God Doesn’t Want You to be Good
We are living in a condition that requires illusions. The call to abandon illusions about the condition is the call to abandon a condition that requires illusions. -Karlton Marx
What is this condition? It’s a condition requiring us to pretend to be something other than who we are so that we can be worthy of love. We are all good at pretending. For example…
The politician makes promises that we all know cannot be fulfilled. She promises anyhow. What’s going on? She’s asking us to pretend to like the person she’s pretending to be.
The moralist preaches about the decadent culture we live in, aiming at particular people he feels are being immoral, all the while forgetting about his own shortcomings. What’s happening? He’s asking others to pretend to like the person he’s pretending to be.
The guy goes out with the girl on the first date and attempts to be funny. Her extra laughter is probably unwarranted. What’s occurring? He’s asking her to pretend to like the guy he’s pretending to be. And she can easily return the favor. By overreacting, she may be asking him to like the person she’s pretending to be. (BTW, this example was obviously not taken from the first date my wife and I had. In that case, I actually was hilarious.)
Oh, and one more example, for how is it possible that we wouldn’t bring all this image-management into our faith communities, so we show up to church to be good, moral, or worthy. We long for God to see our effort and respond by giving us… well, fill in the blank… peace, salvation, healing, a fix, etc… What’s happening? In essence, we’re asking God to pretend to like the person we’re pretending to be.
When I say God, I’m not speaking of a real God, I’m speaking of a pseudo-god, in this case, the one the religious system has conditioned us to believe in, follow, and worship. We are living in a condition that requires illusions. The illusion says that God needs us to be something other than who we are. It’s a kind of trap that winds up esteeming those that perform well (e.g., us obviously) and devalues those who don’t perform well (e.g., the other obviously). Our condition has taught us to call ourselves good as over against the other obviously bad person.
Meanwhile, the real God says, “I’ve always been with you. Everything you’ve ever needed has been yours.”
Grace wrecks the mechanism of pretending.
Grace wrecks the system of goodness and badness we’ve created.
God doesn’t want you to be good. (And I don’t think he wants you to be bad.) No, what I think He wants is to wreck our entire notion of goodness and badness. It’s a trap. It keeps us pretending. We must abandon the condition that requires illusions.
the artwork is an image from an artist who I really like on iStock who goes by the name of Grandfailure
