More and more people are taking issue with those who pronounce God as sovereign and wise, and in short it is all due to lack of trust in authority--and this is largely due to humanity having poor examples of authority to follow. It is said that we humans make puny gods (an understatement in the least!), which is obvious given the powers that be in our respective governments. We have families and dynasties still in power and actively trying to take over the world, to put it in cartoon terms. This has led to a severe lack of trust in authority with people, let alone with God.
Things that have largely been considered conspiracy theories in the past (especially on topics such as ancient cultures being more technologically advanced than ourselves, alien races living among us, artificial intelligence growing in power, and suspicions regarding what's been happening in Antartica) now have evidence coming to light to back them up. There is a lot of suspicion surrounding the Vatican and what they are hiding (with 53 miles of hidden documents and information that the masses are not allowed access to, who knows!), and, as always, there is a lot of dirt being swept under the government's rug.
What does all of this have to do with humanity's issue with God's power? This is all just proof of why we have so little trust in authority. We see the game being played amongst ruling class of human beings bent on making our lives as peons and peasants (who are also human beings) a living hell in many cases. We see this out of humans, and we assume God to be the same way.
We don't have examples of true perfection in the human population; well...we had One walk the earth, but that was 2,000+ years ago, and since then true perfection has been hard to come by in a human. Even our best examples of people who are generally kind to others, have giving hearts, and make building a better world their life's work do fail us from time to time, and sometimes in the worst ways. Because of this, we don't honestly know what it looks like played out tangibly, and being very visual in nature, we crave being able to see what true perfection looks like. We have examples in Scripture, yes, but I wager that the main reason why we keep making all of these lists of dos and don'ts in the Christian faith and others is because we so desperately want to see true perfection acted out. We also want to see it physically here in the modern day, rather than sit and read about it (admit it, folks; we are incredibly lazy like that!).
Combine that with accounts that we read about in Scripture involving Adam and Eve being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, God punishing Israel various times, as well as a lot of perceived incoherencies within Scripture make it difficult for unbelievers to understand why believers follow God in the first place. They wonder to themselves, and at times we all wonder, why God, who is supposedly so loving and kind, would send people to Hell for things such as sin, when it seems like God exhibited some very human characteristics in Scripture.
To put it simply, I cannot give a full answer as to why God chooses to do one thing or another. This is because it is not my place to know. The most I can give you, the readers, is some insight as to why we think the way we do about what God does, and why we have trust issues. However, some insights can be given based on the fact that God is sovereign. God is sovereign in the sense that He is a parent who is undoubtedly and unceasingly patient and caring for His children, but has to correct us (and rescue us) from trouble a lot. He also cannot tolerate even the smallest amount of sin, which seems harsh to us, who are constantly mired in it. How are we to ever be accepted if He cannot tolerate sin, and yet we are stuck in the muck? Awesome note: it's never been about what we can or can't do to get out of the muck and cleaned up, as that is an impossibility for us; it's about what He has done for us so that we can finally get unstuck! The vast majority tends to ignore this rather large and obvious amount of evidence that He does indeed care about us.
The point of this article is this: the only reason why we humans have such a hard time accepting God as, well, God, is because of trust issues and a need to see what perfection looks like. God is perfect and absolutely holy, but because we are surrounded by imperfect people on a moment-by-moment basis, not to mention our own personal problems, it's hard to tell what perfection looks like in a tangible sense. There's just too much noise, too much snow on the screen as it were, and we can't get a crystal clear picture. The only solution: learn to look past the noise and realize that even though we don't see it completely, perfection and God do exist. Think beyond your current state in life, as well as what's going on in the physical world. Learn to see past the end of your nose, as it were! Then, learn the art of trusting again. Not in the government, mind you, but in God. Make yourself read Scripture so that you know what He is like, and read with an open mind, willing to see what He wants to show you about why He does what He does. It won't be an easy process. In fact, it will take work, but it's worth it in the end.
@jackieb1992
Good Post!
Thanks for sharing.