Subtitled: “But I’d secretly rather have a God who is a non-anxious presence,” Apprising Ministries now brings to your attention a web only post by Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today.

Galli begins:

I like a tranquil, even-keeled, self-controlled God. A God who doesn’t fly off the handle at the least provocation. A God who lives one step above the fray. A God who has that British stiff upper lip even when disaster is looming.

When I read my Bible, though, I keep running into a different God, and I’m not pleased. This God says he “hates” sin. Well, he usually yells it. Read the prophets. It’s just one harangue after another, all in loud decibels. And when the shouting is over, then comes the pouting…

This God is like the volatile Italian woman who, upon discovering her husband’s unfaithfulness, yells and throws dishes, refuses to sleep in the same bed, and doesn’t speak to him for 40 days and 40 nights. We may think this a crude depiction, except that Jesus—God with us—seems to suffer the same emotional imbalance… (Online source)

Galli informs us of the “gamble” God made in the creation of man:

he created beings with deep awareness of themselves and their Creator, who could envision the absolute heights they could scale and the perfect love they could enjoy, and who knew they could have all this forever and ever.

It was a gamble, though. For such a creature—one with the very nature of God—could also become a devil. Such a creature—one who could know perfect love—could also learn perfect hate. Such a creature—who could envision a life blessed beyond imagination—could also despair, could begin thinking that to be human is to err, is to be flawed, is to despair of glory.

And yet God gambled. He has thrown everything into this grand enterprise. He made the creation of these beings not a matter of course or compromise, but a matter of life or death. Everything was on the line with this roll of the dice. To win meant for these creatures a bliss that only God knows. To lose meant death and eternal destruction. There was no holding back… (Online source)

You can read the rest of this nauseating ode to mankind, i.e. love of self, where Galli also tells us God “wants” to “make gods out of sinners” right here.