Like the three-year-old, cutting, pasting, and gluing pieces of paper, we make things. We mold the clay. The stubborn clay doesn’t bend when we ask it to. We add more water, pushing, and pulling. The clay will be shaped into our own image. Clay squeezes out in the wrong places and between our fingers. The clay does not obey us.

It is impossible to mold God into our own image.

And yet we try.

Our sweat is visible. We push and pull the clay. “You must obey us!” we yell to the clay. Finally, we give up in despair and sit beside our clay. Finally, we ask for help. When we remember our humanity, we are ready, finally, to hear from God.

We have forgotten who God is because He doesn’t look like us.

We don’t point the finger at one another and judge.

And so we try to create God into our own image, as One who does not judge.

“Don’t Judge Me!” we yell indignantly.

Then we remember sheepishly that we’ve been talking to God, the potter, not God the clay.

What if we set aside our expectations about how God should act and listen to what God is saying about Himself? God describes Himself as fire.

God is . . . actively cleaning house, torching all that needs to burn, and he won’t quit until it’s all cleansed. God himself is Fire! The Message

Is God as a fire a good thing or a bad thing?

Sometimes God uses fire to judge His People when they are stubborn. His fire is sent to clean up the place, mostly our hearts.

And yet, we can’t read God like a child’s picture book either. His ways can’t be distilled down to an essential oil, a fragrance that allows us to say with certainty – cause and effect – “When this happens, God will do that.”

Sometimes fire is evidence of God’s favor. Sometimes His fire is sent to guide us. And so, we can’t figure out God or create a checklist to foreshadow how God will react.

All we can do is examine our own hearts, and ask Him, humbly, to show us the charred regions. Lord, are the wildfires, so rampant in Canada, California, Australia, and many other places, the seeds, or evidence, of your judgment of us, as a culture? What do you think He is saying?

Now I’m glad—not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss.

Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

And now, isn’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. The Message

Dolly Parton recently had a dream about God on a mountaintop speaking to us, as a Father speaking sternly to his children, saying, “Don’t make me have to come down there.” She wrote a song about it. What are your thoughts?

And so, if you search your pockets and find only a bit of change there, and you don’t find enough wisdom in your pockets to know how to live with a holy God, a God who may be judging us even now, then read on to the next post, which outlines three ways to live with a clear conscience before a holy God.