Christians can be heard talking about God all the time. ‘Blah, blah, god this. Blah, blah, god that.’ Especially preachers.
They seem to think they know him which is an outrageous claim. A bag of liquid chemicals who is wandering around on the 3rd rock from a particular sun, among millions of suns, 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.
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. Here’s how the theologian above, Don Carson put it.
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.
That’s ultimately why Christians claim to know God, the Creator of the universe. Because God has made himself known through the Bible, across the whole storyline revealing his character.
But the story doesn’t end in this general revealing of God. Jesus came to make God known personally. To know Jesus is to know the God of the universe. Jesus is the crux of the storyline of the Bible. And we can meet him in the pages of the Bible.
This is what Jesus himself thought.
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. 46 He also said to them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead the third day, 47 and repentance for forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
Notice Jesus use of the word Scriptures above. In the original language of the New Testament the word is the graphes, the writings. These writings at Jesus time were our Old Testament. So that Jesus’ disciples could understand who he was, he opened their mind to the words of the Scriptures.
If you’re wondering who God is, the best place to start is with Jesus in the Bible. God has disclosed himself to us.
That’s why every week at Risen Church our goal is to go deep with the Scriptures, God’s word.
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