What is God Really Like?

We had a ton of very good and extremely challenging questions on Sunday night. It was hard trying to sift through them up front and choose which ones to talk about on the spot. We want to make a shot at continuing the conversation that we started on Sunday night. If you were not there, our conversation was around the question, “What is God like?” My proposal is that what we know of God is the way God revealed Himself in Jesus Christ (John 1, Philippians 2, Colossians 1). What is God like? Jesus Christ!

I believe with all that I am that this really is the best way to answer the question. I also believe that this resolves our questions around the Old Testament/New Testament God but it does not make them obsolete or easy. Why would God send His people to kill other nations is still tough even when we understand that God is like what we see in Jesus Christ. 

Challenging questions like this mean that we have to do some very astute reading and interpreting of Scripture such as looking at the whole context, understanding the genre, knowing the culture, etc. I still think that the biggest one is that we keep in mind that all Scripture is inspired (from God through human writers) but not all of Scripture is equally authoritative for all time. We talked about this on Sunday night when we looked at John 5.36 where Jesus is claiming authority or more importance over what John had said and done. The revelation of Jesus trumps and should give us a lens into all previous revelations of God.

The reason I wanted to recap is that over the next few days, we are going to take a stab at continuing the conversation around some of the questions from Sunday night. We won’t be able to deal with all of them but if we have ways to think and talk about them then we are off on the right foot.

God Bless,
Brad Jackson

Brad serves as Pastor for The Table at CPC

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