Is God the King?

There is a debate among Christians today about the nature of God and what His role is toward humanity. And, as is often the case, the dividing line is faith. The imperative question: Is God the King?

If God is the King, then He has acted and will continue to act as a king acts. He is able. He is powerful. He is faithful. His is just, but is standards are demanding. He is merciful, but He will see his will done. He keeps his promises, and all that we know about him comes from him.

The God I worship spoke a universe into creation and banished darkness with a sentence. He formed man from dust, and completed the work with woman. He knows the number of the stars in sky, for He made each one, and He knows me by name. My God is awesome. He has prepared a future for me of many blessings. I know this because He promised all this in his word, and He promised his word would never pass away.

There is another God worshiped by Christians. He is not the King, though. I am not really sure that He is God. Because while the God I know can command the storm and raise the dead, the God they claim cannot even manage dictation. The scriptures, they say, though divinely inspired, were nevertheless dependent on men and corrupted by men. They were influenced by the social values and prejudices of the times. God was powerless to stop it.

Think about it: The God who saw Jonah heading away from his assigned task, and ordered a storm to stop the ship, a great fish to swallow the prophet: powerless. A God who ordered a strict Jewish prophet to marry a prostitute, yet unable to get those who record the scriptures to overcome their social values. A King who told his servants they had to face death over and over for his sake supposedly incapable of getting men to faithfully record his Word.

And it's not as though this is a trivial thing. The emphasis that God placed on it, reaffirmed through Christ, is clear: We do not live simply by bread, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. These were the scriptures that Moses commanded the people to discuss when they went in and out, when they got up and lay down, in all aspects of life. More than that - these are our life.
If we cannot trust the scriptures, each and every one, how do we know we can trust any of them? How can we know where the truth begins and the lies end? What do we base that decision on?

If we are the ones making that decision, then aren't we saying we have more faith in ourselves than in God? Seriously. If we have more faith in our ability to discern what is "true" in the Bible than we have in God's power to direct his prophets, what does that say about our faith in God? Is that an awesome God? Is that a God that can rescue anyone? Or is that more like the description of the idols in the Old Testament, the gods that can neither see nor here nor move.

As it was when the Hebrews entered the Promised Land, so it is with each new generation. We all have to decide which "God" we will serve. For more than a generation now, Christians have become very comfortable with the "friend" we have in Jesus. I think it's time to reassert our faith in Christ as King.