Humanizing God

My mom, sisters and I have a weekly-ish Bible study by Skype. I love that the four of us are able to get together to talk and cry and share about what we're reading and learning. We're in about our 20th week of a 10 week study (not quite half-way through week 7, to give you some idea at our pace!). We've been going through Beth Moore's study Breaking Free.

Yesterday we had a bit of a lively discussion about a phrase the Beth uses in the workbook. The chapter was about rebellion against God/disobedience. The phrase that caused the discussion is this:

Oh, what a disservice we do when we try to humanize God by imagining Him as the best of humanity rather than all-together God! God's compassion demands that He reach out to us even in our rebellion, but His righteousness demands that He bring painful chastisement if we don't grab His reaching hand and return to Him wholeheartedly. (emphasis mine)* 

FTR, I disagree with the highlighted line (really, the whole thing kind of, but mostly because of this piece by Michael Gungor that is still rocking my world), but my youngest sister made some compelling arguments for why she agrees with it. I'll probably go into it more later, but I'm feeling kind of cruddy today, had to help kids with some grief over a dead pet last night, have a couple of really long days ahead of me, AND I don't want to poison the well too much (probably too late, since I already said I disagree, but still!), so I'll just ask you.

What do you think about the quoted text? Agree? Disagree? Some other third thing?




*The quote is taken from page 158 of  Breaking Free: The Journey, the Stories workbook by Beth Moore.