About two months after I became a Christian, I was reading the New Testament and I became so angry with what Jesus said that I threw the Bible across the room. I simply couldn’t believe that Jesus said the things he did. His words infuriated me.

What was happening? It was the conflict between me and God’s word. Was I going to mold God’s word to fit me or was I going to be molded by God’s word? Since this was the first time I read the Bible, the conflict was intense.  I was discovering Jesus and realizing we were very different.

That is why I am generally encouraged by people who struggle with Jesus as they are drawing near to him. I know that they are approaching him honestly. The people that don’t seem to struggle with Jesus are the people that almost always fall away. They aren’t taking him seriously. They think his values and theirs are one and the same.

But Jesus is Creator and we are creatures. We have to eventually come to a place where we let God be God. He is a person and is who He is. To make Him who we want Him to be is delusional. It is a worship of a false god. But that is the human predicament. We have replaced the Creator God for a god of our own imagination (Romans 1:18-19).

This is also not to say that we can’t misinterpret the Scriptures — this is why we need the present body of Christ and the historical understanding of the Church. But we don’t have the leisure of rejecting things about God just because we don’t like them. In Jesus day, the religious leaders didn’t like the mercy of God. In our day, there are cultures that are similar. They like holiness and obedience, not grace.

But our culture loves mercy and grace, but dislikes Truth. But with Jesus we get a man full of grace and truth (John 1:14). No wonder we can’t stand him.