Who is God? What's He or She like? What are His beliefs, what are His motives, what's His agenda? Who is He to you? Everything hinges on your response to this question.
For me, the answer is simple: my God is an imaginary deification of my idiotic and contradictory personal opinions.
Whatever I believe about immigration policies, my God does too. Whatever I believe about healthcare, my God does too. Whatever I believe about government welfare, my God does too. With a passion!
The best part about serving a God who's simply an amalgamation of all my prejudices, opinions, biases, and social agendas is that He never once contradicts or challenges me. He never once asks me to step outside my culture and worldview and question whether or not my truth is in line with His truth - because my truth IS His truth.
Therefore, anyone who disagrees with me, disagrees with God. That's serious!
You might ask how I reconcile my God with the God of the Bible. It's easy: I simply interpret every passage of Scripture through the lens of my own opinions. For instance, when I read in the Scriptures that God is love, I immediately interpret that to mean that He supports all the social policies that I support. I read the gospels looking for hidden social justice themes in between the lines of each text. When I read the Old Testament, I desperately hunt for narratives that line up with the narratives of oppression and victimhood that I myself subscribe to.
And guess what? When you look for these things in the Bible, you'll find them. When I come to the Scripture with my guard up, rejecting themes and teachings that contradict me and instead looking for elements that agree with my worldview in order to incorporate those into my imaginary depiction of who God might be, I end up with a God whom I believe to be exactly. Like. Me.
But what I believe isn't important. What's important is the most fundamental question you can answer: who do you want God to be? Who is God to you?
I sincerely hope and pray that God to you is the same as my God. Otherwise we're going to have a problem.
