|
My Dear Friends,
What is God really like? This is a question I have encountered over many years in many different forms. It has come most poignantly from those who have found themselves overwhelmed by life, either overcome with some grief or anticipated loss, or caught in a very lonely, hopeless place, or in some very frightening or confusing circumstance. C.S. Lewis famously referred to suffering as "...God's megaphone. God whispers to us in our pleasure, but God shouts to us in our pain." Sadly, most of us do not ask this crucial question with such urgency or insistence when most things are going well with our lives.
But when the bottom falls out, or the ground suddenly shifts beneath our feet, we cannot help but to ask it. I was blessed to study for a year as a student at Edinburgh University with Scottish theologian Thomas Francis Torrance. Professor Torrance won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his groundbreaking work on the relationship between science and religion. He wrote profoundly about the broad contours of Christian theology and theoretical physics with great benefit to both believers and seekers who cared deeply about truth. To be honest with you, though, sometimes I barely understood what he was talking about when he lectured on these lofty matters!
But I will never forget a comment he made once in a lecture on the Trinitarian nature of God. He told the story of his role during World War II in which he was serving as an army chaplain. He was holding the hand of a nineteen-year-old soldier who was dying. The same experience emerged years later when he was a young pastor in Aberdeen. Both of these souls asked Torrance exactly the same question: "Is God really like Jesus?" As the young theologian in the making assured them both, he told them "that God is indeed like Jesus, and that there is no unknown God behind the back of Jesus for us to fear; to see the Lord Jesus is to see the very face of God." When we encounter Jesus in our worship, in our daily living or even in our suffering, or when the Holy Spirit enters our lives, there is no other God behind them waiting to be discovered, and God is never other than the One we encounter in Jesus.
This is what the Apostle Paul was saying when he wrote that "there is one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all who is above all and in all and through all" (Ephesians 4:4-6). God is ever and always the same. The author of Hebrews said that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever." Cyril of Jerusalem, the great Church Father of the fourth century, put it like this: "The gifts of the Father are none other than those of the Son, and those of the Holy Ghost; for there is one Salvation, one Power, one Faith."
We who seek to be theologians can make God and faith in God very complicated. Indeed, God is large and powerful, great with mystery. But God also is loving, and wants to be known! Jurgen Moltmann, the great German theologian, says, "The doctrine of the Trinity is nothing other than the conceptual framework needed to understand the story of Jesus as the story of God."
God is like Jesus, and is never other than the crucified, risen One that we follow. "What a friend we have in Jesus!" I sang that song as a little boy, and I am always glad in my heart to sing it to this day. To know this in your heart is to know the Living God.
With Love and Prayers,
Todd Jones
Pastor
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
