Why? Because they can’t or won’t accept that they’re sinners who need to repent and be forgiven.

It’s not a difficult message to understand. But it’s an incredibly difficult message to accept.

God’s role as a teacher isn’t so much to impart knowledge into our brains, although there are of course certain things we need to know and get right.

His role isn’t so much to teach us how or what, but rather why – why we need to accept this and embrace it and change our lives.

The “how” and “what” only need to get into your brain. The “why” needs to get into your heart. And that’s where the real battle lies. The source of all that is evil in the world is (if only metaphorically) the human heart. God’s teaching is designed to carry a flag right into the centre of the enemy citadel and plant it in the ground and claim your heart for himself.

The only question is: will you embrace it or reject it?