BY LAEL CAESARThe Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, in “the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever amassed,” has been analyzing America’s gods.¹ There are at least four major gods around, they say. The authoritarian god, feared by 31.4 percent of Americans, rules the biggest kingdom, while 25 percent believe in the benevolent god, 23 percent in the distant god, and 16 percent in the critical god. Easterners, our researchers say, most believe in god the critic, while Southerners think their deity is authoritarian. The Midwestern god looks out for you rather than judging you like his Southern counterpart. West Coast dwellers, on the other hand, aren’t sure he is around.
 
This gap between His real identity and our evaluations worries Jesus. It bothers Him that He will end up expelling people from His presence who thought themselves His followers. How horrible to have Jesus imply, in the end, that we were worshipping the wrong god: “Get out! I never knew you, lawless people!”² What then? Nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth? We must act now to be sure that He will know us then. But how can we avoid engaging today in what Jesus will tomorrow dismiss as lawlessness?
 
Paul’s thoughts to sophisticated Athenians two millennia ago may help. His words relate to our current concern because his audience’s effort to worship God also involved unhelpful ignorance.
 
Worshipping With Understanding
Introducing his subject, Paul offers our first insight: “What you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23).³ Paul’s Athenian audience worshipped a thing. Twice in the Greek of this one verse Paul speaks of “it” in the neuter gender. They worshipped this concept as but one of many philosophical ideas that comprised their Areopagite chatter. Including the God idea, they agreed, was a good value.
 
But days, gifts, monies, and worship songs dedicated to a God of our inclusion hardly prepare us for His stunning repudiation, “Get out. I never knew you, lawless people!” Though Jesus predicts that some will have an answer ready about service with and for Him, as treasurer, elder, or music director: “We ate and drank in Your presence,” they will say, “and you taught in our streets” (Luke 13:26).
 
“I tell you, I do not know where you are from,” He will insist; “DEPART FROM ME, ALL YOU EVILDOERS” (verse 27). Being nice to God will prove quite awkward in the end. For God is much more than an idea deserving respect, or a pauper in need of human charity. Rather, He is the one “who made the world and all things in it, . . . Lord of heaven and earth, . . . [not] served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:24, 25). Neither grudging gift, nor noble kindness, nor total sacrifice can make him rich. Every good thing comes by His origination. And He is consistent in such bounty (James 1:17), however much we, or those before us, or forces beyond us, do distort those gifts. No matter how ruinously we use the delectability of good food, the ecstasy of sex, or the sheer privilege of honest work, He is still the source of these, and all other good besides.
 
Moreover, Paul’s real and provident God is Lord and ruler. He is, because He originates and supplies all life’s blessings. God is personally real, prodigally bounteous, and master of all: these three crucial truths Paul shares with people unfamiliar with biblical origins, revelation as explanation for their individual existence; with minds not privileged with historic Exodus deliverance as context for their national identity; with keen intellects not privy to intelligent prophetic utterance as guidance for their history and articulation of their destiny. The best the Greeks could do for divine orientation was grope in indeterminacy.
 
By contrast with the Bible’s clear “Thus saith the Lord,” the Greeks’ famed prophetic voice at Delphi offered the most ambiguous messages. Whatever the similarities between Christian and pagan prophecy, the ambiguity of the latter is not one of them.⁴ God communicates clearly, and especially in His giving.
 
God’s Great Sacrifice
God’s giving is the very nature of His being, and for the sake of all our life. Once, in the beginning, He gave us everything. But a snake undid His giving. Through John’s record, He explains the regiving process: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life” (John 3:14, 15). According to that astonishing comparison, Jesus on the cross equates to a snake on a pole. In the wilderness incident to which He points Nicodemus (Num. 21:4-9), people survive the deathly bite of poisonous serpents by looking at a standard with a bronze serpent on it. Jesus, then, is like a bronze snake on a stick. Jesus as the snake is surely one of Scripture’s most bewildering analogies. For “snake” is Satan’s name from of old (Rev. 12:9), because the serpent is his earliest instrument of havoc (Gen. 3:1-15). Why should Jesus be equated with the snake, the source of sin, the father of death, and all distortions of truth (John 8:44)?
 
The answer is as straightforward as it is unfathomable: God made Jesus “who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Simply, and inexplicably told, Jesus did not merely take victims’ places. He incarnated their toxic venom. Believing the cross, we understand that when God’s wrath destroyed Jesus on the cross, He destroyed sin, for Jesus became the curse and by God’s destruction obliterated the curse, to give us the blessing (Gal. 3:13, 14).
 
For Lucifer, ambition involved the ultimate misconception: the creature as deity: “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa. 14:14). Our rescue from Lucifer’s madness involved the ultimate imponderable: deity as creature, blighted, damned, and standing the consequences of such identification. Jesus became evil incarnate, that righteousness might live in me, as, by faith, I live His life (Gal. 2:20).
 
Not things, but a person, not material possessions, but life itself, is the miracle of giving: The miracle of giving is God Himself. Americans, Canadians, and others attach special historical significance to their Thanksgiving feasts, but Thanksgiving is possible only because of the miracle of the cross. Grateful saints, oblivious sinners, all eat Christ’s body: “The cross of Calvary is stamped on every loaf.”⁵
 
And because only Christ’s sacrifice makes life possible, we understand that He Himself is giving’s miracle. Sure He gives birdsong and bees’ buzz, the glitter of fish and the sigh of seas, flower fragrance and the dance of trees. But indispensably, and most wonderfully, He gives Himself: The miracle of giving is God Himself. Without that gift life’s glitter is but froth. We are living dead. But because He gives Himself all life may be redeemed “from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21).
 
“Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!” (2 Cor. 9:15).
 
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“Losing My Religion? No, Says Baylor Religion Survey,” Sept. 11, 2006, www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=41678. See for all further references to this study.
Paraphrasing Matt. 7:23.
Except as otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
M. Eugene Boring, “Prophecy (Early Christian),” Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992). vol. 5, pp. 496, 497.
5 Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 660.
 
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Lael Caesar is a thrilled and grateful recipient of God’s gift, Jesus. He serves as an associate editor of Adventist Review. This article was published November 24, 2011.