The God Who Is

My thoughts today are centered on the God of scripture. By scripture, I mean all of scripture. Who is he? What is he like? Why does he do what he does? Where does he reside? How can I know him? These are just simple questions but the answers are more complex than we think. This is especially true when we dare examine more than just a few select passages from our Bibles. If God is a loving heavenly father who welcomes us into his presence as scripture teaches, then he is also a consuming fire that we are to fearfully consider as taught by the same scriptures. (Both concepts come from the New Testament by the way.)

I have become convinced in recent months that unless we understand the world from which scripture was originally written and engage our hearts and minds with the mindset of those who first heard its message, we are in danger of missing the main points and more critically in danger of redefining our faith in terms outside of scriptural faith. How we in our modern world naturally think and process and interpret is radically different than the audience that would have heard Jesus speak. We are even more removed from the those who participated in the faith during the times of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David. We cannot dismiss those people and their ways as being irrelevant to us. It is wrong to suggest that those patriarchs of the Old Testament participated in a faith that is radically different from ours or knew of God in terms that we now know are archaic compared to our New Testament status.

We assume that the Bible is a book of facts to be learned. We also assume that it fits together into a logical framework that ultimately produces a "How to do Life" manual. In fact, in today's most celebrated churches, the Bible is simply a source of information to deal with the felt needs we encounter in doing life. Many churches design their presentation of scripture around the felt need of the week. The really ingenious churches actually spend time polling people as to the felt need of the week and then utilize scripture accordingly. But that is not how and why scripture was written down and certainly not the revelation that prevails of God's person and God's modus operandi.

I ran across this quote from a book I'm reading that goes like this, "it pleased God to reveal himself not through timeless teachings, or some heavenly knowledge, but through the events of a particular history, and to and through people who were caught up in that history, and who were in every case people of like passions with ourselves and subject to the limitations of our flesh." The truth of the matter is that these people were Hebrews and the language and culture that they possessed is the framework within which any relationship with God must be understood. We ask for definitions; we receive pictures. We want defined doctrines; we are given stories. We covet black and white facts; we are given images. We require information to make tables and graphs and charts; we are presented poems and prophetic prose that requires its own unique thesaurus and dictionary. Unless we understand this fundamental fabric in which our scriptures are handed down to us, we will be spiritual versions of Dumb and Dumber without a clue to the scriptural world around us.

For example, how did Pharaoh's heart get hardened? Believe it or not, we in the western church divide over this question. We have to know and we have to know the truth. Scripture tells us that God hardened Pharaoh's heart (Ex. 7:3). That settles it! Oh but it tells us that Pharaoh hardened his own heart just a chapter later (Ex. 8:15). Don't mess with us...tell us one way or the other! But God doesn't reveal himself that way. We are not satisfied until we settle on an "either/or" stopping point that we can be confident of. God is either sovereign and predestines or man is free to choose and God must await the fruit of that decision. What happens if God is both sovereign and awaiting our decision? I would argue that the Hebrew world flowed easily within an "and/both" paradigm and never concerned themselves with its doctrinal ramifications. Rather, they viewed Pharaoh's situation as a warning to avoid becoming hardened themselves. They were as comfortable with the idea that God could and would fix some one's destiny as they were with moral responsibility and the idea that one could change God's mind.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace yet he tells us that "he did not come to bring peace to the earth but rather a sword." Which is he, the Prince of Peace or the one with a sword? Like all good westerners, you will probably side with the Prince of Peace idea because it fits what we want from God. Perhaps we need to become more eastern in our understanding and frame the Prince of Peace as one who requires a man to leave his family or forsake his parents in order to follow him...a forsaking that could bring untold grief and heartache to those who choose not to follow. The peace he gives is incredible. The conflict he causes is painful. God is not simple. Jesus is not simple either. There is no box to contain Him.

God is near to everyone of us. David declares in Psalm 139 that he knows every intention of my heart and there is no place that I can go from his presence. Yet the prophet places God enthroned in the heavens with earth as his footstool. All of creation cannot contain him. He is both intimate and transcendent. When Moses encountered God on Sinai, what he saw was a God who revealed himself as, "a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin" (Ex. 34:6-7a). Ah....we like that! The very next thing that God reveals about himself "but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Ex. 34:7b). So is God merciful and forgiving or is he holy and exacting justice upon future generations of a people whose actions go without remorse? Because of our enlightened mindset, we demand to have it one way or the other. I suggest that the God of scripture feels no obligation to accommodate us and exists as the God who is. We, like those who have gone before us, must believe that he is both merciful and just.

My point to all of this is that rather than accommodating our need to identify and qualify God in terms that we can easily embrace and be comfortable with, we must place ourselves in his story. This means in all of the story...Old Testament included. Rather than serving as public relations people who seek to create a God from the pages of scripture that culture can be comfortable with, we must press on to know and represent the God of mystery. As the psalmist wrote some years ago, "Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases." He doesn't have to explain why he loved Jacob but hated Esau. He doesn't have to apologize for choosing Israel and judging the Hittites. He does not have to answer his critics who demand an explaination for his partiality toward David, a man tainted by murder, adultery, and deplorable domestic skills, while finding easy reason to bring his predecessor Saul to an inglorious death.

We are the ones that need to change in our understanding of who he is. Until we embrace the words of scripture within the context from which they were written and seek to understand the world and culture that God chose to pen his eternal words we will be left with a make-believe God, created from select scriptures, who is comfortable, manageable, and predictable. We will build our systems of doctrine and our assurances of heaven while missing out on the amazing God of scripture and his call to include us in on his story. May we never settle for less than amazing.