Simplified: Exploring Christianity together

God’s self-disclosure in Scripture is often a little vague - “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14) is not the most easily understood self-description. Solomon once wrote this of God – “God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). Today, we will not engage in apologetics, providing arguments for the existence of God. We are going to begin with the assumption that God really does exist and talk about how this God who really does exist reveals Himself to us through scripture.

Before there was … there was God. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2) “I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is, and who was, and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8) God is the beginning and the end of all things; He is eternally existent. The word “eternal” refers to an existence outside of or beyond time.

God is not unknowable – our knowledge of Him is revealed on God’s terms and at His discrimination. God is a “person” and not an indiscriminate “force”. We know what it means to be a person, because we are created in God’s image. We experience personhood, because we are created in the image of a Person. God also reveals Himself as a Trinity; three distinct, yet interrelated Persons – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

God is wholly “other” than anything in creation, so using created things as metaphors for God will always lead to incomplete comparisons. Because God is holy – separate and apart from all other things – it is a challenge to describe Him adequately using references to created things.

Four quick facts about the Trinity: each of the three Persons is equally and fully God. there is a differentiation among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit. even though there is differentiation within the Trinity, there is a dynamic relationship within the Godhead. although the relationship within the Trinity is dynamic, there is an order of relationship within the Godhead. This does not communicate inequality, but evidences to us an incredibly loving and dynamic relationship within the Trinity.

Often God is pictured as distant, detached and removed from this world; He is seen as not present in the world, nor sovereign in matters of the universe, particularly in matters of humanity. This is known as Deism. Deists based their belief on a distant and detached god on their observation of suffering and strife in the world. The Deists concluded that the answer for this question was that God was one of three things: weak and powerless, unknowing and oblivious, or disengaged, distant and unloving to the plight of humankind.

Through His self-revelation in scripture, we are never even once given cause to question God’s unlimited power. “It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.” (Jeremiah 10:12)

Nowhere in scripture do we even get a hint that God is unaware of what is happening in creation. “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please … What I have said, that I will bring about; what I have planned, that I will do.” (Isaiah 46:9-11)

Not only is relationship key within the Godhead, but relationship with humanity is God’s way of being all throughout the pages of Scripture. God is incredibly relational and present with His people throughout the pages of Scripture.

Not only is God good, but He is loving. “God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:8-10) We cannot get to know the depths of His love, the utter depths of who He is, until we look to the One sent of God, His one and only Son, Jesus Christ. The ultimate revelation of God is in Jesus Christ, the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and the One in whom “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell” (Colossians 1:19).

` If a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, holy, loving, engaged and present to us exists, then what ought our response to such a God be? Acts 17:27 informs us that made Himself known “so that [we] would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us”. Our response ought to be that we seek Him and reach out for Him.

Does an encounter with God require something from us that we will be unable to provide? Does He require our perfection or some immensely extravagant sacrifice? “… what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”. (Micah 6:8) Incredibly, this omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God desires that we walk with Him – that we engage in dynamic relationship with Him, loving the things that He loves, things like justice and mercy. If you are willing to reach out to God today, you will find Him ready, willing and able to accept you .