Posture: What is yours toward God? Part II
Posture: What is yours toward God? Part 2 – Life Over God
Written by: Marshall Shannon
I read an interesting book earlier this month on how we relate to God in our personal lives. The book is entitled With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God. The author, Skye Jethani, sorted our relational postures toward God into five categories. Life from God, Life over God, Life for God, Life under God, and Life with God. Below is a summary of the second category, Life Over God. Perhaps my summaries over the next few days will help you think through how you relate to God in your everyday posture toward Him but to get the full impact I believe you will need to read and study the book.
Life Over God
Where Life Under God focuses on controlling God and His will by our actions while the Life Over God posture focuses on controlling God by managing a set of predictable and rational principles. It is a form of deism where God created the universe and set it into motion but He is largely uninvolved in our everyday life. This posture holds that our destinies are determined by our management of the natural laws God put into play at creation.
Where Life Under God sought control of the world through religion, “by manipulating God through ritual or morality, Life Over God posture dismisses the Life Under God posture as irrational superstition and “seeks control by discovering how the world works and then directly implementing the right principles”. It is an effort to cut God out of the picture in order to give us direct control over our lives by managing a set of laws and principles. It is a substitution problem. We replace the person of God with His principles and leave Him out of the equation altogether. We figure we can mine the principles out of God’s Word and apply them to our lives to gain control of our world without requiring Him to empower us. This is not what God intended.
In other words, if you have the repair manual why do you need the mechanic? It is the thought that we can discover and apply these principles and it doesn’t actually require a relationship with God. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a subtle lie to get us to abandon the Creator for His creation.
We are in desperate need of Him. Neither God nor His Word is to be belittled in such a way. Again, this is a human effort to maintain control of our lives and the world we live in and it has bled into our faith. “The Life Over God posture’s emphasis on working principles may be appealing because it is far more predictable and manageable than an actual relationship with God.” Relationships can be exhausting and uncontrollable but principles are “comprehensible and clinical”. As I said yesterday, you can’t control God, no matter what posture you take toward Him. If you place your trust and hope in God’s principles rather than in God you are in for a world of hurt. There is no substitute for God and a proper relationship with Him. Commit today to cultivating your relationship with Him. Then ask Him to empower you to walk in the Spirit and in obedience to His Will and Word.
Our motivation is key in to how we posture ourselves toward God. Tomorrow we will discuss Life From God. As I said yesterday, to gain the full impact from this discussion I suggest you read and study the book to see these thoughts more fully fleshed out.