Over and over I talk with Christians who think of their relationship with God primarily in terms of obedience. What Christianity is at its core, they think, is doing the things that God demands. They will affirm that they God has “saved” them, He has forgiven their sins and justified them. But they live as if their sanctification is up to them, is a potential they have to actualize.

What is it fundamentally that God wants or expects from us? Was God primarily concerned with obedience from His people in the Old Testament? Then when they blew it, He had to send His Son to save them because they hadn’t succeeded in being obedient enough?

In my last entry, I looked at the story of Adam and Eve. We often we focus on God’s command to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to confirm our belief that obedience is the bottom line of what He wants. But we saw that the bottom line for God was for Adam and Eve to know Him, His good and giving character and to count on Him to be who He was revealing Himself to be. Yes, obedience is included in that, but it is a certain kind of obedience, namely, one that is a response of trust and confidence in God to be who He is. And that is a very different kind of relationship to God than one of just doing what God wants.

So now let’s consider Abraham. Let’s consider God telling Abraham to take Isaac “‘your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon on of the mountains of which I shall show you’” (Gen. 22:2). “Well, there you go” you tell me. God is a God of commands, and He is always concerned that we obey Him. “Just do it, Abraham!” And if we only look at these few verses I can see how we can be tempted to think this. The narrator tells us that God is “testing” Abraham. And when God stops Abraham’s hand, He tells Abraham that He now knows that Abraham fears God.

Well, what is really happening here? Is God mean and exacting in demanding Abraham give up his beloved son just because that’s what he wants? Is that what He demands? I don’t think so. This becomes clearer if we consider the whole story of Abraham and ask : How does God motivate Abraham?

The first thing we need to see is that when God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, He has already been dealing with Abraham for more than 30 years. It was 25 years from the time that God called Abraham from his home in Ur to the time when Isaac was born. And Isaac is old enough to carry the wood for the offering when this event occurs (Gen. 22:6). 

Let’s look at the interactions between God and Abraham during these 30+ years.  Let’s start with their first encounter. God comes to Abram and says, “‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves’” (Gen. 12:1-2). Notice that most of what God says here is about Himself and what He will do for Abram. He will show Abraham the land he will be given. He will make him, not a nation, but a great nation. He will bless him, and ultimately Abram with be a part of ALL the families of the earth being blessed! So yes, Abraham does leave. But note well, Abraham’s obedience is in response to these amazing promises and to this God who makes the promises. That’s why he does what he does. He trusts in God’s work, His promise, and his own hope of being a blessing.

God actually has many interactions with Abram over the years. When Abram lies twice about Sarah being his wife to save his own skin, God intervenes to have Sarah restored to him. He reminds them of His promise to give the land and for the many descendants several times. Let’s look at one of these times of reassurance. After Abram has rescued Lot, God comes to Abram and says, “‘Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great’” (Gen. 15:1). What wonderful words! No command here, just revealing to Abram more of Who He is and what He is doing in Abram’s life. Abram responds by questioning God’s faithfulness to fulfill His promise of descendants. And what does God do? He assures Abram again that he will have a son, and then He has him go outside and tells him to try and number the stars because ‘So shall your descendants be’” (Gen. 15:5). How gentle and caring God is here. Abraham’s response? “And he believed the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” (15:6).  God reveals more and more of His character and purposes to Abram and, in so doing, draws out of Abram a response of trust.

Right after this event, God establishes a covenant with Abram and tells Him more of what will happen to Abram’s descendents. Then Sarai (Sarah) gives Abram Hager so that he can have descendants. How does God deal with this? He cares for Hager and for her son Ishmael and establishes a relationship with her (ch. 16).  He doesn’t reject her or Abram because of Sarai’s distrust of God and His promise.

After 24 years, God again states His promise to Abram. This time He includes the fact that the covenant that He has established with Abram will continue with Abram’s descendants because God will continue His relationship with them. He will establish “‘an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you’” (17:7). 

And it goes on. It is not possible, here, to include all of the times God interacts with Abram, but I will briefly mention a few more. God renames both Abram and Sarai. He tells Abraham He will bless Sarah, and He reassures her when she laughs at the idea of her becoming a mother in her old age. God tells Abraham what He plans to do to Sodom and Gomorrah. Now what is fascinating in this story is that Abraham feels the freedom to go back and forth with God on whether he will destroy Sodom if there are even a few righteous there. Look at how Abraham’s relationship with this God has grown over the years!

I just want to take a moment here to mention how truly astonishing and radical this God must have been for Abraham. When God first came to him, Abraham was not looking for a god. He lived in a culture that already had their gods, and most likely, he worshiped the moon goddess of Ur and possibly others. And what did this worship consist of? Their understanding of the gods is that they were all arbitrary and for the most part disinterested in humanity. They were as likely to do harm as good, maybe more likely. Worship consisted of the rituals they went through to appease these gods—either in hopes of getting some blessing, or just to avoid the harm they might do to them. But here was a god who came to Abram, interested in Abram, in knowing him and in Abram knowing Him. Over these years Abram learns that this God is unlike all the other gods. This God is actively, intensely interested and involved in Abraham’s life and affairs. He is faithful and remains consistent in His character and purposes. He tells Abraham that he will bless others through Abraham, and Abraham sees this already being true over and over again—in Lot, Hagar and Ishmael, and Sarah.

It is at this point, after all these years of a growing relationship, that God comes to Abraham and tells him to go to the mountain He will show him and to sacrifice Isaac. If God was mainly interested in Abraham’s obedience, why did He take all this time with Abraham, teaching him over and over about His amazingly good and faithful character? As I said earlier, we are tempted to interpret this story in the light of the words “tested” and “fear”. But how are we to understand them?

I believe that we need to understand this story, and these words, in the light of all that has come before. After all, this is what Abraham did. When God came to him this time, Abraham understood him to be the same God he had been coming to know all these years. It wasn’t just a blank God who was speaking—but his God, his faithful and good God, who had taken care of him and blessed him through so many trials over the years. The God he had dared to question over the fate of Sodom. We need to understand that Abraham was not just hearing the words, but knowing the One who spoke them. This is the only fair way to deal with this story. If we ignore all that has gone before, then we are misinterpreting what we read. We are taking it out of context.

How does Abraham view this? Well, we may not be able to know completely, but I think we have a good hint. When Isaac asks his father where the lamb for the offering is, Abraham replies, “‘God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son’” (22:8). Abraham knows that God can be counted on to be true to His character—as He has proven to be faithful over and over again. God wants Abraham to know Him well enough that he is able to count on Him more and more to truly be his God. Abraham obeys God out of this trust. If this is who God is, if He is the One who has unfailingly been with Abraham all these years, who has loved and blessed him and those related to him, then of course he can do as he is commanded. Why wouldn’t he? God has not changed, and He will again prove Himself to be the wonderful God He has revealed Himself to be. Rather than mere obedience, God had, and wanted real relationship with Abraham, and that is what He wants with us.

“Just Do It!” was the motto of the Nike corporation for a period of time. Nike sells athletic gear, mostly shoes. The commercials would show various people straining to do their best in their athletic performance. The advertisement appeals to your desire to face the challenge, pluck up your will and get the job done. The only way to really achieve anything great is to make things happen by exercising sheer willpower.

I think that as Christians, we are often tempted to think that the triune God operates towards us like a Nike commercial. What God mainly wants is obedience from His creatures. He has come up with many rules for us to live by and the only way we can please Him is by obeying them. And, like the Nike commercials, God is not so much concerned with our motivations or feelings—He just wants us to get the stuff He commands done. Our relationship with God, then, is primarily most similar to a master-servant relationship. And we are tempted to judge the quality of our relationship with the triune God by how well we are doing in our acts of obedience.

Where does this thinking come from? Well, I wonder if it stems from a misunderstanding of the character of God as we see Him in the Old Testament. It seems to me our thinking goes something like this: Wasn’t the God of the Old Testament the One who gave the Ten Commandments, plus all those other dietary, liturgical, and ethical laws? And weren’t His punishments always dealt out in response to people disobeying? And His punishments often seemed so severe. Doesn’t that just prove that the heart of the God in the Old Testament was His law and His desire was that His people obey it? Isn’t the very definition of sin simply disobedience?

What I am asking here is a very fundamental issue for our faith and our lives as Christians. What is the heart, the core, of God? Why did He create us? What does He most deeply want from us? How we answer these questions affects every part of our lives as Christians. It affects how we understand who Jesus is and what He came to do for us and in us. Do we think that Jesus primarily came to save us from the penalty of our sins, in other words, our disobedience? It affects our understanding of the Holy Spirit and His work in our lives. Do we believe that the Holy Spirit is given to us primarily to help us obey? And it affects our understanding of sanctification, how we mature in our Christian lives.

Really, what we are going to explore here and in the next couple of entries is connected to the first question I raised, the question that is at the heart of theology—Who is God? If this is a question we think we have already answered and the issue now is “getting the work of the kingdom done”, then I would say, we are already heading down the wrong path in our understanding of Who God is, who we are, what sin is, and what our lives here on earth are fundamentally about. Actually, the irony of all this is that even our understanding of what obedience is, is determined by Who we believe God to be.

I believe that the central question God Himself has sought to raise and answer from the beginning is the question of Who He is. He wasn’t, and isn’t, seeking first to make sure His creation knows what they are to do, but to help us know the God that He is, and to help us grasp and understand everything else in the light of Who He is.

As Paul pointed out in his letter to the Galatians (3:17), the law came 430 years after God had established His covenant with Abraham. If God’s main interest was our obedience according to Law, why did He wait so long to tell them the rules?

But before we look at God’s relationship with Abraham, let’s step even further back—to Adam and Eve. Looking at the first chapter of Genesis, the author tells us that humanity was made in His image and to have dominion over the rest of creation. But what does He tell the first man and woman after creating them? What is the word He gives them? Here is what the text says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (1:28)’” So the first thing that these humans receive from God is a blessing, and then a commission to be fruitful and to have dominion over everything.

But God doesn’t stop there. He goes on, “‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. (vv. 29-30)’”

So what are the first things God wants to tell those beings that He has created in His image?—that He a God who blesses, and that He is giving them all that they need to fulfill the purpose He has for them. He reveals that He has not only created them for good purposes, but that He is committed to enabling them to achieve these purposes. He reveals Himself to be a giving God, and a blessing God.

If we look at the creation narrative in the second chapter, there is a beautiful description of God preparing a home for His human creation: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food…(2:8-9a)” When God speaks again to Adam, He tells him that he is free to eat of every tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die. (2:17)”

Again, we see that God does reveal something of His good character to Adam and Eve. He shows Himself a God who cares and provides for the needs of His creation. And before He created Eve out of Adam’s rib, He reveals Himself to be One who gives Adam the opportunity to participate in His work by having him name all the creatures.

So, before the serpent ever comes along to tempt Eve, what do they already know about God? What has He revealed about Himself? They know that He is a God who blesses them and provides abundantly for them—they can eat freely of all the trees that God has placed in the garden for them except for one. And He intends for them to have dominion over all of creation. In other words, He gives them all of what He has made for them to subdue and take care of.

And what does the serpent do when he tempts Eve? First, he misquotes God to have Him sound like One who mainly withholds instead of gives, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?(3:1)’” Satan isn’t primarily checking to clarify God’s commands, he is trying to get Eve to distrust God by questioning His character, questioning if God can be trusted to be the God He has revealed Himself to be. You notice, then, when Eve responds she adds to what God actually said, making Him look more strict than He was, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die. (3:2-3)’” Having set her up to think of God more negatively than He has actually revealed Himself to be, the serpent now goes on to claim that God was lying, “‘You will not die,’” and then to claim that the reason God has forbidden this fruit is because “‘God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing God and evil. (3:4-5)’”

What the serpent does, in getting Eve to eat the fruit, is to get her to question whether God could be trusted, whether He really was as good and as for His creation as He had revealed to them. And God, as we have seen, had made sure to let them know enough about Who He is that they could trust Him and obey Him (eat of all the trees but one) out of that trust.

So, from the first pages of the Bible, we can see that the God who is, is a God who desires His creation to know His true character and to trust Him to be the God He reveals Himself to be. All human action, then, is to be based and grounded in that knowledge of who God really is, and upon nothing else. And sin is primarily distrust of God and what springs from that distrust.

The New Testament speaks a lot about faith. Jesus commends some who come to Him for healing, saying “your faith has made you well.” When the Roman centurion tells Jesus that He doesn’t need to come to his house in order to heal his servant, Jesus marvels over the man’s faith, “Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith” (Mt 8:10).

Well, just what is faith? In our culture today, we often hear that all kinds of things are possible if we just have faith. It seems that we think of faith as a sort of force we impose on our circumstances or our lives and, if we have enough faith, we will get what we want. Faith is a commodity we want to have a lot of. And the way to get it is to work it up in myself by sheer willpower.

This view of faith is often the one that Christians also hold. We are encouraged when we are struggling to just “have more faith”. The so-called prosperity teaching tells us that if we have enough faith, God will bestow blessings upon us. The implication, of course, is that if we are not healed or well provided for, it is our fault because we did not have enough faith.

Is this what Christian faith is? When Jesus tells the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years and was healed when she touched the hem of Jesus’ robe that her faith made her well, does He mean that she was healed because she had enough faith? What was the difference in the centurion’s faith compared to others? Was it simply that he had more? Does Jesus work with us according to the amount of faith that we have?

This understanding of faith is completely unbiblical. In the Bible faith is always understood in terms of the object of your faith. It is not a matter of how much faith one has but where one places his or her trust. My faith is defined by the one I have faith in.

My trust in my husband is shaped by who he actually is. I have faith that he is faithful, insightful, and good at repairing things around the house. However I don’t trust him to perform heart surgery on me! I don’t believe that he could operate if I just had enough faith.

So my trust, my faith, in my husband is a response to who I find out he is. The more I know about him, the more I trust him and the more my trust in him truly reflects who he is. My trust follows his revelation of himself and it grows in and through our relationship. I first may trust Gary for what I learn from his actions, but as my knowledge of him grows, I come to trust in his character, his person. In other words, I come to trust him for who he really is.

When Jesus commends people for their faith, He is commending them for putting their trust in Him rather than somewhere else. He sees that they have decided to place trust in Him based on what they have come to know about Him. Their faith, like my trust in my husband, is a response to Him. People came to Jesus because they had heard of or witnessed the healings He had performed, or they listened to His teaching. Some at first were trusting completely in His power, His ability to heal. But as they came to know Him better, they came to trust in who He is.

This is why Jesus can tell them that their faith can be a small as a mustard seed (Mt. 17:20). Their faith is only as good as the One in whom they are placing their trust, not in the amount of faith that they have. Is it my faith in Gary that makes him who he is or gets him to behave in certain ways? Does he fail to come through because I am not trusting enough? Do we prompt God to work by having enough faith? Does He have a faith meter in heaven that measures our amount of faith and He won’t work until it reaches a certain level?

We aren’t to have faith in our faith. And we don’t start with our faith. We can only have faith in God when we start to see who He is, His character and purposes. In Hebrews 11:11, Sarah’s faith is described in this way: “she considered him faithful who had promised.” She trusted the promise of an heir because she trust the One who promised.

We don’t trust in our circumstances. The end of Hebrews 11 describes those who by their trust in the God who is were able to endure great hardship and suffering. They knew the eternal God who had met them, had revealed Himself to them and had the last word on temporal things, so they counted on God to be the God that He is.

When we are struggling to trust God, we aren’t to just try harder. We need to look away from ourselves to God. Having trust in God is like enjoying a sunset. To enjoy a sunset, we must place ourselves before the sunset and let it work on us. The enjoyment of the sunset is drawn out of us as we watch it. And faith is like that, except we behold the very glory of God’s faithfulness in Jesus instead of a sunset!

When my husband was a campus minister, he once had a student who asked him “Who should I pray to, God or Jesus?” When he inquired as to why she asked this question, she replied, “Well, I really like Jesus, but I am not so sure about God.”

Is there a split between Jesus and God? Does Jesus show us who God is, His very heart and purposes, or is there a God behind Jesus? Is God the Father full of wrath, ready to punish us for our sins, but Jesus is the nice guy who protects us from Him? Are God and Jesus somewhat at cross purposes towards us? Or are there some things about God that Jesus doesn’t show us?

I remember struggling with this a lot when I was a young Christian. I really liked Jesus. He was loving and compassionate. But I felt that, with God the Father, I could never be sure of being fully accepted and loved. I always felt that I was being “weighed and found wanting” as Scottish pastor and writer George MacDonald would say. While I believed that He loved me “unconditionally”, I felt a need to do what I could to make sure He continued to love me.

Is there a God behind Jesus? Is there some slippage of character, attitude, or heart between the Father and the Son? Or can we trust that Jesus fully reveals the goodness, the grace, the true character of the triune God? Is God the Father just like Jesus the Son?

What the New Testament writers emphatically declare is that Jesus is the clearest, fullest revelation of the character and purposes of the whole God. In fact, in Jesus we don’t just learn more about God, we meet God Himself. This is how the author of Hebrews begins his epistle: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (1:1-3).

The epistle’s author draws a sharp and absolute distinction between ALL the others ways and times God has revealed Himself, or spoken, and when He reveals Himself in Jesus, the Son. Before, all revelation had been revelation about God, but now we have God’s self-revelation. Have you ever heard a lot about someone and then met them yourself and come to know them as a friend? There is a huge difference, isn’t there, between knowing about a person or coming to know them, as they reveal themselves to you in person, face to face. God did speak in various ways to individuals in the Old Testament: through a burning bush, dreams, angelic visitors, or a voice out of a whirlwind. But now, in Jesus, God shows up and lives among His creation.

Jesus is not just another messenger, not even the greatest of all those whose spoke on God’s behalf in the past. He is God, God the Word, who is eternal and always with God, as John puts it at the beginning of his gospel. Paul, in his epistle to the Colossians, declares that Jesus is the very image of the invisible God (Col.1:15). In Jesus, we meet God Himself.

Jesus declares that to know Him is to know the Father. During His last supper with the disciples, Philip asks Him to show them the Father. Jesus replies, “Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?”(John 14:8-10) To see Jesus is to see God. To see Jesus is to see the Father.

Jesus is emphatic about this point. In the Gospel of John Jesus speaks of His close relationship with the Father and that to see Him and know Him is to see and know the Father. Jesus teaches, “He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me.”(John 12:44-45) Jesus doesn’t let His listeners consider Him alone, apart from His Father. There is no slippage between the Father and the Son. In fact, to trust in Jesus is to trust in the Father.

And all of what Jesus says and does is always according to what He hears and sees from His Father (John 5:19-20, 30). Jesus speaks the words of God and does what God is doing, and this is true because He is God. As God the Son he shows us the whole God: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The whole God was at work in the Incarnation and in the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus Christ.

There is no God behind Jesus, because Jesus IS God, He is the Son and He is always with the Father and the Spirit, even when He was incarnate. God did not cease being God, He assumed humanity. And therefore, we can rest in the wonderful knowledge that when we look at Jesus, we see the triune God Himself. What you see is what you get! He graciously enters our time and space and reveals Himself to us in flesh and blood. There is no “part” of God that remains hidden. The whole God wants a relationship with His creation, the whole God was willing to pay the price to free us from our sin, to heal us, and make us able to truly be His children, His very beloved children. The whole God, Father Son and Spirit is our loving, gracious Savior.

When Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27) they had already been with Him well over two years, listening to Him teach, seeing Him perform miracles, living with Him. They had seen Him walk on water, feed two separate crowds in wilderness settings with whatever meager supply of bread and fish they gave Him, and raise Jairus daughter from the dead. They had heard Jesus declare to a paralyzed man that his sins were forgiven, an outrageous statement that set the Pharisees, the religious leaders, murmuring against Him. Now they were traveling around to villages in Caesarea Philippi when Jesus asks them, “Who do you say that I am?” This is the question Jesus wants to have them wrestle with. Now that they have been with Him all this time, seen and heard so much, who did they think that He was?

This is very interesting to me. All this time Jesus has spent with them was leading up to this question. Jesus has been revealing to them His heart, His character, His purposes and now He wants to see if they have a grasp of who He really is. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah”, and Jesus commends him for that. But as soon as Jesus begins to teach them about His coming suffering and death and resurrection, Peter rebukes Him! So, Peter gets the right label, He calls Jesus the Messiah, the anointed one of God. But when this same One goes on to tell of the suffering that awaits Him, Peter immediately rejects what he hears, he resists knowing more deeply Who Jesus really is, he resists letting Jesus tell him what it means that He is the Messiah.

Peter, at that point, wasn’t able to see the connection between the words about suffering and the person that he had lived with for over 2 years. I wonder if he had a glimpse of Jesus’ power and authority, but hadn’t grasped His character, His heart.

I think we can be a lot like Peter. We think that because we have the right labels for Jesus that we know who He is. But when we are making decisions in our lives or when we are struggling, we act and live, not according to the labels, but to the content we have consciously or unconsciously given to those labels.

Do we really know Jesus? Or do we just affirm certain statements about Him? When I worked as a campus minister several years ago, I asked one of my students, “What do you love about Jesus?” He was a nice, decent sort of Christian trying to be good but really had no joy in his faith. He gave me the standard answer, “Well, He died for my sins and I can go to heaven.” His understanding of Jesus was limited to this one simple statement. I replied, “Yeah, I know that. But what do you love about Jesus Himself? What do you love about His character, His values and concerns? What do you love about Who He is?”

I could tell this was a question he had never considered before. He rummaged around in his brain for something else to give me, but came up empty.

No wonder he had no real joy in his Christian life. As far as I could tell, his understanding of being a Christian was that we affirm certain statements about Jesus and then we try real hard to be obedient to His commands. Jesus provided forgiveness of sins and an example that he was to emulate. But his immediate situation and the commands he believed he was to obey were more real and present to him than Jesus Himself.

I think we have often answered the Who question about God far too quickly and simply. We answer with His titles, or what He has done in saving us, or by listing His attributes. But none of these are adequate and tend to leave us living as if God is not fully good, not fully active and present in our lives. He remains somewhat abstract and distant to us. And this often comes out in how we live our lives, how we go about the what and how of the Christian life. For instance, what we pray and how we pray reflects our assumptions about the One to whom we are praying. Is our heavenly Father slow to listen, needing to be persuaded, grudging towards His children?

So, what do you love about Jesus?

Once, when Jesus was confronted by Pharisees over his receiving sinners and having fellowship with them, He responded by telling them three parables. The Pharisees believed that a righteous person would not taint his/her righteousness by hanging out with those who were decidedly not righteous. To be and remain righteous was to avoid those who did not uphold the oral and written law to the same extent that they did.

Jesus knew that the deeper issue for these Pharisees was their understanding of the character of God. Their understanding of what righteousness is indicated that they really didn’t know the character and purposes of the God they claimed to serve. So He describes the nature of God in these parables. In the first two, God is described as the One who searches diligently for the one who is lost. He persists until the lost one is found and then rejoices and invites others to rejoice with Him.

It is the third of these parables that I want to focus on. This well-known story, though often referred to in terms of the younger son, is really a story that reveals the heart of the Father. It turns out, neither son knew the character and purposes of the one who was their father.

First, the younger son. He viewed his father merely as a means to fulfilling his own ends. He resented having to live under his father’s roof and authority.The only good that could come from his father was the money he would gain upon his death.

But he must have known something of his father’s love and gentleness, because he decided to ask for his inheritance early, a request that couldn’t have been more insulting. He might as well have said, “I wish you were dead!” His father, rather than denying the request or shaming his son, gave him his share and let him leave.

This son didn’t give another thought to his father until he had run out of money and found himself in desperate straits. As he thought over his despicable situation, he remembered that his father was the kind of person who treated even his servants well. As he started to consider who his father really was, he came up with a plan for how to return home and improve his life. He would go home and ask his father to take him on as a servant, aware now that he was “no longer worthy to be called your son”, but knowing enough of the goodness of his father to hope that he would take him in as a hired hand.

But what the son finds as he approaches home is that he still knew very little of the true heart of his father. While he was still a long way off from home, he sees his father running out to meet him. The father that he had shamed and insulted was doing something most undignified for his standing and age. He had picked up his robes and was running to meet the young man. I wonder what the son was thinking as he saw his father approaching. Before the son is able to say anything, his father embraces and kisses him. What an unexpected welcome! But the son doesn’t yet hope for more and now launches into his prepared speech.

But the father didn’t even let him finish. He reveals his surprising, wonderful heart by turning to his servants, who must have coming running after him, and telling them to provide his son with the best robe, sandals for his feet, and a ring for his finger. And if that was not enough, the father ordered the fatted calf, the one prepared for special feasts, be killed and that everyone should celebrate the return of his son. “Who is this man?,” the son must have wondered. “How could he still declare me his son after all that I have done?”

But Jesus doesn’t end the story here. He turns now to the older son and shows that he, too, does not know or does not choose to acknowledge the true character and purposes of his father. Unlike the younger son, the older had stayed home and had obediently worked the fields. But even with all that time living with his father, he had no clue who his father was.

When the older son finds out what the music and dancing was about, he refuses to go in and welcome his brother home. Rather than leaving him outside, the father comes out to him and entreats him. The son’s reply tells us a lot about his understanding of his father’s character, “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends…” This son believed that his father was a taskmaster, an order-giver. His relationship with him was as servant to master, it was based on a contract. He believed that he had to work to gain his father’s rewards and was bitter because, compared to his disobedient brother, he had not “earned” even a kid to enjoy with his friends. So, while he was home, working side by side with his father, he was blind to the real heart of this man.

The father’s response is meant to help the eldest son realize his deepest issue is his misunderstanding of his own father. “’Son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.’” He tells him that their relationship is not master-servant but father-son. And as the son, the father tells him that he owns all that the father owns. The older son, in other words, had been living as a servant rather than a son. And, ironically, this led to his being directly rebellious and defiantly disobeying his father, refusing to go in to the celebration of his brother’s return.

Jesus wanted to invite the Pharisees to consider their faulty view of God. They had come, like the older son, to view their relationship with God as contractual, as master—servant. They did their part, they “kept” the law, and God was to do His part. In the parable, we don’t know if the older son eventually went into the feast or came to know his father more truly. Jesus leaves it open. The listening Pharisees are invited to see that they are in the same place as the older son. They are being given a clear picture of their heavenly Father and being invited in to enjoy the feast on the younger brother’s return.

For Jesus, the central question He needed to get the Pharisees to consider is the Who question: Who is God? And this is true for us. Over and over we need to reflect on what our understanding of the character and purposes of the triune God. Are we like the younger son, viewing God as mainly a means to what we want, and not an end in Himself? Or are we like the older son, tempted to believe that God is a taskmaster, only interested in our grudging obedience? We bring no glory to God if we live and obey Him in such a way that gives lie to His true character.

“I like to think of God as…” Ever hear anyone say this? “I like to think of God as kind and loving”, “I like to think of God as not judging me”, “I like to think of God as kind of grandfatherly.” Somehow when people are come to address the question of knowing God, they often don’t see the absurdity of these statements. We can recognize the fallacy when we use the same kind of thinking in relation to other people. I could say that “I like to think of my husband as being tall and blond”, but my thinking that way doesn’t add up to anything. He doesn’t become tall and blond just because I think of him that way. When people say they like to think of God a certain way, then what they are really saying is that they like a god who doesn’t really exist, who is on the same level as an imaginary friend. A god who merely lives in their heads.

I think that even as Christians we can be prone to do this–to believe in a god that is more a product of our thoughts or our fears. We start with ourselves and through our reason and perhaps comparing that with what others think, we try to work out what a “God” we can approve of might be like.

This may be why we are tempted to think that formal theology is not much better. It’s just a bunch of ideas and concepts that academic people have thrown together, some times with the help of the Bible, some times not. Mere speculation, often abstract and disconnected from real life. But we wonder what the point of all the effort is if that’s all you get? I can easily come up with my own favorite ideas and thoughts about God without going through all that rigamarole.

While some of what passes for theology isn’t much more than that, it isn’t what theology proper is. That’s bad theology (if it is theology at all) and no one should be interested in that. I have said that theology is the actual study of God and that it must begin with the “who” question. When begun that way we head off into a whole new direction. So, we’re not just making up ideas and concepts and pictures of God as we please. But rather seek to know God as God has made Himself known.

So what’s involved in the study of God, to discover Who God is? Theology is a science and can be done in the same way good science is done in other fields. Good scientists don’t just give us their favorite thoughts and speculations about how they’d prefer things to be. They don’t just make up imaginary facts. They study the reality that is there and seek to understand its nature. So how is theology a science?

Good science must conform its study of an object to the nature of the object itself. In other words, the object under study must dictate how it is studied—otherwise you are not going to be able to come to any real understanding of your object. For instance, how you go about studying a rock would be very different than if you were going to study a human. You would not break the human down to its mineral components and believe you now understand humans. You can’t learn much about the moon through a microscope. It takes a telescope (or traveling there if you can get there) So, theology must be done in a manner that conforms to the One being studied, that is, God. You have to approach the divine Subject matter in a particular way and using the right “tools” if we are going to really know something about God.

Now you might be thinking, but God is not a rock. In fact God is not a part of creation at all. You can’t put God in a test tube. And you’d be exactly right. God, the Christian God, is not a material creature at all. So how can we study God? Well, only if God has made Himself available to us to study, in time and space, where we live. We have to know God according to the way he has made himself knowable to us. Otherwise all we can do is speculate and make up ideas about our favorite view of God.

But in the Christian faith, we’re not stuck like that. God has made himself knowable to us in a very particular time and place. In fact, in flesh and blood as well. God gave Himself to be known in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God with us, Immanuel. Jesus is God’s own self-revelation. This is part of what we mean by Christ’s divinity. To know Jesus is to come to know the Father and the Spirit as well, to know the whole God. So the scientific way of knowing the Christian God is to know Him at the exact place where God, who is not a creature, has revealed himself in time and space, in flesh and blood, in and through Jesus Christ. Without this particular and personal self-revelation of God, we could not really know God. We could only speculate.

So, Christian theology has to start with the Christian God, the God who reveals Himself in His relationship with Israel and finally and most completely in Jesus Christ. Far from starting with us and trying to head out and find “God”, Christian theology is a response to the fact that the God who is has come to us, has confronted us with Himself and revealed to us His character and purposes. Abram was not out looking for a god. He already had one. He was already worshipping the local moon goddess. God broke into Abram’s life. And notice that in the very act of speaking with Abram, God demanded a response. Abram had to respond to what he heard — he had no choice. He had to either reject or accept the proclamation and therefore, the God who was proclaiming.

In Christian theology, we are seeking to understand the God who is not a creation of our own imagination, or a product of our thinking or of the study of creation or other people’s thoughts. But rather, we seek to understand and know the God who is utterly above and Other and yet who has come to us, has addressed us in person. Theology is the pursuit of seeking to understand who this God is who has spoken to us in Christ. Theology has been described, therefore, as “faith seeking understanding.” We are seeking to know, more and more and in particular, the heart, the character, of this God who reveals Himself and so confronts us in Jesus Christ. Theology, as the study of God, directs its “Who” question about God to Jesus Christ for that is the place where God has give us His answer to that question before we even asked.

My guess is that when you hear the word “Theology” you immediately think of dry scholarly discussion that is incomprehensible and totally irrelevant to your everyday life. Books of theological teachings and discussions belong on dusty, hard-to-reach shelves. Or you may think that “theology” refers to a list of doctrines that Christians are believe or assent to. While good doctrines are important, we need to see the connection between them and how we live day to day.

The truth is that theology has everything to do with our everyday lives as Christians. Why? Because, believe it or not, we are all already theologians; we already have theological assumptions about who God is and what He is about. And our theology is the framework by which we live. Sometimes this “theology” we live by is not really congruent with the doctrines we hold to be true. Other times, our doctrines don’t really reflect the truth and need to be re-examined.

Theology is, quite simply, the pursuit to know and understand the character and purposes of the triune God that are revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Paul, in speaking of Jesus in his letter to the Colossians, says “He is the image of the invisible” and that God was pleased “to have all his fullness dwell in him” (Col. 1:15, 19). The author of Hebrews declares that Jesus bears the very stamp of God’s nature (Hebrews 1:3b). How in the world can we know God? We can only know Him if He reveals Himself to us, and this is precisely what He has done in coming to us in Jesus.

What I find with most people I talk to is that their “working theology”, that is, the one that they are living by daily, is in many ways not congruent with the true character and purposes of God that we can see in Jesus. But often they are not aware of this, thinking they are not really interested in theology.

How can we learn what our “working theology” is? A few key questions may help. Look at how you are motivated each day, consider how anxious you are. How do you deal with crises, both large and small ones, in your life? Often we allow fear to fill in the gap between us and God which colors our understanding of and relationship with our heavenly Father. The result is that we act or react to our situation on the basis of that fear-distorted view of His true character. And this misapprehension of God, this deep misunderstanding of His nature, affects literally everything we do and think.

When you are struggling, what are you thinking or assuming about God? Does He care? Is He here? Can He do anything? What is He up to? Is He not happy with me? What should I be doing to get Him to do what I want? What do I think God is primarily up to in my life? What does He want from me? But notice that these are theological questions! They all involve who we think (or fear) God is. You can see that if theology deals with the very nature of God, if it answers the question Who God really is, then it lies at the very center of the Christian life.

This is why we need to care about theology. Only a secure grasp of the true character of God gained through an intimate knowledge of the character of Jesus can cut through our fears and anxieties to provide a more secure foundation for our lives. Good theology about Who God is feeds our faith and can correct our working theology when it is out of sync with the truth and reality of His revelation in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And if it is not our fears and anxieties that get in the way of seeing who God really is, I’ve found that too often we Christians are busy focusing on the “what” and the “how” questions of the Christian life: what should I be doing in the church? What is the most effective way to pray? How should I prioritize my day? How can I make my relationships better? Good questions, but before we can answer these questions, we need to ask the most fundamental one: who is God? When we don’t, when we only ask what and how, we can come to believe that God is only interested in the “what” and “how” as well. In other words, dealing only with these so called “practical” questions will lead us to hold certain ideas about who God is—they affect our working theology! We can start to believe that we serve a God who is mostly interested in our performance, who is not satisfied with us, who wants slaves and not children.

And doesn’t that affect our deepest thoughts and feelings about ourselves and our lives? A professor I had in seminary once said that “burnout is a theological problem.” It seems to me that, if we looked carefully at our anxieties and struggles, we would see that underneath it all, are our assumptions or our fears about the character and purposes of God.