God
Pete Jackson
The other day I was feeling very tired as I came home from a
long day at work.
And as I drove up to the front of the house I saw the warm glow
of our kitchen window welcoming me home and in the kitchen I could
see my beautiful wife getting the tea ready.
As I opened the door and greeted Claire I said 'You're a sight
for sore eyes!'
Whereupon she hit me hard round the side of my head with the
soup ladle.
All of which underlines the fact that not only are words
important, but so are the meanings that we attach to them.
I thought I was being nice; where I come from a 'sight for sore
eyes' is something good to look at, familiar, homely, welcome,
friendly.
But where Claire comes from I'd basically just said to her
'you're so ugly that looking at you makes my eyes hurt'.
In this new series we're looking at a whole load of words that are used fairly regularly in our society, and that are found on a regular basis in the Bible.
But what these words mean in society is often very different to what they mean when the Bible uses them. The danger is that we'll read our own personal meaning or societies' meaning into the Bible. What we're trying to do is get to grips the Bible meaning of these words, so we don't misunderstand what God has to say to us.
The word we're looking at here is GOD. Seems like a good place to start. What or who is 'God'? According to a recent survey by YouGov 44% of us here in the UK believe in God. But what do people mean when they talk about 'God'? Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would say they believe in a labour government but how they each define that might be very different, or not, depending on the paper you read. Well to start with, there's a great number of people who don't believe God exists, so for them, to talk about God is to talk about something fictional, like the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas.
Now, I'm aware that many people say they can't believe in any sort of god because of the terrible suffering in our world. That's even more so I think recently in the wake of the tsunami disaster. All I can say is that I think it's an important question but I don't have the time here to deal with it. We have looked at it on a couple of occasions in these slots and I really would recommend that you take a look at the parts of our website tackling the whole question of believing in a good God when there is so much suffering in the world.
Or for others, when they talk about God they're talking about some kind of impersonal force, an energy field that unites everything. Actress Minnie Driver said something like that on BBC1 last week. And others in that survey by YouGov said they don't believe in God as such, but in 'some other kind of Supreme being'.
Very few of those 44% claimed to attend any sort of public worship of any religion. That suggests, and I think our own experience bears this out to be true, that even were people do believe in God then it is as something private, and individual. God is something we have to search for and find for ourselves, or invent for ourselves. Or a God who is kind of 'there' as a comfort in times of need but who demands very little from us. Comfortable.
Ultimately though I suspect the vast majority of people in that we know and in this country are agnostics, that is, they don't know, or aren't sure, what they believe about God. Is there a God? Well, how could we know? Maybe, possibly there's something, it would be nice, but I just don't know. For many people then, the word God is an enigma.
In fact, it's all very vague really. I think Billy Corgan, former singer with rock band 'the smashing pumpkins' probably speaks for the majority position in his song 'if there is a God'.
If there is a God
I know he likes to rock
He likes his loud guitars
And the spiders from Mars
And if there is a God
I know she's watching me
She likes what she sees
But there's trouble on the breeze
And if there is a God
I know they're on TV
The chorus includes the line 'who are you this time, are you one of us, flying blind? Cos' I'm down here throwing stones while you're so far from home'.
'He, she, it,' God is a big IF, and if god does exists then he she or it is kind of like me. That's where our culture leaves us with this word 'god', a great big IF, a sense of longing and confusion, at best the comforting probability of a god constructed by our imagination, a god kind of like us. We find however when we come to the Bible that we have a very different picture. In the Bible we get not the result of an opinion poll on God, nor the musings of human philosophers on the possibility of a god. We get God's own self-definition. And that's because the Bible claims to be God talking about himself and his plans to his world. The Bible claims to be God's own CV. And the Bible tells us what God said to someone once when he asked God 'who are you':
'I AM WHO I AM'
Exodus 3:14
A personal, relational, knowable God
A God who speaks and makes himself known
A God who defines himself.
Ultimately God is the best authority on who he is. And he isn't hiding from us like it's some kind of game, to see if we can be clever enough to figure him out, he hasn't left us in confusion and darkness, he isn't satisfied to remain an enigma, nor is he pleased to let us imagine for ourselves what he is like. Christianity is therefore less about people searching for God and more about God searching for people. God takes the initiative to show people that he is there and what he is like.
'I AM WHO I AM'
And there's a sense when God says that about himself that he's saying 'watch this space'. 'You want to know me, then watch what I'm going to do, what how I act and what I do. Pay attention as I demonstrate what sort of God I AM.'
Just as what we do reveals an awful lot about who we are and what we are like, it's the same with God. So, as we trace the Bible's main plotline in our Bible overview series, that's what we are doing, we are paying attention to God's CV, to what God has done to tell everybody what sort of God he is as he's acted throughout history to rescue people and bring them to know him. God's CV, climaxes in Jesus' life and death and rising again, God's ultimate answer to the question 'who are you', his definition of that word 'God'. When reading our Bible then, we're not setting out just to fill our heads with knowledge, we're not delving into this ancient book out of curiosity, we are looking for God in the place where he says he can be found.