We feel like we need something beyond God and his promises. We don’t want to get rid of God per se, but we aren’t willing to accept him on his own terms. So instead of completely walking away from God, we just reshape him into a form that guarantees he gives us something in the way that we want it.

When the Israelites made a golden calf to worship soon after leaving Egypt, they did so because Moses had not returned from the mountain and his meeting with God as soon as they expected (Exodus 32:1). And so, with real enemies around and real needs to be met, they felt like they needed something more than the promises of an invisible God to protect them.

They weren’t the only ones.

Like the Israelites, our counterfeit gods always grow out of distrust and fear. We feel like we need something beyond God and his promises. We don’t want to get rid of God per se, but we aren’t willing to accept him on his own terms. So instead of completely walking away from God, we just reshape him into a form that guarantees he gives us something in the way that we want it.

For example:

• We feel like we’ve got to have money to be happy, so we invent a God that will guarantee that for us. This is called the “prosperity gospel”—and it leads to books like Your Best Life Now.
• Others like to see themselves as good people and better than others, so they invent a God who is angrier at the kinds of sins other people struggle with more than he is the kinds of sin they struggle with. This is a lot of conservative, cultural Christianity.
• Maybe you really need family stability to be happy, so you invent a God who guarantees that, and then you get angry at him if he lets something go wrong.
• We want to have unchallenged sexual freedom—where we can do anything and everything we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody—so we invent a permissive God who is OK with it. This is the God of liberalism, popular among many professing Christians today.

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