A few week ago, I edited and reposted old posts examining two statements sometimes used as rebuttals in theological discussions about God. The two statements are
* You’re making God the author of sin.
* You can’t put God in a box like that.
There’s one more post in the series and now I’ve redone it, too.
What is the third argument? I call it the green eggs and ham argument. It goes something like this: “I could not worship a God who would _____.” Another version of this same objection is, “The God I worship would not _____.” Either statement is completed with whatever it is the other person in the discussion has been saying God does. What this rebuttal does is suggest that what the other person has been saying about God is in error because a God who acts that way would be unworthy of worship.
First, let me emphasize that there are similar phrases to these that can be used legitimately. It is perfectly fine to say, “God, as revealed in scripture, would not _____,” as long as we have the clear teaching of scripture to back up our statement. There are indeed many things that God would not do. He won’t (and can’t) lie; he won’t fail to fulfill a promise; he won’t treat someone unjustly. God has disclosed these things to us and we can count on them. Banking on these “would nots” is trusting in God as he has revealed himself.
But there is a big problem with saying, “I could not worship a God who would….” Judging God—and isn’t that what this is?—is something his creatures have no right to do. No, as creatures, we are required to submit to what God does as perfectly just because he is the Judge of all the earth.
People arguing against the existence of God often use a form of the green eggs and ham argument. You’ve seen it: “If there were a God, he would never permit _______ to happen, and since ______ happens, there is no God; and if there is a God, and he permits _______ to happen, there’s no way I will worship him.” We might expect this sort of reasoning from unbelievers, but there are also people professing faith who reason this way. For instance, sometimes people argue for a form of inclusivism because “the God I worship would never condemn someone who has not heard the gospel.”
Here’s a paraphrase of the version of this argument that I saw most recently: “Well, yes, the text says that certain people gathered together to do whatever God’s plan decided beforehand would happen, but the God I worship would not decide beforehand that certain people would sin. So God’s plan had to involve only the events that occurred, and not the particular people who carried it out.”
Let’s ignore any other problems with this statement (like the problem, for instance, of determining that an event involving human action will occur without planning who it is who will perform that action) and just look at the phrase “the God I worship would not decide beforehand that certain people would sin.” How would someone know this? Is it that he has his own idea of what is right for God to do, his own essential requirements for God, if God is to be worthy of his worship? That’s what it sounds like to me. Of course, it is possible he means to say that the God he sees revealed in scripture, and thus the God he worships, would not decide beforehand that certain people would sin. But he didn’t say this, nor did he give any texts from scripture to support his statement that God would not do this. His statement, as it stands, suggests that the meaning he takes from the texts of scripture is defined, first of all, by his own ideas of the God he worships instead of the God he worships being defined by the texts of scripture.
The bottom line is that the green eggs and ham argument is a useless (and dangerous) one, for when it comes to resolving the question of what the true God is like, what sort of God someone can or cannot worship is irrelevant. Romans 1 tells us that people, generally considered, do not like to worship God as he is and as he has revealed himself. Instead, they prefer to worship a god they like better than the true God. If this is so, then we can’t trust our own judgments of what kind of God is worthy of our worship, can we? This makes our own notions of what sort of God we could or couldn’t worship worthless as evidence of what the true God is or does.