It appears that too many Christians read the Bible as the story of men and women bumbling around because they couldn’t quite figure out what God wanted them to do. They conceive of life as a giant stage, with no script, no director, just a mysterious set of Very Important Rules. Some people call this the clockmaker hypothesis, where God is the clockmaker who has created the world as a great machine, operating by immutable principles, placed us in the middle and stepped back to see what happens.

Another word for this is deism, the belief that God does exist, he created all things, including us, given us a rule book, but evidently has more important things to do than get involved in our daily life.

In 2005 Christian Smith published Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers in which he suggested that the prevailing religion in the USA was an adulterated, culturally adapted version of Christianity that he calls Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The goal of life is to be a good and just person and to feel happy and secure. God is remote from our daily lives, intervening only in a time of crisis. This avoids any awareness of sin and eliminates the need of doctrines or self-denial.

Theism, on the other hand, is the belief in an active, personal God who wants us to talk to him, and to listen for his soft, gentle voice speaking to us. He answers prayers, performs miracles, intervenes in the course of nature on our behalf.

Deism says that we can learn the important lessons of life by our own reason and that the Bible is a series of morality tales to guide us.

Theism says that the Bible is God revealing his purpose to us. We need to go deeper in reading the Bible in order to discern the hand of God guiding people to accomplish his purpose.

In other words, when we read the Bible we should ask “What was God doing?” It’s easy to see how people always tend to make a mess of things. The Bible reveals the fallibility of man and the tragedy of human endeavours to create a better world. But if we read the whole story we will see God gently, patiently nudging people and events to accomplish his designs. And those designs are for our salvation.
We will not be saved by reading the Bible as a book of morality tales and trying to do better than those people back there did. We will be saved by realizing that God always has our best in mind and by submitting to his plans for our life.