Belief In Cows

I’m going to copy a section from a book tiled “Blue Like Jazz” by Donald Miller, but before I do that I need to explain why. Last week I taught a session on doubt at our church here in Vancouver. Now I know that most Sunday morning sermons are on faith and things that build our faith and this is a good thing. But in reality, we all are faced with the negative, guilt-ridden part of our personal belief system that still deals with the doubts lurking in the back stages of our lives. I know that most churches have buried their corporate unbelief in the back parking lot and live in “denial” about the subject. While we might pretend that doubt is none existent in our churches and personal lives the bible is full of people who doubted and still received God’s blessing and the fulfillment of His promises. We’ve all read about the man who answered Jesus with, “Yes I believe, but help my unbelief”. How about Jesus dying words to His Father on the cross when in His humanity He asks his Father, “Why have you forsaken me”? Often our doubts are expressed in questions towards God, such as Jesus had. In our human form we will always have these doubts. Thank God that He bestows His GRACE upon us because of His work on the cross and not our strains of weak efforts to believe all things perfectly.

I’ve changed the text from first person to the group in order to protect the guilty.

Donald Miller writes (from Blue Like Jazz): I think our desire to believe in a God other than Jesus had mostly to do with our boredom. We want something new. We want something fresh to think about, to believe, to twiddle around in our minds. I understand the plight of the children of Israel, to be honest. Moses goes off to talk with God, he doesn’t come back for a while, and so the people demand a god they can see and touch, a god they can worship with the absolute certainty it exist. So they build a golden cow (odd choice, but to each his own). Moses comes back from talking with God and finds the children of Israel worshiping a false god, so he goes postal. Imagine us as the children of Israel when Moses comes down from off of the mountain.

“What are you doing”, Moses ask.

“Worshipping a golden cow.”

“Why? Why would you reject the one true God?”

“Because I don’t get to see Him or talk to Him. I am not even certain that He exist.”

“Are you on crack? Weren’t you around when God parted the Red Sea? Weren’t you there when God fed us from the ground, made water from a rock, led us with a cloud?” Moses screams.

“Calm down, Moses. Listen, man, you always go up to God and come back with a sunburn, and you have God hover around your tent in a cloud, and you have God turn your staff into a snake, and we get nothing. Nothing! It’s not like we have this personal communication going with God, you know Moses. We are just sheep out here in the desert, and, honestly, we were better off as slaves to the Egyptians. That is where your God brought us. We need a god too. We need a god to worship. We need a god to touch and feel and interact with in a very personal way. So we made a cow. You can also wear it as a necklace.”

Moses response to us, “before I put all of you to death and send you home to the one true God, I want you to understand something. I want you to understand that God has never been nor ever will be invented. He is not a product of any sort of imagination. He does not obey trends. And God led us out of Egypt because you people cried out to Him. He was answering your prayers because He is a God of compassion. He could have left you to Satan. Don’t complain about the way God answers your prayers. You are still living on an earth that is run by the devil. God has promised us a new land and we will get there. Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled.”

Moses made it clear that God was not here to worship us, or to mold Himself into something that will help us fulfill our level of comfort. We want spirituality to be closer and more real. I think I understand why people wear crystals and perform chants and gaze at the stars. People are lonely. Not in a lover or friend way, but in a universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny little people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars. We might want a god who has a call in radio show, but God is not like that he wants us to seek him and obey Him. Maybe we can realize that we desire false gods because Jesus will not jump through our hoops and our faith is not about image and ego nor is it practicing spirituality. God desires us to be faithful to our faith in Him as our God.