You’ve submitted to God the best you know how, but He’s acting like a monster towards you. Perhaps He has a long history of doing cruel things to you. Perhaps He has saddled you with some devastating struggle like pedophilia or sadism or an addiction which is totally messing up your ability to relate to other people and making your future feel hopelessly grim. Perhaps He’s ripped away something or someone who you dearly loved. And in the midst of all this, God says that you must learn to trust in His goodness. Right. How on earth are you supposed to do that in the middle of this hell? If God is so eager for you to view Him as good, why is He acting like such a creep?

Deep, unshakable soul peace and rest is a product of rock solid trust in the goodness of God. Deep soul peace is what God wants for you, and if you ask Him to have His total way with you, then He’s going to roll up His sleeves and start laying the groundwork for your little soul to develop rock solid trust in Him. How does He do this? Well, what makes you doubt God’s love and goodness? His behavior, of course. His treatment of you and others. Every time you see God acting like your definition of mean, evil or cruel, your confidence in His goodness collapses under the weight of fears that He really is a monster at heart.

Now being the universe running Guy that He is, God is not going to always behave in ways that you consider right, good, and loving. God’s agendas are far too complex to accommodate such limited behavior parameters, plus God just isn’t the kind of Being who allows His creatures to dictate how He can and can’t behave. Rather than agree to tiptoe around your fears, God offers to topple your fears so that you will stop doubting His goodness the moment He does something that you don’t like or understand. To do this, He creates your personal “worst case scenarios” by intentionally acting like your definition of an ogre. Then He proves to you that He’s really not an ogre at all, and eventually you learn to stop judging His Character by His actions.