God is in charge...

You've probably heard this banality quite a few times. There is even a children's song with lyrics including lines such as:

'I am not the boss of me...' and, of course, 'God is the boss of me...'

Like all analogies of biblical matters, this is...as I wrote above...banal.

It puts God in the same category as a parking attendant and completely exhausts the magnificence of God's creation of people-in-his-image, reflecting his glory into the creation and being his people: a relationship of love. John 3:16 is not '"or God was so in charge of the world...".

It is confounded by Genesis 1:27, 28, and Psalm 115:16:

"The highest heavens belong to the Lord,
    but the earth he has given to mankind."

In terms of Genesis, given to mankind to care for as the place where God and man are in fellowship.

Greg Koukl's book The Story of Reality goes full bore on this arid and inaccurate theology, bourne on his, I'm guessing, equally arid Calvinistic theology. It mars an otherwise very helpful book. I would that someone had given it to me when I was young. Nevertheless, my tip: don't go to stoic lawyers for theology.

The quip that Koukl goes to town with demeans God and his intention in making us -- for a relationship with him. See Genesis 3:8 for the contra-positive example.

Rather, God is our heavenly father (see Matthew 12:50, and particularly Matthew 6:9...It is not 'our parking attendant in heaven...') who has made us to enjoy him forever. He seeks our relationship, for our good. He rescues us from our state of being in rejection of him and the peril of our rebellion against his love. We have chosen death and 'not-God' in everything we do, yet he seeks us to repent of this rejection and its consequent idolatry, pride and the sin that comes from these to embrace life in the regeneration of his Spirit through Christ, who conquered death and was the first resurrected in the kingdom of peace.

Going around saying that God is in charge, or God is the boss, is abhorrent. He is our father in heaven who will always achieve his ends.