When we consider the nature of God what do we use as a reference? Where do we get our ideas about the character of God?

Many of us have the idea that God is a micro-manager of everything in the universe, and especially our little blue marble called earth. We believe that if something happens it is because it is his will and he either directly caused it or gave his permission. 

This view of God causes all sorts of problems for us. It puts God as the source of all good and all evil. When something tragic happens we chalk it up to his will. We then somehow try to reconcile this act of God with what we have been told about his nature, that he is good, that he is love. But our minds rightly recognize the disconnect between what we are told and what we experience. So, to satisfy this contradiction we usually say something like “His ways are higher than our ways” or “he works all things together for our good.” This temporarily quiets the nagging feeling that if God is really good, if he is really love, he wouldn’t do that or he wouldn’t permit it. These thoughts lead to mistrust of God, anger against God and sometimes outright hatred.

Then we have the doctrine of hell and eternal conscious torment. We’re taught that there will be people writhing in pain and anguish forever and ever just because they never heard of Jesus, or because they heard but didn’t respond with a confession of faith. Some even hear and confess but are unable to control their base nature and live a life of sin. There are many other ways to find yourself confined to an eternity of punishment, it just depends on who’s particular version of God you are listening to at the moment.
Now we are faced with a visceral reaction of horror at the thought of that kind of punishment: Eternal torment in exchange for temporal acts of disobedience.

For some, they cling to the thought that, if God is love, somehow this is not his doing. He offered a way out but they didn’t take it. It’s their own choice to spend eternity in hell.

We’ve been made to believe that hell is the default setting and its up to us to change the setting. 
There are a lot of things that happen on my computer because of default settings. Some of them I don’t like at all, like starting a full disc scan every time I start to use it! If I knew how to change that default setting I would! I would avoid the personal hell of using an 8 year old computer running Windows Vista while performing a full scan. But it comes back to this, even if I’m the one that has to choose to reset the default, someone programmed it that way. So, if God is the creator, designer and sustainer of all things, he must have been the one that set the default to hell.

Our minds instinctively see these problems yet we come up with all kinds of convoluted ideas to get God off the hook. 

Some people can’t lie to themselves and they just decide that if that’s how God is they don’t want anything to do with him.

The problem comes back to our reference, the source that we draw upon for our mental picture of what God is like. That would inarguably be the bible. A book written over the course of hundreds of years by dozens of people. It’s not really a book at all, it is a collection of books and letters, a library. 

Not only was it written by many different authors but it was written to many different audiences. It was assembled by people over 200 years after the last letter was written, men who argued over which ones to include and which ones to exclude. Men who didn’t agree over many of the doctrines that were being taught at the time. It was then translated into English from various manuscripts that were copies of copies of copies that didn’t always match texts when compared.

Here’s the deal, when you translate something you first have to interpret it. Meaning you have to understand the language and customs of every person that wrote any portion in order to accurately translate what was written. The things you are ignorant about get translated as best they can according to your understanding. Any version of a bible you read has man’s understanding translated into it, regardless of how pure the original manuscript.

Then you come to the present where you have literally millions of people reading and attempting to re-interpret this library of books in order to get the proper view of God. No wonder we have many hundreds of denominations with dozens of subsets under some of those. 

You may think I’m bashing the bible, I am not. I just want people to contemplate what they hold in their hands before they declare “The Bible clearly says!” If you’re honest with yourself, the bible is anything but clear on any number of issues, including the nature of God. If you think that you can use a literal reading of the old and new testaments and arrive at a coherent understanding of the nature and character of God you are sadly mistaken. 

You’re going to believe that God wipes out populations, rains down fire and brimstone, punishes the disobedient with all manner of plagues and pestilence and requires those that do believe in him to adhere to a strict code of laws or risk being stoned to death.

You’ll also believe that God is kind, gracious, loving and forgiving. He’s our benevolent papa that wraps us in his loving embrace and protects us from all harm. You’ll believe that he is light and in him there is no darkness, that every good and perfect gift comes from him, that he tempts no one with evil but delivers us from it.

That’s pretty bipolar behavior if you ask me. Or maybe he has multiple personality disorder? Maybe he’s schizophrenic? Who knows? After all, his ways are higher than ours!

Or maybe we don’t understand our bibles?

I haven’t flooded this article with scripture because I believe that when portions of it are ripped out of its context and doctrine is built upon it the scriptures have been abused. There are a few things that must be considered when attempting to understand scripture; the nature of God, the context of the writing itself, historical context and audience relevance.

So, what if God wanted to clear things up about his nature and he sent his own son into this world to exemplify who he is? Jesus said, “if you’ve seen me you’ve seen the Father.” Over and over Jesus demonstrated who God is and what he is like. The writers of the New Testament declared that Jesus was the exact image or perfect representation of God. In every way he was like his Father in heaven.
I have a son, an only son, and over and over I get comments like “Is that your son? You look just alike!” or “Wow, I can tell who he belongs to!” or “You can’t deny him!” If I wanted someone to know what I looked like, but I couldn’t show them my face, I would show them my son. Then, if they ever did see me, they would be able to recognize me with a fair amount of certainty because they had seen my son.

Now this is physical appearance that we are talking about but it doesn’t take much imagination to apply this to Jesus and the Father. Not necessarily in physical appearance but in his nature and character Jesus gave us a very clear indication of God. He came to erase the poorly understood image of God that was represented in the Old Testament and overlay that with the pure image that has no distortion of his nature.

If Jesus is the true picture of God then what do we do with the one we see in the Old Testament?
We have to understand that the writers of the Old Testament didn’t have a clear image to determine the nature of God. Like many today, they believed that everything came from God, good and evil, and that whatever happened was his doing. God got tagged with a lot of stuff he had nothing to do with. But if we understand that Jesus is the perfect representation all we have to do is compare images.

If someone were looking for me but they only had a picture of my son, every time someone else said “Hey, that’s him over there” they would have to compare the person they were looking at with my son’s picture. If the person didn’t resemble the picture they would have to determine that it wasn’t me. We can do the same when reading the bible, if it doesn’t resemble the image Jesus gave us it must not be God but someone else. I won’t go into who the someone else might be but I’ll just say that there were other actors at work in the OT besides God the Father.

God said no man has seen his face, yet we see many instances of people interacting with who they believed to be God. If you read closely enough you’ll find that not even Moses dealt directly with the Father, ever. Is it possible that some of these visitations were misinterpreted? I think it is very likely when you start comparing images.

I’ll just leave you to chew on that for a while.

Back to our ideas about God, I do not believe that everything that happens is a result of some master plan where everything is happening exactly according to what God has planned. We make decisions, good, bad or otherwise that affect our lives and the lives of others. Other people make decisions that affect our lives but that doesn’t mean that it is God’s will. If that were the case then we are just puppets without any real free will. We are just actors in a play, going through the motions of our part. So drug addicts are supposed to be drug addicts according to the plan, murderers are supposed to kill people or it will mess up everything and disease is necessary to get rid of all those people in order to fulfill every minute detail of this master plan.

Again, we have a gut wrenching revulsion to an idea like that but we paste over it with platitudes and cliches and go about our business of doing “God’s will”. 

Come to think of it, why do were pray for God’s will to be done if everything that happens is his will? Isn’t it just going to be done anyway? This is truly a doctrine that I have never understood. 

Is God sovereign? Yes, but that doesn’t mean he micromanages every detail.

Does God have a plan for mankind? Yes! But it is a big picture plan, an over arching template for all of his creation. By and large we determine our lives by the decisions WE make.

So does God even care about us or get involved in our lives? Again, yes! When we seek the wisdom of God and live our lives according to his principles he becomes as involved with us as we want him to be. But that’s the kicker! It’s our choice! That’s where our decisions become so very important, to involve God in our daily lives. If you read the New Testament closely you begin to see that what Jesus taught was not about preparing for heaven but living a “saved” life here and now. He rarely, if ever, discussed what was going to take place in heaven, instead he taught people how to live!

I think this salutation from Peter sums up nicely how God interacts with us.

2 Peter 1:2-4

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

It sounds like God has provided us with everything we need and left the choices to us. It doesn’t not sound like he has mapped out our every move or that he he has arraigned every event in our lives.

If we can separate God’s true nature, that he is only good, from many of the things that happen in this world that are not good, then we can re-present God in an accurate way. Then, when people get a more accurate understanding of his nature, the mistrust, anger and hatred of God will begin to dissipate. I truly believe that many who call themselves christians today have some very negative feelings about God that they probably would never admit but a pure and undiluted image of his nature can bring peace to their tortured feelings.

Many Blessing,

Jeff