The following is a very good devotional exercise that focuses on how we humans often times make our own idols out of our own self-centeredness. Listen to what anti-Nazi theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has to say. Keep in mind that he is writing in a time when Hitler was not seen as a great evil in the world, but as a charismatic reformer and hero of Germany. However, Bonhoeffer knew otherwise. God is not money, power, politics, sex, or anything like that. Instead, God is who God is, that is, God is who he has revealed himself to be. Principally, God is love. However, God defines love and we do not. Often times we shake our fist at God and say, “I don’t believe.” However, what does God do in return? He gives us the cross of Christ. The cross of Christ should reform our thinking, ground us, and challenge us to love God first then love one another. What this means is kindness, gentleness, otherness, and respect–yes–even in our disagreements.

If I am one who says where God shall be, so I will always find a God there who corresponds in some way to me, is pleasing to me, who belongs to my nature. If it is, however, God who speaks where God chooses to be, then that will probably be a place which does not at all correspond to my nature, which is not at all pleasing to me. But this place is the cross of Christ. And the one who will find him there must be with him under this cross, just as the Sermon on the Mount demands. This doesn’t suit our nature at all but is completely counter to it. This, however, is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament (Is.53!). In any event, Jesus and Paul intended this: with the cross of Jesus is the Scripture, that is, the Old Testament, fulfilled. The whole Bible will, therefore, be the Word in which God will allow the divine self to be discovered by us. This is no place which is pleasing or a priori sensible to us, but a place strange to us in every way and which is entirely contrary to us. But this is the very place God has chosen to encounter us.