Understanding God, Part 1

If you want to know someone deeply, it takes time and effort.  The Lovely Joanne and I have known each other more than ten years and we're just getting started.  We hate being apart, as it's harder to share everything even by email and phone calls.  We need to be face to face! 

What about when we are trying to get to know God, whom we can't see?  Some people look at the world around us, with its troubles and pain and evil, and conclude that if there is a God, he's remote and doesn't care about us or powerless to stop tragedy.  Some read verses like 1 John 3:1 and think he's like a kindly old man who loves everyone so much he just kind of drools over us.  Others read verses like Psalm 2:4-5 and think he's a mean, angry judge who waits for us to step out of line and then zaps us with a lightning bolt (or cancer, a car wreck, or an earthquake).  How can we know? 

Well, the Bible is progressive - we only get a glimpse of God in Genesis, and have to go all the way through the Bible to get more of a picture.  The New Testament tells us much more detail, more directly, than the Hebrew scriptures.  But still, there seem to be differing ideas in individual verses, so how do you unify the whole thing?  Is there a single thread?  Yes, there is!

Let's begin with a summary passage, Hebrews 1:1-3 which says "Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe. The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command. When he had cleansed us from our sins, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven."  This tells us that the greatest revelation of God is not by the prophets and others who wrote to the Hebrew people, but from the very Son of God -- Jesus.  So then, to understand God, we have to look at Jesus. 

There's even more revealed in this passage.  The Greek says that the Son is "of the same essence" which means he is identical to the Father, not in any way inferior or separate, so that the Son is God just like the Father is God.  This is said so we understand we can completely trust whatever Jesus tells or shows us about who God is. 

So, since the Son (Jesus) shows us who God is, we should look to Jesus, to what he said, how he responded to people, and how his followers explained him to us -- which then helps us understand what was written in the Hebrew scriptures about God.  Another way to say that is, the Bible, the written word of God, is written to show us the Living Word of God -- the Son, Jesus; and by looking at Jesus, we learn who God is. 

What does that mean about how important Jesus is in the Bible?  We'll look at that next time.