Faith & Writing
Faith · A Warning

When the Devout Miss God

The fiercest opposition to God came from the most religious

Read the Bible straight through and one pattern surfaces so often it is impossible to unsee: the most determined opposition to God almost never comes from pagans, foreign kings, or atheists. It comes from inside the household of faith, from the most scripturally literate, theologically careful, religiously serious people of the day. It is a sobering thing, because those are exactly the people most of us are trying to be. The warning of this page is not aimed at "them." It is aimed at us.

The pattern in the Old Testament

It starts early and never lets up. Eli's sons ran the tabernacle and corrupted it from the inside, so that men "abhorred the offering of the LORD" (1 Samuel 2:17). The priests of Malachi's day "departed out of the way" and "caused many to stumble at the law" (Malachi 2:8). The prophets of Jeremiah and Ezekiel cried "Peace, peace; when there is no peace," healing the people's wound "slightly" (Jeremiah 6:14; Ezekiel 13:10). And through Isaiah, God says something staggering about the worship He Himself had commanded: "I am full of the burnt offerings… your hands are full of blood… bring no more vain oblations" (Isaiah 1:11-15). The machinery of religion was running at full speed, and God could not stand the sound of it, because the hearts had gone elsewhere.

And then they killed the Messiah

When God came in person, the pattern reached its terrible climax. The people who recognized Jesus the fastest were the ones with the least religious standing, tax collectors, prostitutes, Samaritans, lepers, a Roman centurion. The people who fought Him hardest, and finally engineered His death, were the Pharisees and Sadducees, the seminary-trained, Bible-memorizing, tithe-paying elite. Matthew 23 is one long lament over them: "ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in" (Matthew 23:13); they tithed their garden herbs and "omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith" (Matthew 23:23). Jesus put His finger on the engine of it: "Search the scriptures… and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me" (John 5:39-40). They had the whole Book and missed the One it was about.

A lion, when God sent a lamb

Part of why they missed Him is that they were sure they already knew what God would do. They were watching for a warrior king, a lion to break Rome, and so they could not see the humble carpenter standing in front of them, the Lamb led to the slaughter (Isaiah 53), the King who came lowly, riding on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). He will indeed return as "the Lion of the tribe of Juda" (Revelation 5:5), but He came first as "a Lamb as it had been slain" (Revelation 5:6). Their confidence about God became a wall against God. That is the deepest danger of all: not unbelief, but a settled certainty about how the Almighty must act, so airtight that it will not let Him be Himself.

Why religion is such a good hiding place

How does this keep happening to the devout? Because religion can quietly become a fortress for the self, a way to feel safe, superior, and in control, while keeping the living God at arm's length. "Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth" (1 Corinthians 8:1), and there is no pride so hard to detect as the pride that wears a robe and quotes chapter and verse. The Pharisee in the temple "prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are," while the tax collector who would not lift his eyes "went down to his house justified rather than the other" (Luke 18:11-14). The same machinery that should draw a heart near to God can become the very thing it hides behind.

Where this lands

This is not a reason to despise the religious; it is a reason to fear for ourselves, and to walk softly. The people best equipped to see God are, for that very reason, the people most able to use their equipment to avoid Him. So hold your knowledge with trembling, not swagger: "let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall" (1 Corinthians 10:12). Keep the humility of the tax collector and the publican, who knew they had nothing to stand on. And test even your certainties against the living Word, lest, like the experts of old, you should hold the whole Bible in your hands and miss the One it was always pointing to.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

Related: The Soul That Sinneth, Loving the Church You Disagree With, Did the Church Get It Wrong?, and "Judge Not"?. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Offered as a warning the author points first at himself.