God Is Not a Robot

Recently, it occurred to me that God is not a robot. 

This may seem obvious, but it was something of an epiphany to me. Of course God is not a robot. But too often, we think and act as if he is.

We see God as a thing to control. We think of prayer as a programming code. If we use the right words or have enough faith, we can get whatever we want from him. 

But God cannot be programmed. He is not a machine designed to do our bidding.

Neither is he a deadly cyborg hell-bent on destroying the human race like the robots in the Terminator movies. He is not out to get us. He wants what is best for us, even when we don’t know what that is. As Jesus said, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

God is a person. And like any person, he cannot be controlled. He cannot be tamed. As C.S. Lewis described Aslan, who represents God: “He is not a tame lion, but he is good.” 

God is free. He can give and receive love. He laughs and feels pain. He mourns and rejoices.

Just like any person.

How do we know this? Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus is the exact representation of God. So if we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. What did he do?

He showed compassion to the poor. He healed the sick. Jesus cried when his friend died. When he saw merchants defiling the temple, he tossed tables and chased them out with a whip. He got angry. 

Jesus refused to condemn a woman caught in adultery. Instead, he encouraged her to stop sinning. In the garden of Gethsemane, he seemed to get frustrated with the disciples for falling asleep instead of praying. He loved the whole world so much that he allowed himself to die on a cross. 

That’s who God is. It’s not tame. It’s not a mechanical droid. It’s a living person.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that God is exactly like us.

He is purely divine, all-powerful and all-knowing, unbound by space or time. 

We must honor and fear God in a holy, healthy way. He is sovereign. There is so much about God that is beyond our understanding. But still, he is a person.

What does this mean for us? It means we are free to love God and let him love us. We don’t have to be afraid of him. He does not want to hurt us. But we cannot manipulate or control him. We can be real with him, honest about our feelings, hopes, fears, and frustrations. We can talk to him. We can trust he listens and wills our good. 

We can enjoy a personal relationship with God, not a cold contract.

This has implications for how we relate with others too. If God is a person, then all humans are made in his image. We can’t tame them either, or try to use them to get stuff we want. We have to let them be free as we are free, to love them as we wish to be loved. We can be in real relationship with them.

At the same time, we have to resist another urge. 

It’s one thing to see God as a person, but sometimes we try to turn a person into God.

We expect them to meet all our needs and make no mistakes. We get frustrated and angry when they don’t live up to our expectations. In a way, this is the same thing as trying to control them, to program them like a robot to do our bidding. 

But people are not robots either. People are not perfect. Only God is. That’s another big difference between us and him. 

So let’s love people without trying to control them. Let’s love God the same way. Let’s remember that none of us are robots. We are all people in free, unpredictable, wild, and wonderful relationships. That’s something that can never be programmed, only lived.