100th Post, Some Thought On The Nature Of God(s)

So we’d just finished a sermon series on Jonah at Sojourn, and while this wasn’t directly from the sermon, it did get me thinking about the nature of God versus the nature of other gods. Jonah’s complaint is that he knows God is a merciful God who will forgive if people repent, thus he doesn’t want to go to Ninevah. And he’s right, after he prophesises, the people repent and God changes his mind and doesn’t destroy the city. So that got me thinking about God’s nature, and if you compare it to the nature of gods that we’ve essentially made up, how they reflect who we are. I’m no expert in comparative religions, but it seems to me that the gods we as humans throughout time have worshiped are a capricious and somewhat cruel lot. It seems to me that the gods we create are based on what we would be like if we were all-powerful. There’s the saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So I imagine that we as early people would see what humans were like when we get power, and just extrapolate from that to make our gods. I’m sure someone could maybe point to an example of a loving god, I mean, there’s Aphrodite for example, but for every Aphrodite you have an Apollo or Zeus etc., who aren’t displaying God’s merciful nature. Anyway, just some thoughts I had.