I used to like to hide from God. Somewhere along the way I picked up the notion that I had God summed up fairly well and I could cram Him down in my pocket and pull Him out whenever I thought He would suit my purposes. God was, in my mind, an authoritarian to be feared, a killjoy to be obeyed, a grandfather to be manipulated and a rescuer to be utilized as a last resort when I was in trouble. Due to the prominence of the imaginary authoritarian-killjoy characteristic in my thinking, I sought to avoid God at all costs. Back then, God was such a drag. Maybe if I never thought about Him, He would never think about me. With all my might, I perfected the skill of evasion and lived as a functional atheist while, for the comfort of my own soul, clung to the idea that God would be there for me if things ever fell apart. Like many do today, I created a piecemeal God of my own imagination and went on my own personal, presumptuous pathway. As all who do so today, I was then an utter fool.
“Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” – Psalm 32:2 {ESV}
I’m wondering today from where you have received your concept of God? This is an honest, valid question for each of us to ponder. What defines God to you? Is there an objective answer to the question of who God is and what He expects of us? Should we not all have the same answer if we believe there is only one true God? What might startle us is that, should you poll the average evangelical church, you will discover a great variance in the ideas people have concerning who exactly God is. Why is this? The simple answer is that we are a biblically illiterate generation. Absent from God’s own testimony concerning Himself in His word, human beings will default in making God to be much like themselves. This is no new disease, read Isaiah 44:9-20 to discover that the history of humanity is that we fashion gods which resemble us. In essence, we worship ourselves and adorn it with some religious exterior to give it a sense of piety. I prefer to call it like it is and welcome a sense of honesty on this issue. When we abandon the revelation of scripture concerning who God is then we find that His identity is up for grabs and we end up with ten thousand lesser versions of what should be the one all-consuming reality. In case you care, here is what I have concluded based upon the teaching of scripture:
Jesus Christ is God…and it just so happens that there is no other.
What we decide about Jesus is the peg upon which our eternal destination hangs. The Gospel is inclusive in that it is available to anyone who will embrace by faith that it is the truth. The Gospel is exclusive in that all who choose not to believe, for whatever reason there may be, will be refused entrance into paradise and forever banished from the presence of the one, true God. I’ll not spend any time here today going through the learning process by which we come to these conclusions – if you are hungry to know you will endeavor to learn for yourself and God will grant you your desire. Today, I’m just rushing to the very end of the argument and making declarations. Because Jesus Christ is God and because this is an exclusive truth, what then have you decided about Him? Be careful to think through this because it is entirely possible to know the Gospel facts about Christ without reaching the appropriate final conclusion. You may be at risk of doing what I and others did in our pasts when we crafted a Savior of our own making and, before we knew it, we had fashioned a hybrid Master who, upon close inspection, resembled our own independent ideas of what a good god should be. This is a more common danger than most realize because we are so very blind that we often live out our years in being blind to our own blindness. We are self-victimized by our presumptions about God and it takes powerful, eye-opening grace to jar us awake. When you have been made to see Him, you will see Him as He is. You will see Him as He has objectively revealed Himself to us in Scripture.
So who is He? Not, who is He to you…but who, really, is God? What has He said? What has He done? What is said concerning what He is yet to do? Very importantly, for what are we accountable? The answers to these questions must be brought to the forefront of our thinking and must be allowed to interrupt the buzzing beehive of life here under the sun. Why should we stop all things and ponder these few questions?
Because the clock is running and has fewer ticks ahead of it than it has behind it.
Thank you Pastor Lyle. Thank you so much for your blogs and your posts. They are uplifting and thought provoking. Praise God for you and your family!
I was talking with a friend some years ago and asked, “Try to picture God in your mind. What does He look like to you?” My friend is a man of very few words. His answer? “He’s big and I like it!” My friend was certainly no trained theologian but he knew his God. He had lived long enough and done his own personal study to correctly conclude that he would never get all the facts right (there are, after all, an infinite number of them!). Instead, he grasped God’s myterious enormity and took great peace and pleasure in God’s “size”. I echo his words: “He’s big and I like it!”
To answer “Who is God?” is both extremely simple and also incredibly complex. In respect for other’s time, I’ll take the shorter route this morning…. About a year ago, I was eating dinner at a friend’s house listening to his testimony and during that he stated that God spoke to him saying (I paraphrase), be still because I AM. And it hit me like thunder. For the first time I ‘got’ it. Not that I didn’t know, love and trust God. But I had never fully understood when God said I am. But he is simply that. I AM! A simple statement that embraces all of God who was, is and is to be. Far too complex to bullet out the ‘talking points’ all the while so incredibly simple for a simple child like me.