By Ronnie McBrayer

A.W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” I can hardly disagree. Our perception of God shapes our character and actions like little else.

So it’s no wonder that some people are the way they are: loving, helpful, sacrificial, kind, and giving. They think of God this way. But on the other hand, some religious people are angry, suspicious, unforgiving, and murderous. These folks, in turn, think of God in these terms and it shows.

By way of example, I have a friend whose thinking about God is sadistic. God, for her, is an always lurking bogeyman who must be continually appeased. He is vicious and eager to rub out a groveling sinner (or an entire city) if it suits him.

Thus, she lives in fear of God and inflicts her angst on everyone around her. Recently, however, I connected the dots between her thinking about God and the relationship she had with her father, when in an unguarded moment she told a forbidding story.

She was a child, and her father came home drunk, as usual. In his stupor he pulled a revolver from his pocket and called his daughter over to his lap. He cuddled her in his arms and then placed the revolver against the back of her head.

“I could blow your brains out right now,” he whispered. Then he put the gun aside and held her close again, only to return to the gun and the threat again and again over the space of the evening. One moment he was loving, and the next he had a gun barrel pushed against her skull.

This type of parenting has caused my friend all types of emotional disturbances over her lifetime, not the least of which is her thinking about God. For her, and I understand why she feels this way, God is just like her drunken father.

The moral and spiritual authority for her life is an erratic, cold-hearted bastard whose words of love are nothing more than an invitation to terror. Her God calls out for his children, takes them into his arms, and then threatens them with violence.

Such a God is unworthy of worship, incapable of being trusted, and impossible to love. Thankfully, such a God doesn’t exist, for Jesus has shown us that God is good, and he’s good all the time.

Ronnie McBrayer is a syndicated columnist, blogger, pastor, and author of multiple books. Visit his website at www.ronniemcbrayer.net.