Christians can be heard talking about God all the time. ‘Blah, blah, god this. Blah, blah, god that.’ They arrogantly think they know him. Which is an outrageous claim: a bag of liquid and chemicals wandering around on the 3rd rock from the sun, among outrageous millions of suns and rocks, knows the Creator of the universe: God.
Given the outrageous nature of the claim, why are Christians so confident that they know God? Here’s what one Christian thinker wrote.
But we’re talking about the God of the Bible, and the God of the Bible is self-defined. He talks about himself as being eternal and righteous. He’s the God of love. He’s the God of transcendence; that is, he’s above space and time and history. Yet he is the immanent God; that is, he is so much with us that we cannot possibly escape from him. He is everywhere. He is unchangeable. He is truthful. He is reliable. He’s personal.
What’s really important to see and understand, as God has disclosed himself not only in words but in the whole storyline of the Bible’s narrative, is that we are not permitted to take one attribute of God and make everything of it. We cannot, let’s say, take his sovereignty and forget his goodness. Or take his goodness and forget his holiness (his holiness is what makes him the God of judgment). Or take his judgment, even the severity of his judgment, and forget that he’s the God of love, the God who has so much loved even his rebellious creatures that ultimately he sent his Son to bear their sin in his own body on the tree.
In other words, to get to the heart of who God is and to bow before him in some small measure of genuine understanding, it’s important to think through what the Bible says again and again and integrate the whole with the same balance and proportion that Scripture itself gives. That calls us to worship. And if we put anything else in the place of God, that is the very definition of idolatry.
Don Carson, New City Catechism
That first sentence is crucial. The God of the Bible is self-defined. We don’t decide who he is. His name or title is not an empty cipher. He is self-defined. Which makes sense, right? Nobody likes it when someone else tells them, ‘Oh, you’re like this and this and that.’ We object to others defining us. Surely, we should do God the courtesy of letting him define himself. And the way God has done that is broadly in creation, personally in the Bible, and finally in the person of Jesus.
That’s ultimately why Christians claim to know God, the Creator of the universe. Because Jesus made him known. And to know Jesus is to know the God of the universe.
And we, humanity, have access to Jesus in the pages of the Bible. If you’re wondering who God is, the best place to start is with Jesus in the Bible.
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