Understanding God .......... Parables 670

May 18, 2000

Millions of businesses use the Internet to advertise and sell products. Millions of ordinary folks use it to find information and to communicate with friends all over the world.

The Internet started as a convenience for government agencies. Soon other organizations saw its potential. Since the 1994 advent of Internet browsers, the number of web servers who feed information into cyberspace has exploded from a few thousand to over several million. They host uncountable personal and corporate web sites. With such rapid growth, no one has a handle on the actual size of the worldwide web. While most of us don’t care, some ambitious people are trying to draw a map of the Internet. They want to define and catalog it, somehow wrapping their minds around its size and content.

Imagine an even greater challenge: try to figure out God. The study is called “theology” and theology books are filled with finite human attempts to understand Someone infinite, Someone greater than the Internet or even the entire universe.

Theology tries to list God’s attributes and actions, dividing characteristics into those we can share — like mercy, and those that belong to God alone — such as the ability to know all things.

Theologians devote pages describing how God reveals Himself and how we can know Him. They describe and define His names and His triune nature. Some have perplexing titles such as “Essence and Attributes” and “Defenseless Superior Power.”

Besides chapters on His character, theologians describe the way God behaves. They talk of His mercy in sparing those who deserved judgment. They describe how He takes care of His people, sometimes in miraculous ways.

However, the best way to define God is the way He defines Himself. That is, what God is like is most clearly seen in His Son, Jesus Christ. Yes, Jesus was a human being. He was born just as we were, grew up, learned, and was subject to His parents and civil law. He got hungry, thirsty and tired. He was just like us in that He had feelings, thoughts, and choices to make.

However, if we study His life, it is not long before we realize He is not exactly like us, or rather, we are not exactly like Him. We make mistakes, talk out of turn, lose our temper, and get annoyed with people. We lose patience with our own sin and the sins of others. But Jesus said and did the right things — always. He reflects qualities that belong to God and God alone. If descriptions do not convince us that He is divine, Jesus also walked on water, healed the sick, turned water into wine, fed thousands with less than what is in my pantry, and raised the dead. He read minds and forgave sins. Only God can do that.

We may not understand words like immanent and eternal, but in Christ we can clearly see that God is loving and merciful. We can also see how He hates sin but cares deeply about sinners. That is, God pulled on humanity like a pair of pants and walked among us. He knew we could not grasp His nature by mere descriptions. He knew we would stumble if all we had were stories of His interaction with Old Testament Jews. Skeptics even discredit God and those miracles by saying they were superstition, coincidences or freaks of nature.

But no one can explain away Jesus. Real people saw, touched, and heard Him. They interacted with a living person who loved them and did miracles. They watched Him give Himself up to death on a cross for human sin. Over 500 of them rejoiced to see Him alive again when God raised Him from the dead. They knew He was God in the flesh.

By studying Jesus, we can begin to understand God as described in Scripture. By putting our faith in Him, we can experience God too. He will live within us and walk beside us. We never again have to struggle with long words and vague descriptions that always fall short because, in Christ, we can not only know who He is but we can know Him as our Savior and personal friend.