What God Wants Most of All for You (3)

Expectations either way
It doesn’t really matter what you regard as God, whether the God Who reveals Himself in Scripture or the god you conjure with the best exertions of your mind. It doesn’t matter. You still believe in God (or god, if you will).

I should qualify that. It matters which “God” you believe if there are consequences to not believing. We’ll come to that in a bit.

But no matter which God we believe and serve, we must face up to the fact that he/she/it makes expectations of us. The God of the Bible certainly has expectations, and we’ll have opportunity to consider those in due course. Indeed, it is precisely because of the expectations He makes that many people find the God of Scripture a deity not to their liking.

But what about the god of your mind – whatever you consider to be most ultimate, enduring, and desirable? Does this god hold out expectations for you? You can count on it. You simply cannot escape the fact that your god, who- or whatever it may be, expects certain things of you, insists that you conform your way of life to those expectations, and threatens you with disagreeable consequences should you refuse to comply.

Let’s say, for example, that your god is material comfort. What matters most to you, what you long to possess, what you give yourself to, think about, work for, and seek to acquire – the stuff of your hopes and dreams – is material comfort, enough of the things and experiences of this life and world to satisfy your longing for fulfillment. Even though it is an entirely impersonal and uncaring deity, the god of material comfort holds out expectations for you.

Let’s look at just one of these.

The god of material comfort expects you to acquire things. If you are saying you will only be “happy” when you possess material comfort sufficient to satisfy your longings, then the god of material things insists that you acquire and possess them. You may have to work for those comforts, or you may be able to get friends or government or charitable agencies to provide them. But in order to know and enjoy the material comfort for which you long, you must acquire material things. The god of material comforts is not satisfied merely to be desired, dreamt of, or enjoyed only in prospect. If material comfort is the god we worship and serve, then we must acquire him. Failure to do so leaves a person longing, unfulfilled, disquieted, covetous, and perhaps even angry.

Unhappy, that is.

Shape shifting gods
Like other deities of the mind, the god of material comfort is a shape-shifter. And as he shape-shifts, so his expectations change. One day he looks like this, the next day, something else. One day we’re sure we’d be content, fulfilled, and happy with a new car. The next day, the new car acquired and possessed, the god of material comfort begins to look like something else. A boat, perhaps. Or a vacation to Aruba.

One can’t drive around in his car all the time, after all.

Suppose your god is not material comfort, but the very opposite – complete freedom-from-things. The story is the same. First, you must acquire freedom from things, which, apart from something like self-immolation, is difficult to achieve.  So instead of possessing completely freedom-from-things you learn to be content with something less, something like, fewer-things-than-most-people. And so the shape-shifting begis.

Then, once you have reduced your standard of living sufficient to deprive yourself of all but the necessities of life, the god-of-freedom-from-things, having become the god of fewer-things-than-most-people, will shape shift into something else: such as solitude, or silence, or fasting – the god of beat-up-on-my-material-self. After all, real adherents to the shape-shifting and always elusive god-of-freedom-from-things will continue to pursue liberty from people, noise, and food – at least, for a season.

They become monks or hermits. Or hypocrites.

The gods we conjure with our minds just won’t hold still. We think we know them, and we understand the expectations they make of us, which we dutifully pursue. Then, the deity of our mind acquired and possessed, he squirms, squiggles, transmogrifies, and shape-shifts into something else – with new expectations, thus making the former expectations no longer valid.

This can be frustrating, hope-defeating, and discouraging. We may even despair of ever knowing, for very long, anyway, the happiness we believe our chosen deity holds out to us.

This can lead to a life of perpetual grumpiness and angry indifference: “Who gives a rip?”

Which becomes a deity in its own right, with its own expectations, and so forth.

The god-of-good-enough-for-me
Most of us aren’t die-hard materialists or anti-materialists. We have determined a place in life which we have agreed will “do fine.” That place involves some material possessions and experiences, and some learning to be content without everything we can imagine or might want.

Our chosen god is therefore something like “contentment” or “good-enough-for-me.” We work, dream, spend, acquire, indulge, deny, enjoy, avoid, and everything else we do with a view to having a good-enough-for-me life. The most ultimate, beautiful, and desirable thing imaginable goes by the name of good-enough-for-me.

But even this deity has expectations. Just consider the words that comprise the essence of this deity of the mind: good: I am expected to acquire some reliable and preferably unchanging sense of what that entails; enough: At some point I must bridle or deny such affections as discontent, covetousness, greed, jealousy, and the like, and learn to inhabit a place of sufficiency and perpetual peace as the happiness I seek; for: Everything must have some utility unto my good-enoughness, or else it has no validity at all – whatever is not “for” me is necessarily “against” me and thus to be assiduously avoided, denied, and negated; me: I must convince myself, and sustain the belief, that satisfying me, however much or little that requires, is the ultimate value in life. Others bearing the title of “me” may disagree, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Doubtless there is good bit of room for shape-shifting here as well.

The point is simply this: Whatever god you choose to worship, whatever you consider ultimate and most to be desired, that deity of the mind will place expectations on you, not all of which you will find agreeable. Then, at just the moment you think you’ve fulfilled those expectations, your deity will change both its form and its expectations, thus mitigating, postponing, or redefining the terms of your happiness.

And leading you into a kind of desert of perpetual discontent and uncertainty.

So one need not become automatically dismissive of the God of the Bible simply because he understands that this God makes expectations of us. All gods make expectations.

Does it make sense to reject the God of the Bible without considering what he expects of us, and what He wants most of all for us?

What does God expect of you? What does He want most of all for you? Ask a few of your friends their thoughts about these questions.

T. M. Moore
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