Category: distorted view of God | Page 4

God is Like An Elephant

How would you describe an elephant? To me, elephants are gray, and generally calm. They are plodding, steadfast, and they nurture their young. They generally live in herds, and they can work together to accomplish important tasks for the livelihood of their ecosystem. I really like the symbol of the elephant. Studying them is also fascinating. However, none of this is why I say that God is like an elephant.

When I say that God is like an elephant, I am making an analogy to his greatness. Elephants are immense creatures. Of course, God is even greater, but the analogy I wish to make is nonetheless better made with the example of an elephant.

Imagine that you are an artist at a zoo, having never before seen an elephant. You are faced with a wall when you come to where the elephant should be. A sign indicates that, in order to see the elephant, you must look through a peephole in the wall. You notice that there are small peepholes located high and low along the wall, scattered out at different distances. Many other artists are at peepholes, looking through to see the elephant. You choose a vacant peephole and look through, longing to see what an elephant looks like, so that you may paint your masterpiece.

Looking through the peephole, you see a large gray cylinder with a crackled surface. As you continue to gaze, you see it sway slightly. Excited, you rush back to your studio and begin to recreate what you have seen. Soon, you have a beautiful painting of a gray cylinder, with a uniquely designed crackle pattern. You just know that you have perfectly captured the image of an elephant and you can already see the trophy you will win for your life-like painting.

Wrapping the painting carefully, you proudly take it to the contest venue. You place it carefully on the easel for the judges to see, then you turn and stroll through the facility, looking at the other paintings of an elephant.

With growing confusion, you realize that the other artists really have no talent at all. You grow arrogant, thinking to yourself, I am definitely winning this contest! The other paintings look nothing like the elephant you saw through that peephole.

One painting has the same texture, the gray and the crackled surface, but the shape is just off. The artist drew it long and slender, almost snakelike, suspended in midair, with a split end, and it appears to be spewing a cloud of dust. You chuckle, shaking your head. “That is definitely NOT an elephant!” you mumble.

A few steps away, you see another painting, this one just the gray, crackled texture, with a few stems of grass in front of it and some artistic shading. You think to yourself that maybe the artist was attempting an up close version of the elephant.

As the judges assemble to announce the winner, there is silence. Slowly, each judge carries one of the paintings and begins to hang them together, side by side on the wall, some above and some below. As more and more paintings are hung in this fashion, a new view unfolds, and the crowd gasps collectively.

Someone goes to the microphone and gestures to all of the paintings, hung together. “This, my friends, is an elephant.”

Suddenly you feel foolish, realizing that you only painted the back leg of an elephant. You were not the sole winner after all! The judges hand out trophies to each of the artists and you realize that it took all of you together to capture the immense portrait of the elephant because he was simply too big to be seen through one small hole.

In the same manner, many Christian groups have claimed to have the only saving knowledge of who God is. They look down on other groups and make derisive comments about how they have just simply “missed the boat”. They refer to others outside of their group collectively as “the world” or “sinners,” claiming to have some superior connection with God and His character.

I will never forget, upon leaving the cult I grew up in, being told by a preacher, “What are you in search of? You already have all the truth there is to know.” I responded that if I ever think I know everything there is to know about God, I will have just proved my ignorance.

God cannot be put in a box. Only by walking through that wall and getting to the other side of eternity will we ever be able to see Him fully in all His Glory and truly know everything that He is. It is arrogant and foolish to think that any one group of human beings has all the truth they need to know about God, especially while they are still on this side of the wall, looking through a peephole.

I Corinthians 13:12 was speaking about this idea when it stated “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.” (New Living Translation)

It is by sharing what we have seen, and getting together with others who see God a bit differently, that we get a glimpse of His attributes.

You can read a book about elephants. Without a picture to see him, you still cannot draw an accurate image. In the same way, the Bible tells us much about God, but it is through knowing Him, and fellowship with other believers who have a slightly different view of Him, that we truly are enriched to know more about Him.

Never again will I be drawn into the cult-like thinking that only the people in this little box have a handle on God. God is too big and too grand to ever fit inside human delineation. We show that we are growing by acknowledging what we do not know. I will never know everything about God until I pass to the other side of life and see Him face to face. Neither will you.

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Coping with the Cults – Part #3 – Spiritual Abuse

Spiritual abuse is one of those labels that can be overused, much like the word cult. In the times following Jesus’ crucifixion and the birth of the Christian church, Judaism and the Roman occupiers of Jerusalem labeled the Christian movement a cult. However, it is also something that needs to be defined and exposed, because it happens in our neighborhoods, around the block, and in town.

Spiritual abuse is defined as when a spiritual leader, such as a pastor, uses his/her position of authority to control other individuals in a way that requires absolute obedience and results in the personal gain of power, prestige or financial gain.

Part 1 – Separation | Part 2 – Judgmentalism

In the book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, that author(s) talks about the recovery process necessary to put back one’s faith in God and spiritual leadership after leaving a spiritually abusive situation. Like a man or woman abused by a spouse, or a child physically abused by a parent, in time they begin to believe that this is the norm. Every other man, or women, or parent, must be like this.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, but the wounds of the heart run deeper than the skin, and the wounds of the spirit run deeper yet. God warned of false teachers that would come in, ‘not sparing the flock.’ We think that just meant teaching false doctrines, but the warnings came on the heels of Pharisees using their authority to abuse people.

I know that after I am gone, [false teachers like] ferocious wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; – Acts 20:29, AMP

Spiritual abuse is malicious but covert. I am even willing to admit that some abusers are ignorant of the fact that they are perpetrating abuse. Rather, they are doing it ignorantly, fully convinced that it is the right thing to do.

This is always affected by people who lead a more cult-style religious system than a grace-based, Faith focused, Christ-centered church. Rather than pointing you towards Christ and getting out of the way, these people believe that they are the only pathway to Christ, that their legislated rules and behavior models are the only acceptable way, and that you need their shepherd’s crook around your neck to stay on the straight path.

For instance, in the Oneness Pentecostal sect of Pentecostalism I was in, the leaders often believe in what is called delegated authority or spiritual fatherhood. They have the right to whip your hiney when you get out of line (figuratively). They have the right to set up curfews, and dating policies, and restrict cell phone and internet usage of congregants. They have the right to decide if you attend college, or if you seek professional help for marital or mental health issues.

As a matter of fact, in the bylaws of my old church, they taught that the pastor was the final authority on matters of infidelity – in other words, he decided if and when a divorce could take place. He even chose if and when a marriage could take place, what you could wear, sing and eat at said weddings.

Furthermore, the pastor defined our dress and clothing, what was/was not acceptable, our hairstyles, if we could have facial hair, when women had to wear nylons, and what style of underwear our daughters could wear at certain ages.

Spiritual abuse can take on many other forms, such as requiring work from church members while using guilt to enforce obedience. It can also be exhibited in the grossest forms, where spiritual leaders demand sexual relations with congregants and use their position and authority to demand silence and to instill fear.

What we know for sure, is that this is not the Kingdom or Church of Christ!

Jesus did not come to create a church in which men (and women) would lord over God’s people (1 Peter 5:3) and create rules and standards above and beyond what He already gave us. (Mark 7:7-8)

Rather, understanding and knowing that Christ came to set up a church in which humanity was inspirited to live for Him due to his love and mercy!

The adulteress of John 8 is a beautiful example of Christ combating legalism and spiritual abuse. This allows us to fulfill Scripture when we say, show me another human who is without sin, and thus is capable of passing judgment, and I’ll show you a liar. (1 John 1:8)

However, when they persisted in questioning Him, He straightened up and said, “He who is without [any] sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” ⁸Then He stooped down again and started writing on the ground. ⁹They listened [to His reply], and they began to go out one by one, starting with the oldest ones, until He was left alone, with the woman [standing there before Him] in the center of the court. ¹⁰Straightening up, Jesus said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” ¹¹She answered, “No one, Lord!” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you either. Go. From now on sin no more.”] John 8:7-11, AMP

The Results of Spiritual Abuse

The most common result of spiritual abuse is causing a soul to turn away from God. This bruised and scarred spirit will take on the attitude that if that is what God is, they want nothing to do with that God.

Another result is reverse judgmentalism. This person will cast the behavior of a very bad minister upon the face of all other ministers. This is equally devastating as the judgmentalism of cult leaders and followers because it denies the one abused the right they have to recover and to see faith again.

Fear and depression is a major sign and a result of spiritual abuse. One woman recently said that she used to wake up with panic attacks in fear of God cursing her for all the wrongs she had done. When she stopped feeling that panic, she would panic again, now believing that God had given her up and she was eternally damned. Why? She was wearing jewelry, or pants, or cutting her hair.

Marital and family conflict is a very major part of the spiritual abuse and marks the organization as a cult when it demands loved ones to refuse to be part of each other lives based on the premise of believing in the organization’s set of guidelines and ideas.

Self-hate and criticism was my drug. You begin to question your own intelligence, and sanity! Some will say, ‘How could I have been so stupid!‘ or ‘Why would I be so deceived to let someone do that to me?‘ You can even start to believe it was your fault, that the responsibility was yours.

Worst of all, is that the lies of a spiritually abusive leader will be so ingrained, that even after exiting from the system, you’ll constantly wonder, ‘What if they were right, and I’m lost now?’ It can cling to you like the spray of the skunk. No matter what you try, and how many showers you take, that scent is still in your nose, always reminding you of the past.

Recovery from Spiritual Abuse

It will sound strange coming from a faith-based ministry like Divide The Word, but there are some very real and consequential steps to take in your recovery. These are by no means a complete list, and if it comes down to depression, anxiety, and marital struggles, you need to seek professional help.

Also, read the book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse! You can find it here very inexpensively, and if you desperately need help buying the book, send me a private message on my contact page and I’ll help.

Surround yourself with both secular and more loving faith-based people.
Often times, secular people can provide understanding without looking at you or your situation through the eyes of religious standards or requirements, and thus, be a very healing antidote to the poison in your heart.
Read, read, read!
Read books like Toxic Faith, Spiritual Abuse, visit websites like spiritualabuse.org and find local and even internet communities that are for the purpose of recovering from spiritual abuse. I will say this boldly, and clearly: Anyone who scoffs at the idea that spiritual abuse is real, and tells you this is nonsense, is themselves an abuser. You must find support and community. The single most healing aspect of my own recovery was first understanding, as sad as it made me feel, that I was not alone. There were hundreds and thousands out there with the same story. This made me feel like I had a family again, and there you’ll find comfort, understanding, and friendship.
Seek professional psychological help
There are too many pastors and teachers that believe they have your every need, and it is simply just not true. There are some traumas that ingrain themselves into our psyche that requires digging out. Certainly, God is powerful enough and capable, but the real bottleneck is our own mind and heart. Having a professional help us open ourselves up again, to learn to let go of some of the pain and accept the nectar of God’s love, is sometimes the only way back.

Conclusion

Spiritual abuse, like Satan, is alive and real. It’s around the corner probably and in most towns. Denying this keeps it alive. Staying quiet about it keeps it alive. Believing that it is isolated, keeps it alive.

The most important thing we can all do about spiritual abuse is to expose it where it lays. Drag it out into the street for all to see. Put the Scarlet Letter S on it like a badge of shame so that we can keep as many souls from being scarred by it as possible.

We cannot stamp it out, or root it out completely, for God himself said that these men would come in among us. Yet, we can mitigate the results, and when we find someone who was abused, spiritually, we can make our calling and election sure by displaying the real love of Christ to them, in acceptance, in refusing to judge, and most importantly, being there and caring for them in their time of need.

For certainly, someone extracted from spiritual abuse is a spiritual widow or fatherless child until the true Father, and husband, is accepted back into the fragile heart of a human.

Pure and unblemished religion [as it is expressed in outward acts] in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit and look after the fatherless and the widows in their distress, and to keep oneself uncontaminated by the [secular] world. – James 1:27

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When you’re an “Apostate” in their eyes

When you’re an “apostate” they don’t know how to handle you because they may get infected with your “evil.” I am the only person in my extended family to leave the sect I grew up in. Every cousin, aunt, uncle, sibling, parent, nephew, niece, and grandparent is still in the sect.

When I left I was shunned by all of my friends and the entire congregation. I was suicidal because I thought my family was also going to shun me and break off contact with me. But, by the grace of God, they showed mercy. There is contact (via text mostly because I live far away from them, in a different country), but it is quite strained because of all the lies they are told to believe about me – and other ‘apostates’ and ‘worldlies.’ I have chosen the way of Satan. I have chosen the easy life. I am lazy and don’t want to serve the Lord. Of course, none of these three statements are true, but it is what they believe whole-heartedly.

The bizarre thing is that they know I am still a Christian and I love God with all my heart, and my whole reason for being is to show love to others and live a life that is honoring to Him. But they still couldn’t attend my recent wedding because they might have been infected by my evil. They must have cognitive dissonance, surely, when they read the scriptures about all believers being one body, Christ’s body. How can the arm say to the leg “I can’t be near you?” It’s just ridiculous. Oh, and they claim to be the one group of Christians with the truth, and the light, and the presence of God. But not attending your daughter’s wedding isn’t love, is it? Where love is absent, God is also absent.

My Dad even went as far as to tell me that God would not be present at my wedding. And I married a Godly man who shines with the love of God. Strange how my Dad thinks he can state where the Creator of the universe is and isn’t. Like he has a monopoly on the Creator. What a deep level of lies and deception!

I am so very grateful that my family doesn’t shun me, like the families of many ex-cultists do. But there is still a grieving. Grief at the loss of proper relationship. Because to them I am tarnished. I can’t be myself around them. They don’t respect my way of life. They don’t ask me much about my job, my hobbies, my volunteering, my husband, as all of these topics are somewhat taboo. Conversations are shallow and mostly about the weather or the grandchildren. It gets tiring, trying to think of safe topics. Sometimes I don’t control or filter what I say and I just speak freely. But it often isn’t worth it because it causes further alienation.

I guess I live in an alien world. Which is the real world. They live in an insular, unreal, world. Inside the sect they refer to “the world” as everyone outside their insular group of chosen ones. My Mom actually told me that I am the most selfish person that she has ever met because I didn’t obey my parents and I left the fold. She told me that she cannot celebrate me because I have caused her so much pain. I asked her what was more important to her – that I continue to go along with a system that I know is a lie and be totally depressed and fake, or for me to be free to pursue a relationship with God in whatever way He leads and be happy and alive and genuine. She couldn’t answer. This system of religion has her tied in knots.

May God set them free from the grips of the spirit of religion – which is a dark, controlling, insidious, damaging and fake Holy Spirit that tries to block relationship and intimacy with our Creator.

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It’s about relationship

I’ve struggled for years with Bible reading. After I was thrown out of a church in 2000, I started having more and more difficulty, but particularly after I moved to a new city and a new church. So for 16-17 years, I’ve struggled. I knew the push for reading the Bible in a year was part of the problem, but recently I’ve realized there is a whole lot more to it.

So much of what I was taught in the church I was thrown out of was oriented to a judgmental, punishing god. This was a god who wouldn’t answer prayers (at least not mine), who would stand by and watch as someone tried everything and was still thrown out, a god who would give up on people or turn his back on people. This was a god who would send people to hell for wearing pjs or brightly colored tights or a wedding band. Sermons that were respected were about god cutting people off, about people never being able to get back to god if they ‘fell away’, of warnings about people going to hell… I was told that they didn’t even know if I could be saved, and then was warned at the interim church I ended up in that I should never talk about what had happened or that I’d been kicked out, which added more fear to what I was already dealing with, and with no outlet but only shame and secrecy.

When I moved to a new state and a new church, there were many more ‘good’ sermons about how people were going to hell in addition to what I’d already heard. People quoted scripture at me to justify themselves and excuse their behavior as well as to blame me for whatever was happening. It became harder and harder under all the condemnation to see God in any other way.

I could see that the god my former churches taught about wasn’t a realistic picture of God, but I couldn’t reconcile what I read in the scriptures (as much as they’d been twisted) with what I thought should be a loving, faithful, forgiving, merciful God. So I avoided the Bible. I didn’t need another daily reminder of a malicious god.

In all this time, all these years, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d heard that God valued us or that he loved me personally. Not as a platitude, but as a real, heartfelt statement. I didn’t realize how much I’d been taught and how much I believed that Jesus died the death he did because he had to die the most gruesome death possible to take the punishment that I deserved. I didn’t realize the guilt or even the illogic of that — there are plenty of types of death that are gruesome and involve torture. Crucifixion was terrible, but men have thought of other gruesome modes of death, too. It’s not about my sin. It’s not about how awful I am, but about how much God wants a relationship with all of us — not so much that he would die, but so much that he came as a human, grew as a human, lived as a human, and died as a human, experiencing everything that we do in order to relate to us, even including death… to restore relationship. The one who relates best, after all, is the one who’s walked in our shoes. And so Jesus did.

Sin doesn’t separate us from God because he can’t be around sin… it separates us from God because we are too ashamed, too guilty, too whatever to be with HIM. God knew Adam and Eve sinned, but he still came for his walk with them in the garden. It was they who hid, not God. God never stopped trying to connect to us. Everything I was taught even as a child was so backward.

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Does God crush you like a rose to make perfume?

Someone wrote to me recently about songs that ask God to “crush me,” “wreck me,” and “consume me,” saying,

If God can abuse his bride, yet tell her that it is for her good, of course a husband can do that to his. And both blame her for not trusting.

This reminded me of the popular teaching that just as the sweetest perfume comes out of crushed roses, God wants to crush us like a rose so He can make perfume like that. (<– Several links there.)

As if somehow our lives would become more pleasing to God if He crushed us.

And apparently, from the songs she was referencing, that’s a pretty popular notion.

Read the full untangling of this teaching at Here’s the Joy . . .

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