XP3: Playing the God Card - Devotional

Playing the God Card [Devotional]

by Sarah Anderson

I don’t know about you, but there are times when I read through the Gospels and think, “If I had lived then, if I had been around and seen what Jesus was able to do, hear Him teach and watch Him perform miracles, I would have had so much faith. There would be no question that I would follow Him.” Reading through the Gospels 2,000 years after the fact, I start to feel kind of confident—and I start to think that the people who were around Jesus and didn’t recognize Him for who He was were ignorant, or maybe just plain dumb. Because it seems so obvious to me that Jesus was exactly who He said He was—the Savior, the Messiah, the Redeemer.

It is easy to have this perspective when we know the full story and how it unfolds. We know what Jesus was getting at—we know there was a cross in His future, and we know there was a resurrection coming three days later. But not everyone understood.

The Pharisees are maybe the most ganged-up-on group of people in all of Scripture. They make a good victim and they are easy to dislike. They were, in a word, clueless. We tend to think of them as stupid. But that wasn’t it at all. They had years of training and schooling and education that got them to where they were. They had the entire Bible memorized and thought about the law day and night. They were seen by everyone else as having a connection with God that normal people didn’t have. So their problem wasn’t their lack of intelligence. Their problem was their perception of reality.

See, the Pharisees wanted a Savior, a Messiah and a Redeemer as badly as anyone else did at the time. They wanted God to show up and do something so amazing and so incredible that the entire world would be changed because of it.  But what the Gospels show us about this group of people is that they wanted something so badly from a God they believed they followed wholeheartedly—a God who had become an image they had perfected in their own mind—that they missed the reality of the God who actually did show up. What they wanted was a God who fit in their box, and what they got was a God who would have nothing to do with their box.

The Pharisees played the God card. And they did it by playing God—by trying to be Him. They may not have called it that, but their actions proved otherwise. They tried to outsmart Him, outmaneuver Him, and they did it not by doing something, but by neglecting something. By forgetting to go after Him, to search for Him, to discover who He really was, they instead decided to make Him out to be who they wanted Him to be. And it turned out that the people who should have had the best and most accurate perception of God were the ones who misunderstood Him more than anyone else.

In the same way, you and I get in trouble when we play the God card—which can actually look a lot like playing God by pretending to be like Him. And what makes this such a dangerous place to be is that very rarely do we realize we are doing it. Our intentions aren’t bad. Our motives aren’t wrong. Our hope is simply misplaced. We have just slipped from the bigger plans of God to our own more self-absorbed plans and hoped that God was on board with us.

So what do we do to keep from trying to “be” God—from playing the God card and actually playing God? Let’s take a cue from Scripture. In the book of Psalms, King David, who wrote most of the book, asks one question over and over: “Who is God?” (Psalm 18:31 NIV), “Who is he, this King of Glory?” (Psalm 24:10 NIV), and maybe even the most humbling, “Who is like you, O Lord?” (Psalm 35:10 NIV).

I don’t know about you, but these aren’t questions I find myself asking very often. But I think that if we got in the habit of asking, “Who is God? Who is like Him?,” we would be more likely to answer, “We are not Him. We are not like Him. He alone has the power to do as He pleases. And any time I speak on His behalf, I better be careful that I speak as He would speak. That I love as He would love. That I would be still before Him and know He is God and I am not.” Because I think if we start asking the right questions, our lives just might start reflecting the right answers. And the answer is to let God be God and quit trying to take His place.

Psalm 100:3 says: Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture (NIV). Maybe this is a scary thing to admit. We aren’t God, and we have to be careful that we aren't making Him out to be something He's not when we attach His name and His claim to something. But instead of being something that incites fear in you, what if you found some comfort in that statement instead? Know that the Lord is God. You aren’t. And that is okay. In fact, that may be the best thing in the world you could say—a confession and understanding that could do more for your relationship with God than anything else. So quit playing the God card. Quit playing God. Instead, start here: Be still. Know He is God and you are not. And that is just as it should be.

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