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My days in seminary were marred by a dark, little secret. Hidden deep inside me was an anger that exploded at the slightest provocation. At times, this rage so overwhelmed me that I went for walks in an open area near my dorm lividly shaking my fist towards Heaven and venomously screaming out how much I hated God.
In my fury, I took a Bible verse and perversely twisted it into my own sordid mantra that I chanted like some eastern mystic. This hideous corruption of the Scriptures — I hate God, because He first hated me — defined my perception of God
I was a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian. I regularly attended church. At seminary, I studied the Bible six to eight hours a day and yet, despite these positive influences, I couldn’t shake these episodes of intense rage. I believed God hated me and I bitterly hated Him back.
I eventually sought counselling to deal with my anger. One seminary professor told me that my image of God was satanic and unless this changed I would eventually fall away from the faith, because no one willingly serves a tyrant.
Though I knew Scripture spoke of God’s unwavering love for man, an unseen barrier repelled any notion of this off me, like water off the oil-soaked feathers on a duck’s back.
Sadly, I am not alone in this struggle. Many have a skewed perception of who God really is. Some feel trapped by overwhelming urges to do things to gain God’s approval. Others envision the Lord standing in Heaven with a big stick ready to punish them for the slightest mistake. Then there are those who face the daily battle of believing that God has completely forgiven their sins. These distorted perceptions have the same tragic potential to undermine a person’s walk with God as mine did.
They also contradict what the Bible says about our Heavenly Father. The Scriptures tell us that He is a forgiving God, One who is completely trustworthy and has nothing but the best intentions for us.
Yet somehow our ungodly perceptions of God can effortlessly run roughshod over any of these truths.
Why is this?
Coke hits perception wall
In their book Marketing Warfare, advertising executives Jack Trout and Al Reis share this illuminating illustration of Coca-Cola’s encounter with the power of perception. In the 1980s, the beverage multi-national introduced a "new improved" brand of cola as a replacement for its original Coke formula, which the company had used since the early 1900s. This formula — known as Merchandize 7x — became one of the great folk tales of American industry. It’s locked away in a safe and apparently only five people have actually seen it.
The change in Coke’s recipe was sparked by stiff competition from Pepsi Cola. You may still remember Pepsi’s taste-test ads that ran at that time. People were asked to drink from two unidentified glasses of cola — one containing Coke and the other Pepsi — and to choose which one tasted better. Invariably, people chose Pepsi because it was 10% sweeter.
Coca-Cola countered this advertising assault, tactically moving in with its "new improved" Coke. The company had done extensive research — including its own blind taste tests — and developed a sweeter flavour that people overwhelming preferred over Merchandise 7x.
This "new improved" Coke was introduced with all the hype and multi-million dollar fanfare that only a company the size of Coca-Cola could muster. Coke had every reason to expect their new tastier cola would rule the day and send the upstart Pepsi scurrying back to its trenches.
But when ‘new improved’ hit the stores, Coca-Cola was dumbfounded by the reaction. Instead of flocking to the new taste, consumers roared their displeasure. The reason for their dissatisfaction was even more disconcerting — consumers claimed the original Coke formula tasted better and demanded that it be brought back.
This outcry flew in the face of all Coke’s market research. In blind-taste tests, people preferred the new Coke over the original. But a mysterious transformation took place when consumers could identify what they were drinking, unexplainably Coke’s original formula now tasted better.
Why? In one word — perception.
For years, Coke dominated the cola market. It aggressively confronted all challengers to the cola throne and the business graveyard was littered with beverages that took on the king of colas and failed.
Coke stubbornly fought back these intruders with slick and powerful advertising campaigns. But arguably, its most successful promotion was one that ran in the 1970s that brashly claimed Coke was the ‘real thing.’
In its own subliminal way, the ‘real thing’ slogan stated that Coke was the original cola flavour and that everything else was simply a cheap knock-off — an imitator. The company spent millions of dollars bombarding consumers with this single message and established itself as the benchmark for the cola taste.
Through this clever advertising strategy, Coke synchronized itself with the human psyche as it masterfully dovetailed with people’s general dislike of copycats. This was the subtle messaging behind Coca-Cola’s ‘real thing’ campaign, and it worked spectacularly.
Decades later, when asked who the ‘real thing’ was, many from that era still answer Coke — a silent testimony to the enormous impression this slogan had on consumers.
When Coca-Cola released its new taste, it ran headlong into the very mystique the company had created around Merchandise 7x. It was a brutal collision.
There was such a strong consumer backlash against the "new" Coke, that in a matter of weeks, the company was forced to re-introduce its original flavour under the name of Classic Coke. In the months that followed, the new flavour all but disappeared from store shelves, leaving Classic Coke as the king of Colas for another day.
Perception power
This is a sad commentary on man’s fallen nature where perception defines our reality instead of actual fact.
The fact was in blind taste tests the new formula tasted better. But when people saw what they were drinking, this awareness actually improved the taste of the original Coke — making it the preferred choice.
So what gives perception such power that it can distort human reasoning? There are two reasons:
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1. Perception is strengthened by an emotional charge.
Perceptions develop when emotions — such as pride, fear, and anger — are linked to a particular point of view, empowering and transforming these thoughts into a mindset or stronghold in our minds.
All advertising campaigns must touch human emotions to be successful. For example, you can be genuinely concerned about a situation, but it’s fear that causes you to run. Similarly, businesses can tell you the facts about their product, but they must spark an emotional need in order to motivate a response.
Susequently, teenagers feel compelled to buy the latest designer clothes, because of an inherent fear they will no longer be cool or popular. What created this anxiety — the advertising, of course. This created perception coerces teens into purchasing $50 jeans rather than the less-expensive pair on the adjacent rack, simply because of the brand name sewn on the jeans.
Unfortunately, perception can cost more than money — sometimes it requires a bit of our soul. In a recent article1 in our local paper, a teenage woman questioned the current fashion trend among young girls of wearing low hanging jeans with thong underwear sticking out. She didn’t realize the source of this fad until a flyer advertising a popular brand of designer jeans arrived at her door. On the front, was a picture of young model strutting exactly the same style.
"I don’t see how this is fashion at all," she said, "it just makes the girls look lazy and trashy."
But once these ‘chic’ apparel companies establish a certain perception about their products, they can easily manipulate people into mimicking all sorts of unseemly behaviour in an effort to be trendy and accepted.
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2. Repeated messaging develops a pattern of thinking.
Ruts or patterns of thinking can also be dug into people’s minds. If you hear the same message long enough and often enough — through actions or words — you start to believe it must be true.
The disturbing news is the younger the person is when these ruts are created the stronger their hold. Studies show that the earlier a person starts smoking, the more difficult it is for them to stop the habit. Along a similar vein, perception is simply a habitual way of thinking.
Yet despite the grip perception can have on people’s minds, these strongholds can be pulled down and changed.
Perception’s source
The key to unlocking the power behind perception strongholds is found in the first couple of pages of the Bible. In Genesis 1: 26, God says, "Let us make man in Our image, according to our likeness." The two prominent words in this passage are ‘image’ and ‘likeness.’
The Hebrew word translated ‘likeness’ — demuwth — means to model or shape. Though man was fashioned in flesh, we were also created with a spirit that mirrored God’s spiritual nature.2 This similarity separated us from the "beasts of the field" and gave humans the ability to have a relationship with their Heavenly Father.
But the second word —‘image’ (selem) — means to be a representation or representative figure. This same word is used throughout the Old Testament to describe idols or as the King James version quaintly called them ‘graven images’ (cf. Isaiah 40:9; 45:20). Ironically, God intended men and women to be the idols that represented Him, not chunks of rock or carved wooden figure.
Selem is a curious word because it begs the question — who were men and women supposed to represent God to? If we were all created in the image of God, it would be fruitless to model this image to each other.
I believe men and women were intended to be a representative — or an idol — of what God was like to their children. As children watched and interacted with their parents, they gained an understanding of who God was. This perception would be a natural bridge leading children into a personal relationship with their true spiritual Father.
But then came man’s catastrophic fall into sin. In a fleeting moment, this idol — that was intended to represent God in His purest form — was horribly scarred and disfigured. It left all children to follow with a flawed impression of what God was really like.
A study(3) conducted in 1994 — involving 49 children from a middle to upper-middle class Christian Reformed church and 94 children attending a nursery school, a Head Start day care program and two elementary schools — confirmed this truth.
Each of these 143 children were presented with a set of characteristics such as patience, kindness and warmth and asked to rank how much these attributes applied to both their parents and to God.
"Regardless of race, socioeconomic status or religious affiliation, children in our studies reported thinking about God often and perceiving God as similar to their parents in nurturing and power," the authors stated.
This should not surprise us, since God gave parents the mandate of molding a child’s perception of God.
In December of 2003, a group of researchers5 from eight Canadian universities announced plans to undertake a five-year study of male parenting. Through their research, the group hopes to revitalize the image of fatherhood. The group stated that the modern media has provided a distorted image of fatherhood portraying them as little more than overgrown children — as evidenced by Al Bundy in Married with Children, Homer Simpson in cartoon series, The Simpsons and Archie Bunker in All in the Family.
"Fathers are often treated as buffoons in our public images. TV and advertising play on this idea that fathers are deficient and inadequate in what they do," said Professor Kerry Daly from the University of Guelph.
Unfortunately, these negative stereo types in turn contribute to the negative perceptions of God found in our modern society
Perceptions built
Through this study, I realized that my concepts of the Lord were intimately linked to the relationship I had with my parents. The first crucial step in changing this perception was to defuse the emotional charge that empowered these negative views.
All parents are affected by man’s spiral into sin. Your grandparents shaped your parents impressions of God as they in turn affected yours and you now affect your children.
My sister and I didn’t come from a drunken or abusive home. My parents deeply loved the both of us. But there was one area of constant friction between my father and I that profoundly affected our relationship. It was caused by my failure to meet my dad’s expectations in the area of sports — particularly hockey. My father was quite athletic. Unfortunately, those genes never ended up in me and deep down I knew that my lack of interest and athletic ability was a serious disappointment to him. Despite my indifference, I was dragged off to play hockey.
The tension was further aggravated by the son of close family friends who was successful in hockey. I remember overhearing a conversation my mom had with the boy’s mother telling her that I was not the son that my father wanted. I concluded — what any 12-year old boy would deduce in these circumstances — my dad didn’t want me and preferred the neighbour’s son over me.
To this day, I can still remember the look of disappointment and frustration written on my dad’s face when I told him I no longer wanted to play hockey.
I interpreted this constant conflict with my father as evidence he hated me. It was a lie, but I nevertheless believed it. This chronic irritation led to the formation of a raw rejection wound in my heart that eventually germinated into a root of bitterness and a loathing self-hatred. The day I became a Christian all those feelings and beliefs were transferred over to God.
Stop the victim mentality
One of the concerns, I have in sharing this material is that we go on a witch-hunt blaming our parents for all our failures. Over the years, I received brief glimpses of the hard and at times traumatic childhood my parents were raised in. We are all by-products of our history.
The key to stopping this cyclical sequence of events that passes from one generation to the next is for one person to say enough and with God’s help take responsibility to end the downward spiral.
But if you have a victim mentality — continually blaming someone else for your struggles and never taking responsibility for your own actions — you will be ineffective in changing your condition.
In a recent court case(4) in our community, the justice department had a man declared a ‘dangerous offender,’ meaning he could be locked up indefinitely. Between 1990 and 2001, the 37-year-old man has been convicted — in three separate incidents — of murder, rape and aggravated sexual assault.
The prosecution believed the man had a 75% to 80% chance of re-offending, if released. The reason for this, they argued, was that the individual did not take responsibility for his actions. Though he admited to committing these crimes, he claimed they weren’t his fault. "He blames things on everyone else," a witness testified.
Essentially, because of a ‘victim mentality’, the prosecution does not believe this man can be rehabilitated.
If you persistently blame your parents or others for your problems, this same ‘victim’ mentality will stop you from effectively dealing with any issues in your life.
By choosing to relive the past, you relinquish your future.
Break perception power
To change my distorted perceptions of God, the Holy Spirit led me down the painful path of forgiveness. I had to forgive my parents, particularly my father.
Forgiveness is not for the weak of heart. It may be one of the most challenging things you ever do, but it is not an option for a believer. In Mathew 6:14, 15, Jesus said, "For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions." Ultimately, a failure to forgive others is a rejection of the forgiveness our Heavenly Father has freely made available to each of us.
We can also determine from Jesus’ statement that forgiveness is a choice — an act of the will. No matter how difficult it may seem, you have the ability to do it, or the Lord wouldn’t have so bluntly required it of us.
But forgiveness also has the unique ability to defuse the emotional charge building up inside us that empowers those wrong perceptions of God.
As I entered adulthood, I was plagued by images of incidents that happened to me as I was growing up. I would be doing some activity and suddenly a painful memory, decades old, would flood my mind. These flashbacks — which usually involved negative situations with my father — were so vivid it seemed like they had happened yesterday.
There were countless events that took place during my childhood that I couldn’t recall today, even if I was offered a bank full of money. But there were some I couldn’t forget.
Why were these memories so real to me? The reason: they were energized by an emotion of unforgiveness.
In order to defuse their power, I had to specifically forgive each incident.
But I received an interesting revelation on forgiveness as I was pulling into the driveway of our home one warm summer’s night. I have no idea what triggered it, but suddenly my mind was flooded with a specific memory — that I had previously forgiven. Confused about what to do, I forgave again.
This incident revealed that there were certain situations that I had to forgive more than once in order to fully quench their hold on me.
In Mathew 18:35, Jesus spoke of man’s need to forgive ‘from the heart.’ This statement implies that there can be different stages of forgiveness — some that are ‘from the heart’ and other that are simply words. Though the latter is a step in the right direction, it nevertheless indicates that we haven’t had a full break through.
We should look upon forgiveness as an onion. As you forgive, a single layer is pealed back. However, underneath there may be another layer that must be dealt with — a deeper emotion perhaps or a silent testament that you have not completely forgiven from the heart. When we are ready, the Holy Spirit will prompt us to forgive one more time. Finally, as the layers of the onion are one-by-one pulled away, it eventually disappears, and the forgiveness is complete.
A sign of unforgiveness
While teaching a Bible School class, I told the students that many young people brashly state that they will not be like their parents. The spontaneous laughter that erupted at that moment was evidence that many — if they hadn’t already said it — were thinking it.
The class took a more sober turn when I added that people who make these statements are doomed to repeat the error of their parents. It’s not that this phrase has some magical properties that force the errors of one generation onto the next. Rather, it is a principle of God’s word.
In Mathew 7:1-5, Jesus condemns judging saying that if we see a sliver in our brother’s eye, it indicates there is a log in ours. Jesus calls anyone who judges a hypocrite because they suffer from exactly the same problem.
When we judge our parents, it is a subtle indicator that we have exactly the same issues. More importantly, it also tells us that we haven’t really forgiven them.
Though I resented the expectations that my father had put on me in the area of sports, I repeated the same mistake with my own son. The only thing that changed was the name of the game — instead of hockey, it was soccer.
I knew I had to stop, but I was a driven man and powerless to change. I was only able to break this cyclical pattern by forgiving my father for the expectations put on me.
Jacob faced similar issues in his life. As a young boy, his father Isaac openly preferred Jacob’s older brother Esau. The Bible tells us that Isaac loved Esau (Gen 25:28) and nowhere is a similar statement made about Jacob.
Jacob was undoubtedly wounded by this rejection. However, though he personally experienced the scarring rejection of favouritism, Jacob would — in his own uncany way — make exactly the same mistake when he had his own family.
In an ironic twist, he reversed the process preferring his youngest son Joseph over the oldest (Gen 37:3). Perhaps through the preferential treatment he showed Joseph, Jacob was subconsciously undoing the rejection he received as the youngest son.
These repeating patterns in families are often subtle indicators of unresolved issues between children and parents. Only as we forgive can this chain be broken.
Does forgiveness forget?
A few years back, a good friend of mine said, "I can forgive, but I will never forget."
I don’t believe this is possible. I feel forgetting is a key element of forgiveness.
I am not suggesting that it will happen immediately, but as you forgive the incident or memory will loose the emotional charge that gives it life. For the first time, those memories will have a chance to grow old and become like those countless events that have suffered from the passing of time — forgotten.
Those flashbacks that once plagued me have for the most part faded away. Some have so completely disappeared, that I can no longer recall what they were, despite the fact they harassed me for decades.
Interestingly Joseph, the son of Jacob, experienced the forgetting of forgiveness. As a 17-year-old boy, his older brothers threw him into a cistern. When we study the events leading up to this incident in Genesis 37, it may not have been the wrong thing to do. With the taunting attitude Joseph displayed towards his older brothers — due to the overt favouritism shown him by his father — a couple nights in the cistern might have done their younger brother some good. However, the brothers crossed the line when they sold Joseph to a passing slave caravan heading to Egypt.
In slavery, Joseph’s woes continued. While serving in the house of Potiphar, the chief of security in the Pharaoh’s court, Joseph was wrongly accused of sexually assaulting his master’s wife and tossed in jail.
In his dingy cell, Joseph had every reason to be offended and angered by his treatment. But after God dealt with his pride and bitterness, the Lord elevated Joseph to second in command in Egypt. At the pinnacle of his success, there was one telling moment that hinted of Joseph’s journey to forgiveness. It surfaced at the naming of his first-born son. Joseph called him Mannasseh (Gen 41:51), "For, God has made me to forget all my troubles and all my father’s household."
It’s a forgetting that can only be achieved through forgiveness.
Installing the right perception
Once we start the process of removing the wrong perception, we must move on to the next step of installing the correct one.
Located in the British Museum in London, England is a collection of ancient Greek sculptures called the Elgin marbles. These artifacts — assembled by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens while he served as England’s ambassador — were sold to the museum in 1812 for $35,000.
Greek master craftsman sculptured these exquisite works in the 5th century. But many of these carvings and sculptures were brutally marred by the passage of time. Heads, legs and arms are missing. Chunks of marble broke off, leaving many of these statues horribly disfigured.
Now if people examined these sculptures to determine what man looked like during this period of time, they would walk away with a very distorted perspective.
We don’t do this because we have a point of reference — we know what people are supposed to look like — and understand that something drastic must have happened to deface these sculptures.
In a similar fashion, man’s fallen spiritual nature tragically distorts our image of God. But the Lord provided a point of reference that clearly depicts what He is like — the Bible.
In Romans 12: 1, 2, the Apostle Paul says that Christians are transformed by the renewing of their minds. The key to being changed into Christ’s likeness is through changing the way we think.
But how do we get what’s written in scripture embedded into our heart and spirit.
First, find Bible verses that clearly address your particular perception issue. If you feel God hates you, seek out verses that speak of the Lord’s unqualified love for us.
Then begin to meditate on these specific scriptures. The psalmist proclaimed that he meditated on God’s word all day (Psalm 1:2). Meditation was an important spiritual exercise in Jewish society. Yet today, it is essentially an endangered species in our westernized cultures. Few know what meditation is and even fewer actually do it.
So what is meditation? The Hebrew word translated meditation in Psalm 1 means to mull over and ponder and spoke of reading and rereading specific verses a number of times. This repetition allowed the Word of God to embed itself in our heart and spirit.
This word also means ‘to make a low growling sound’ which suggests that the Scripture was read aloud in a low voice during the meditative exercise. According to the Apostle Paul, it is the hearing of the Word that produces faith (Rom 10:17). Consequently, as we mull over and vocalize Scripture, the Living Word creates new thinking patterns and perceptions that dynamically transform us into the image of Christ.
Conclusion
Today, I can testify that forgiveness dramatically improved the relationship I had with not only my Spiritual Father but my earthly one as well. My perceptions of God are changing. I have not fully arrived and must admit it’s still a work in progress. But I am gradually gaining an appreciation of God’s overwhelming love for me.
1. Ogilvie, Joanne, Girls are overexposed (Regina LeaderPost: Regina, SK, Canada, February 17, 2003)
3. From the Journal of Scientific Study of Religion (Reported in the Regina LeaderPost: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada)
4. O’Coner, Kvin, Killer will strike again soon, court told (Regina LeaderPost: Regina, SK, Canada, January 31, 2003)
5. Sokoloff, Heather, Study aims to salvage image of fatherhood (National Post:Toronto, ON, December 4, 2003) page 1
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