I find myself having a dangerous tendency in apologetics. It is something that I see in others as well. It is called the nicification of God (yes, I made up that term). What I mean is that we sometimes try to defend God beyond the limits of Scripture. Instead of clarifying what the Bible says about God, we try to make God into a nice guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that God is love. I believe God is good. I love God as my heavenly Father. But sometimes God does things that are not nice from my perspective. Flooding the land was not nice. Commanding the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Promised Land was not nice. There are plenty of examples of things in the Bible that don’t seem nice. There is a role for clarification (for example, God did not command genocide, he commanded that they clear the land), but we should not remake God in our image.
God is God and he is free to do things we are not comfortable with. We don’t have to like, but we do have to accept it. My goal is to catch myself as I am nicifying God. Let the biblical picture of God stand. We can worship God even if we do not understand (or like) everything he has done.
- Character of God
- Flood
- God
- Goodness of God
- Slaughter of the Canaanites
