Ask a hundred churchgoers what God is like, and most of them will have to think about it for a moment. Some picture an indistinct figure somewhere in the distance. Some picture a policeman. Some picture a grand old man sitting on a shelf somewhere, well-meaning but rather out of touch.
It matters which picture you carry. You will pray to that God. You will trust Him as far as you think He can be trusted, and no further. You will expect from Him what you think He is capable of doing.
Get the picture wrong, and everything that follows from it is affected. I have put the whole subject into one sentence, and I have never found a better one:
I have two fathers. One is known by his poems. The other is known by His Names.
What Picture of God Are You Actually Praying To?
There is a story about a mother trying to persuade her eight-year-old son to come to church with her. She gave him every reason she could think of. Finally he said, “Gee, Mom, what would you think if you were invited somewhere and every time you went, the fellow was never there?”
There are a lot of false pictures of God, and they are worth naming because they are familiar and none of them is harmless. There is the parental hangover — God assembled from the temper and personality of your own father.
There is the grand old man sitting in heaven, with no idea what century it is. There is the meek-and-mild God, sentimental and powerless, who could not be a hero to anybody. There is the God who demands one hundred percent perfection before He will have anything to do with you.
There is the heavenly bosom, which becomes an escape from life instead of a way through it. There is God-in-a-box, safely belonging to our church or denomination. There is the managing director, so busy running the universe that He has no time for the details of your life.
There is the secondhand God, known almost entirely through what other people have told you about Him. And there is the perennial grievance: I trusted Him once, and He let me down. Then there is what I think of as the pale Galilean — a long list of things you are not allowed to do, who takes so much of the joy out of being alive that you wonder why anybody would want to know Him.
J. B. Phillips tells about a retired clergyman who had read enough fashionable theology, and heard enough of it on television, to conclude that his life’s work had been built on a lie. The experts must know more than he did.
If the resurrection had never happened and the New Testament was simply a collection of myths, then everything he had preached for forty years was empty. He was alone and in poor health, and he did not survive that conclusion.
I do not mention that as a curiosity. A wrong idea about God is not harmless. A man digging in the wrong canyon can work very hard and still come home with nothing.
What Did Jesus Call Him?
Father. Jesus used that word over and over, and He repeatedly called Him your Father, as though He wanted to make sure that every individual understood that this was personal. Jesus insisted that the power behind this astonishing universe can properly be described by that word. Then He built everything else out from it.
If your Father puts that much detail into a flower that nobody may ever look at closely, how much more attention is He paying to you? Even with all our faults, we still know how to give good gifts to the people we love. And there is no evil in God at all.
He knows the number of the hairs on your head. You are worth more than the sparrows, and He keeps track of them, too. Then there is the sentence that is almost too much to take in. Jesus prayed in John 17 that the world would know that the Father loved them even as you have loved me.
He loves you as much as He loves Jesus. Not a lesser kind of love. The same love. I have had to stop and read that one more than once.
What Are His Names, and Why Do They Matter?
Because His names tell us something about who He is. I have gone through them one at a time, and I will tell you plainly that I felt like a man counting money he could hardly believe was his.
Jehovah-Tsidkenu, the Lord my righteousness — because there was nothing I could ever do to atone for my own sin, and God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for me. Jehovah-M’gaddishcem, the Lord my sanctifier — because being forgiven was not enough. I needed to be changed on the inside.
Jehovah-Shalom, the Lord is peace — and I was a walking civil war. Jehovah-Shammah, the Lord is present — God present all through my life, with nothing hidden from Him. Jehovah-Rophe, the Lord my healer, who restores what the locust and the cankerworm have eaten.
Jehovah-Jireh, the Lord my provider, who set me free from the curse of failure, futility, and inferiority. Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord my banner — and what is written on that banner is love. And Jehovah-Rohi, the Lord my shepherd, which needs very little explanation to anyone who has ever been afraid.
Every one of those names was made available at the same cost. They are not simply character traits God happens to possess. They tell us what He has become to His people and what He has made available to us, at the price of His own Son.
→ I Have Two Fathers is the whole account, and it carries my earthly father’s poems alongside it.
Does He Keep a Record of What You Have Done?
Every honest person tends to assume that He does, because that is how everything else in the world seems to work. Every action has a consequence. Do the crime, do the time. Sass your father, get the strap.
Then read Numbers 22 through 24, where a king hires a prophet named Balaam to curse Israel, and every time Balaam opens his mouth, a blessing comes out instead. Israel had given God plenty of reasons to be angry with them. The king wanted a curse spoken over them.
God would not allow it. Nehemiah 9 and Psalm 78 record the same cycle over and over again for centuries: prosperity, rebellion, trouble at the hands of their enemies, repentance, and then God’s love and forgiveness. Round and round it went.
Not once did God finally say, “Enough. I am finished with you.” Every time they turned back to Him, He received them. He forgave them, restored them, and blessed them again. That tells us something about the way God deals with His children.
What Does He See When He Looks at You?
Not what you see. If you are honest about yourself, you may not be able to think of a single reason why God should want to bless you. Like Adam in the garden, your first instinct may be to find something to hide behind.
Zephaniah says something entirely different, and the Hebrew is even more expressive than our English translation manages to convey. The Lord your God is in the midst of you, a mighty one who saves. He rejoices over you.
He rests in His love. He does not keep bringing your past sins back up. And then the picture becomes almost startling: He rejoices over you with singing. The night I officially repented and asked the Lord Jesus into my heart, God got excited and danced and sang.
I can picture God dancing in a circle with little children joyfully singing, “Matt’s come home! Matt’s come home!” That is the picture I want you to carry. So walk in boldly. Not casually — there is a difference.
Mr. Beaver’s warning about Aslan still stands: he is not a tame lion. He made the whole place and every creature in it. You can love Him and be loved by Him, but you never forget who He is.
Is He Behind Your Trouble?
Jesus gave us a very different picture. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come that they might have life. Two different purposes. Two different sources. But suffering is an everyday fact, and if God is not the one causing it, we still have to ask what the Bible says about where it comes from.
Take Job, which is where almost everybody goes. Job said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away,” and the whole book is sometimes read on the strength of that one sentence. But go back to chapter 1, verse 12.
It is Satan who is given permission to act against Job. Then read Job 3:25, where Job says that the thing he greatly feared had come upon him. God had put a hedge around Job. Job himself had been living in fear, offering sacrifices in case his children had sinned. By chapter 42, Job admits that he had spoken about things he did not understand.
God gave. Something else took away. And what God ultimately did with our trouble is described in Isaiah 53. He put it on Jesus, who carried it to the cross. By His wounds we are healed and made whole.
God disciplines His children, but He does it through His Word, which is sharper than a two-edged sword and reaches into the joints and marrow of a person. Not with disease. Not with failed crops. Not by taking your job or your child.
→ Who is the Liar? You or God? takes the same ground from the other side: He is not a man that He should lie. So if His promises and our experience seem to disagree, one of us is mistaken — and it is not Him.
Why Does This Have to Be Settled First?
Because everything else depends on it. If you do not know God as Father, you cannot know Him intimately. You cannot love Him wholeheartedly. You cannot ask Him for things with confidence. You cannot understand what He wants or serve Him with any real understanding.
Prayer, faith, authority, guidance — all of it grows out of the picture of God that you carry. And this relationship was not arranged by negotiation. It was bought. God made the One who knew no sin to be sin for us. The names of God are available to us because the blood was shed and the tomb is empty.
And the Name that carries all of it is the Name Peter put before the council when they told him to stop preaching:
There is no other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.
When Jesus taught His friends to pray, the first thing He gave them was not a petition, a complaint, or a bargain. It was a name.
Our Father.
Start there, and the rest of it begins to make sense.
→ What If Jesus Had Not Come? is worth reading beside this one, for what the alternative actually looks like.
Still to come in this series: God Does Not Count Our Sins Against Us · Our Father: What God Is Really Like · Who Is He? · God’s Secret Plan · The Name of Jesus: Our Power of Attorney · Through Laughing Children’s Eyes · When God Looks at You, What Does He See? Each will be linked here as it publishes.
