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Story Book God
April 27, 2006

To Those With Ears Who Want to Hear and Eyes That Want to See,

Is the God of your flock a fairy tale or STORY BOOK GOD? That is, no one has ever seen God work supernaturally either in church or in their personal lives. They’ve just heard or read about how awesome He is.

God repeatedly illustrated in Scripture the danger of His people relegating Him to the position of a story book god. In Genesis 6:3 He said, “My spirit shall not always strive with man.” The context here was God observing the behavior of man and deciding that He would limit man’s days to 120 years. And again in Judges 2:10, God records, “And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works He had done in Israel.” Here the grandchildren of the Israelites that were delivered out of Egypt “did evil in the sight of the LORD.” The Old Testament shows how that in just five generations of leadership, the children of Israel totally abandoned God for the world. Those stories are not there for us to say “Tisk, tisk!” regarding the Israelites. They are there to warn us about our generations of leadership. Where the shepherd leads, the sheep will surely follow.

The Moses generation of A/G Pentecostals were either humble Christians diligently seeking a supernatural God—and God fell on them as at the first Pentecost—or they were wretched sinners who knew their way was evil and it would drag them down to Hell. They would hear about this Pentecostal God down at the “holy rollers’” church and come and be gloriously delivered from a life of addictions or prostitution or downward spiraling service to self.

It was this generation that saw the miracle working power of God first hand. Out of gratitude to their Redeemer for salvation from all of Satan’s vices, they swung the pendulum as far away from the world as they could get it. Holiness and the soon return of Christ were consistent by words! They wanted to be delivered from this present world and its slavery to evil!

This generation begat the Joshua generation of our fellowship: children who heard of the great, personal transformations of their parents and were inspired to conquer territory for God in an organized way. They formed our denomination to spread the Pentecostal gospel in an effective way and without scriptural error (that tended to invade some Pentecostal circles); established great missionary efforts; started the fellowship’s first national bible college and liberal arts colleges (dedicated to the proposition that our A/G children could attend an institution of higher learning that endorsed their Pentecostal faith instead of undermining it).

The Joshua generation of A/G adherents begat the Judges generation of Pentecostals. This is the generation described in Judges 2:10 above. This verse doesn’t describe the heathens all around the children of Israel; it describes God’s chosen people! Having inherited the Promised Land, this generation altogether forgot Who had blessed them with their blessings. Of course, there were still miracles that occurred in the Judges generation. Scripture records the cycle of God’s people sinning, God judging them with other wicked nations (those nations who later became the Muslim countries we know today), the Israelites would cry out and God would send a judge to deliver them. Sporadic miracles occurred because a few believed that God was still Jehovah. But the sad comment that ties the book of Judges together is, “And every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Reference these things now appearing in A/G homes with regularity: tattoos; body piercings; making holes in one’s body and stretching them to be larger and larger; unnatural hair things; alcohol; R-rated movies with either nudity or violence or both; “mature” video games with gratuitous violence and nudity; television espousing homosexuality and other sexual sins, disrespect for parents and others in authority; regular viewing of unholy or wicked lifestyles on TV such as MTV, VH-1 and shows treating witchcraft or being a medium as something cute or cool.

The fourth generation, the Samuel generation, got even farther away from God. For a long time, the entire length of Samuel’s judgeship, the people of Israel depended on one man to be the liaison between them and God. In fact, scripture frequently records how the Israelites (including Saul the first king) referred to God as Samuel’s God. And scripture records how they were afraid of Samuel and afraid of God. This speaks to a generation that knows God is real but doesn’t know Him personally. Reference our denomination’s trust in a rather small bunch of senior leaders even when they are headed the way of the world. Regular Bible reading would tell us that, under those circumstances, this trust is misplaced. In fact, the Bible even goes so far as to say that any man that trusts in man is cursed. The Bible also says that there is only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

The fifth generation, the Kings generation, was the generation just before God let the heathens invade Israel and drag them off to captivity. They were the generation that said, “Nay, but we will have a king so that we may be like all the other nations.” They were so enamored with the world, and the sons of their very last judge had become so corrupt, that they abandoned their trust in God and decided to put their trust in a man. So, God, though long-suffering of this generation, finally abandoned them. Once they were in their final captivity, they didn’t hear from God again for four hundred years! No miracles, no still small voice, only the stories passed from father to son for generations. God had finally become a total story book God. Current events: our fellowship was actually considering replacing our last national bible college with a university religion department. “Nay,” said the children of Israel, “but we will have a king so that we may be like all the other nations.” Nay, but we will have no bible college so that we may be cool like all the other denominations, like the secular humanists.

Both literally and allegorically, the A/G is somewhere on the continuum between the Samuel and the Kings generation. This is dangerous ground folks. Do you not see the parallels? We now put our trust in very few men at the top of our fellowship. Instead of seeking Almighty God in our own prayer closet, we go to big conferences to hear from our leaders. We see very few miracles in our churches anymore (how many of you can say that either you or your children have seen—not heard or read—but seen God heal a blind person, lengthen a shortened leg, cause a cancerous tumor to disappear, or miraculously provide?), and we have all sorts of programs in place to accomplish what God used to accomplish by His power alone. Reference the difference between Samuels’ miracles and the taxes and servanthood imposed on the people of Israel once they had a king (just as Samuel prophesied would happen).

Read about God’s command to the Israelites never to buy horses from Egypt. Egypt was always God’s picture of the world and its allure in the Old Testament. Then read how King Solomon disobeyed and did that very thing! We’re headed back to Egypt dear ones! It used to be that the world could tell that we were Christians just by how we looked. Now we look just like them: the same tattoos, the same wild hairdos. We talk vulgar, drink alcohol and go to dances like they do. And we even sport the same extra marital sexual sins and divorce rate. Brethren and sisters—this ought not to be!

Are you afraid to have God work in your life miraculously? You can’t have a miracle unless you need a miracle. Are you willing to go there? With your church? With your family? With your job? With your finances? Do you want to know the Creator in His power? Or do you want the comfort of being a slave to an earthly king? Do you want your children to know God in power or for Him to be a STORY BOOK GOD? “Choose you this day whom ye will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Joshua 24:15

My parents took us children to the “First Church of the Frigidaire” when we were young. They left because the church was dead and preaching heresies. We joined the Assemblies of God because it was alive with the supernatural God Himself in every service! I don’t want to go back to a dead denomination. I don’t want my children to have a story book god. Do you?

For Our Children’s Sake,

Brother Mike

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