by Jacob Ninan
What do we know about the God we worship? Have we thought of Him as a Person, His attributes as a being and the aspects of His character we have to deal with? We cannot become like Him in His being as God, but He wants us to become more and more like Him in His character. We need to know what we can expect from Him, and clear away the wrong ideas about Him we may have picked up from the people around us. Our faith in God must be based on who He really is and not on how we imagine Him to be. We need to know the difference between the God who has revealed Himself through the Bible, and the gods people have created from their own imaginations.
People have arrived at different concepts about God, as if everything that exists including us is a part of God, God is an impersonal force or source of energy which we can tap into for our benefit, or that He exists as multiple gods who can meet different types of needs in our life, etc. But God has revealed Himself to us as being one God with personal attributes and character who created everything we see out of nothing to start with.
God is a spirit being, without any physical form (Deut.4:12). This is why He does not want us to represent Him with any physical form (Exo.20:4). Through His written word, the Bible, He has described Himself as one God working differently as three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is a concept beyond our limited human understanding, but we accept it because we realise that as God, He is above our understanding, and because this is how He has described Himself.
As a book written from God's side to people, many times the Bible uses human concepts to describe different aspects of His dealings with us, to make it easy for us to understand. Some examples are the 'eyes of the Lord', the 'arms of the Lord', how different prophets describe Him sitting on a throne, how He came visiting the earth to see what was going on, etc. But then we must remember that these are figurative ways of describing spiritual matters, and we must not think of God in a physical form.
God says that when it came to creating human beings, in contrast to the way in which He created other living beings earlier, He created us in His image (Gen.1:27). Animals have a body and mind (soul), but we have been given a body, mind and spirit. It is through this human spirit, when it is made alive through the Holy Spirit when we are born again, that we are able to communicate with God. Obviously, the image of God in us is not about a physical likeness, because God has no physical form, or about placing divinity inside us, because we are only created beings without the infinite powers that God has. What it means is that God has made us like Him in terms of abilities, such as thinking, feeling and making decisions, but in a very limited scale, so that we can be individual personalities, and function somewhat independently as He does. Because we are like Him in this way, we can have fellowship with Him and He with us. This fellowship was the goal He had in creating mankind. But it is very important for us to recognise that we are not gods with our own powers, but creatures dependent upon God for our very existence, with lots of limitations on every side.
If we believe the world came to exist accidentally and life started and evolved by itself, then there is no right or wrong, anyone to whom we are accountable or any life after death. But it was God who created everything, and He has laid out moral laws for our life (Rom.14:12). This accountability towards God on the basis of His laws must not be forgotten, but this is what people try to avoid. It was when Adam and Eve went outside this and chose to be independent of God that sin began.
Because of the way God has created us in His image, we too have abilities to be creative. As God, He can create things out of nothing, but our creative ideas are limited to the point that we can only 'make' new things out of existing things.
God who created the whole universe out of nothing has unlimited ability to do whatever He wants (Jer.32:27). He has demonstrated it many times to man by drying up a road in the middle of the Red Sea for the people of Israel to walk through, stopping the earth from rotating for a day to give time for Joshua's army to win a battle, turning water into wine, walking on the water, raising people from the dead, etc. People who do not think of God as the omnipotent Creator and think only in terms of what is natural for us find it very difficult to believe in miracles or expect them. On man's side, God has created us in His image with physical and mental abilities to do what we need to do, but on a limited scale.
As the God who designed and created the galaxies as well as the electrons in the atom, and as a spirit being, He has no limitations of space. This is another way of saying that He is present everywhere at the same time or omnipresent (Psa.139:7,8). He does not have to travel from place to place. We have been created with the ability to move and travel, and we are not fixed to any location.
Another attribute of God is His knowing everything. He is an eternal being without beginning or end, and He knows the past, the present and even the future (Prov.15:3). Nothing is hidden from His sight. He knows everything about us. He knows what we are going to say before we say it (Psa.139:4). He has made plans for us even before we get born and knows in advance what we are going to do (Psa.139:16). Knowing this about God gives us comfort and fear at the same time. When it comes to us, He has given us the ability to know many things and use that knowledge. But we don't know the future and we have to trust God with it.
God is sovereign in that while He can do anything He wants, He will only do the things He wants (Psa.115:3). There are obviously many things He does not want to to do because they are against His character. But when He wants to do something, no one can stop Him (Dan.4:35). This makes it clear to us that God will do only what He thinks is best in every circumstance, even though, as far as His ability goes, He can do anything we ask for. If we ask for something knowing that God is able to do it, or because He has done it for someone else, it does not follow automatically that we can have faith that He will do it. He will do only what His wisdom and love tell Him. We must also understand that when God made us in His image, He has also given us a limited likeness of this sovereignty, which we call our free will.
Apart from God's capabilities, what we need to know in order to relate to Him is His character. In the modern world, what is presented by most preachers is the love of God for people (Jn.3:16). We also hear a lot about God's grace, which is the favour which He is willing to show towards us undeserving sinners. But if we hear only about these, and do not understand other aspects of His character such as holiness, righteousness, justice, impartiality, etc., the picture of God we will have in our mind will not be the real one, and that will cause our relationship with Him to be distorted.
God's holiness means that He is so totally free from sin and against sin that He cannot even look at sin (Hab.1:13). On our side, there is not one of us who has not sinned. This immediately brings a chasm between us and God, and there is no good work or ritual that can bridge this gap. Every one of us gets doomed to hell automatically. There are no favourites before God, and He does not show any partiality (Deut.10:17). God is so righteous that He cannot simply decide to forgive our sins just because He loves us, because His justice demands that our sins must receive the deserved punishment. But since He created each one of us, He does not want any of us to perish by getting our punishment (1Tim.2:3,4).
How God managed to balance His love without losing His righteousness and justice was by taking our punishment on Himself. Now that our sins have received their punishment, God is able to offer us forgiveness freely to us, without our having to earn it. Without showing any partiality but keeping His righteousness to the full, He now opens the way for any one who wishes, to receive the water of life freely (Rev.22:17).
What does God want us to do? To be honest and humble to admit our sins and sinfulness, turn from a life of sin to a life with God, and receive salvation in all its dimensions from the one and only Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will not only wash us with His blood and make us clean and acceptable to God, but He will also help us to walk with Him more and more closely, overcoming sin and becoming transformed into His character.