One of my problems is that I'm 'ungrateful' for religion in general. I first took a look at Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism in 2016, essentially flipped a coin and decided to visit an EO church for the first time, which started my years-long interest in it.
That's not the full truth. I was prejudiced for EO because it was exotic, exotic contrasted to my Protestant but nonattending upbringing, exotic contrasted to closest-church-down-the-street Evangelicalism, exotic contrasted to the inland American culture I'm familiar with.
Now for months I've been piqued specifically by Twelver Shi'a Islam. Five years ago I would have had a very hard time believing that I would fall this far, but I did, and one of the reasons I'm interested in it is because it's exotic relative to Christianity.
I'm facing more and more evidence that I don't really care about the Truth, that I wouldn't know it if it hid me in the face. I'm ungrateful for the ancient and sturdy Christian practices that I've exposed myself too, rather I'm mostly just interested in culturally and theologically 'shiny things', akin to a begpacker in India or Thailand.
What am I doing wrong, what should I be looking for?
It can be difficult to recognize the absence of something until we feel its loss.
In the Lutheran tradition we confess that we can't find God by looking for Him, because the places we look for God obscure Him, we try to find God either by looking at the shiny things out there, or by looking inside of ourselves; and either way we come against a wall.
St. Paul in his letter to the Church in Rome talks about the way creation bears witness to God's glory, His wisdom, power, and divine majesty--but that doesn't lead people to Him. Instead people fashion their own idols, their own ideas of God, worshiping created things rather than the Creator. As such we speak of God in His hiddenness (Deus Absconditus). God is said to be "hidden" behind His glory. This includes God hidden behind the glory of His own Law--to try and find God in God's commandments will result in a skewed and distorted image of God. Only God revealed (Deus Revelatus) lets us know God--God revealed and clothed in the flesh, weakness, and suffering of Jesus.
Lutherans argue that there is a vital distinction to be made between God's Law, and the Gospel; the Law is what human beings ought to do and be: reflect God's image and likeness by loving and serving others ("Love your neighbor as yourself"). The problem is that we don't do this, we don't love our neighbor, because our desires have been distorted, disordered, and bent inward rather than outward; we have become inwardly bent or curved persons. This inwardly-curved disordering of our desires or "passions" is often called "the flesh" in the New Testament; and is the reason why the Law even though it commands life and goodness that we might live and thrive in peace with God and neighbor instead brings condemnation, even death to me. For I behold what I should do, and indeed that it is right to do it, but yet I don't: the good that I want to do I don't do, and the evil I don't want to do is what I do anyway.
The end result of this is that whether we flagrantly disregard the way of life or try to live a good, moral, and righteous life according to it, we remain alienated from God, and alienated from one another, and we remain unjust in word, thought, and action. In this way the Law becomes a curse rather than a blessing, it becomes a hammer of death rather than an invitation to life. Because of sin, we are victims and held in bondage to those very sinful passions. Whether one chooses a life of hedonistic indulgence or a life of extreme rigorous asceticism, man remains helplessly captive to himself. So St. Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians, "even if I sell all my possessions and give everything to the poor, or offer my body over to be burned in the fire, if I have not love, I gain nothing."
When the person becomes aware of this, as though a light in their conscience has lit up, the inevitable result is that beholding God in the Law produces fear, dread, the stark reality that I am not holy. I behold God through the Law and I am terrified. Seeing God through the Law results in us beholding an angry and wrathful God; so great is the guilt upon the conscience. The tragic reality is that many get stuck here, stuck in this place of fear and terror and only able to view God as angry. Some may get stuck here and come to resent and hate God--or at least come to hate those things which is associated with God because of this. Some instead come to lie to themselves, and they start to believe themselves good, righteous, holy--and they view the point of religion as a road toward glory--to be rewarded rather than punished--for having accrued the right number of brownie points with God by observing arbitrary moralistic rules; and so grows hypocrisy and arrogance and pride. Some, in their despair of this, live daily with immense guilt, guilt they cannot rid themselves of no matter how hard they try.
For Lutherans this is precisely what St. Paul himself writes in his letters in the New Testament: the person who tries to be justified by the Law is instead condemned by it, and that the Law is powerless to make anyone righteous. However, and this is the most important however, the Good News--the Gospel--is that God loves sinners and it is His will and His work, through Jesus Christ, to restore human beings to communion with Himself. By giving us His righteousness, as a gift. So that the one who trusts in Christ is justified in and by Christ--and the one who stands in Christ is righteous before God the Father. That is what forgiveness of sins means, we are forgiven, the record of wrongs is not reckoned against us; we are as prisoners set free from the dungeon cell, as slaves whose chains have been destroyed and we have been given freedom and liberty. So that, as Paul writes, "What the Law was powerless to do because of the weakness of our flesh, God has done by sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Romans 8:3-4).
To quote Pastor Martin Luther,
"
If you have faith in Christ your Savior, then at once you have a gracious God, for faith leads you in and opens up God's heart and will, that you should see pure grace and overflowing love. This it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon His fatherly, friendly heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees God as angry does not see Him rightly, but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across His face."
-CryptoLutheran
