Mark Twain obviously had a beef with God. That was made plain in the recent PBS special I watched on the author.  But, as one of the commentators pointed out, Twain really seemed to want the Christian God to be real. He just couldn’t bring himself to put all his faith in a Deity so cruel. So I suspect that Twain’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God, but that he didn’t like God.

The writer had good reason for his bitterness, since two of his daughters and his wife preceded him in death. And a couple of those deaths occurred, in perhaps the cruelest of twists, at a time when the patient appeared to be recovering.

I’m also guessing that Twain spent too much time in the Old Testament rather than the New. After we finish the latter, we can see in Christ what God really is like and where He was heading with everything that occurred earlier. But many of us still aren’t able to comprehend the reasons for some of the things that happened in the Old Testament.

Our pastor’s recent perusal of the plagues in Egypt, for example, had us wondering why--if God hardened Pharaoh’s heart--He could blame Pharaoh for that hardness. And how could God decide before Esau and Jacob were even born which one He would bless and which one he wouldn’t?

I suspect our lack of understanding lies in the fact that we can’t see the whole time line of history spread out before us, but God can. He must have known in advance which of those twins would respond to him and which wouldn’t, just as He knew that Pharaoh would never change his mind. So God could use those people to carry out His plans without violating their freedom of choice.

Other problems with the exodus story are harder to explain. God killed the firstborns of all the Egyptians, those who believed Moses’ warnings as well as those who didn’t. Was that fair? And what about the wholesale slaughter of entire populations, including innocent infants, in the Canaanite cities that the Israelites would capture later? Granted, that sort of thing was common in so-called “holy wars,” but was it really holy?

When we start questioning the fairness of God, as Twain did, we need to ask ourselves a question that one of Job’s friends posed in a different Old Testament book. “Is mere man more just than God?” (Job 4:17 TLB) Our conception of fair play and doing the right thing, after all, comes from our Maker. And “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” compared with His (Isaiah 64:6 KJV). 

That must mean there are things we just can’t understand because we aren’t omnipotent as He is. Otherwise brilliant men such as Twain may find themselves led seriously astray when they begin doubting simply because the real God doesn’t conform to their idea of what He should be.  Do they really believe, after all, that they are brilliant enough to comprehend God? As He asked Job, “Do you—God’s critic—have the answers?” (Job 40:2 TLB) 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also apparently was a highly intelligent man, as well as a highly moral one. Unlike many other authors of his day, he refused to cheat on his wife--who was afflicted with tuberculosis--even though he had fallen in love with another woman. He also took up the cases of people he thought had been unjustly convicted, even when he didn’t like some of those people. 

We can guess that it may have been rationalism, the practice of treating reason as the ultimate authority, such as that portrayed in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories which caused his agnosticism. But his resultant hunger for a new religion would lead him into spiritualism, which requires a much higher level of gullibility than Christianity does! In fact, Doyle would even come to believe in fairies—due to the Cottingley photographs—and to insist that some of Houdini’s acts were supernatural, even though Houdini himself assured the author that they were just tricks.

I suspect that Doyle may have insisted on believing only what his eyes could see, not realizing that even the sharpest eyes can be fooled by sleights of hand—or sleights of photograph, as in the fairies incident. Houdini, in fact, was able to expose many mediums as frauds simply because the magician knew all the tricks.

So, we can deduce that, when you forsake the real God for the god of reason, you are going to find your new deity letting you down big time. Your new god, after all, isn’t reason itself, but only as much reason as you yourself can manage. In other words, your new idol is you. And even the most self-centered narcissists know they are in serious trouble if the only god they have to rely on is themselves. 

Others make the mistake of deserting God to deify another person, such as Jim Jones’ followers apparently did. They shortly found out how far such a god can sink. Although Jones tried to portray himself as a socialist and human rights messiah, it appears that only a truly divine Messiah can experience the adulation of  many followers without being corrupted by it. Those, like Jones, who deny the existence of a God greater than themselves have also lost anyone to whom they can look up and be accountable. As a result, they turn into devils.

Jones apparently became so corrupt he couldn’t endure the idea of losing his tinpot kingdom. Feeling his hold on power beginning to slip, he apparently decided to take what remained of his followers out with him rather than to allow them to get away from him. Of course, he continued to say that he just was protecting them from the fascists, that “us against them” ploy having proved successful for despots almost since the beginning of time. But Jones used guards to force his followers to drink poison, apparently suspecting—accurately, as it turned out--that not all of them loved him enough to be willing to die for him voluntarily. 

He had become such a pitifully insecure character that we almost could feel sorry for him if he hadn’t committed such a horrendous crime. So, if the loss of God doesn’t cause you to turn to other religions or idols, you are likely to turn inward, as Jones did. You will never find enough there to sustain you. In fact, you may become a sort of black hole, devouring everything and everyone within reach in a frantic attempt to shore up your own crumbling ego.

The whole point of worship, after all, is to be able to lose yourself in your awe at Someone Who is much bigger, better, and more baffling than yourself. And the fact that Christ died for his followers proves the “better” part to me more than adequately, even though the Old Testament still gives me pause sometimes. 

If we did fully understand God, I suspect we would lose our respect for Him.  A god that non-omnipotent creatures could comprehend, after all, wouldn’t be God at all.