Our Conception of God

One of the most important factors for our spirituality is our conception of who God is. A.W. Tozer wrote:

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us… Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.

And the traditional theistic and Christian view of God is that He is the all-glorious, infinite and eternal being - absolute and personal. He is, to use Anselm's definition, "something that which nothing greater can be conceived." As Francis Chan writes in his book, Crazy Love, God is a God whose glory and perfections cannot be exaggerated. Our problem isn't that we overestimate God, in His holiness and majesty (or His humility), but that we underestimate Him. We underestimate His perfections, His self-sufficiency, His mercy, and His justice.

To delimit Him then according to our finite understanding is dangerous and even potentially disasterous. For this reason God taught Israel that He is not to be conceived or represented by any image whatsoever (Dt.5:8-12; 4:12), not even by men, in whom is embodied the imago Dei! This is not because the image of God in man is somehow deceptive in and of itself, but because of our fallen nature, such that that image is fundamentally corrupted. We must always be cautious then with the conclusions we draw from the human experience alone. That is, they must always be read in submission to the biblical revelation of God to Israel and in Christ particularly. This is the danger, I would suggest, of some modern conceptions of God which picture Him in heaven as weeping over human tragedy, and participating in the pain of the world as a victim of evil. Jesus certainly did so participate, weeping and suffering at hands of wicked men, in His human nature; but the divine nature is not to be confused with His humanity.

The incarnation demonstrates that the image of God in man is a faithful and full representation of God, though in another sense limited (Jn.1:18). His sinlessness guarantees a faithful representation, in the pristine state of the imago Dei. It is limited in accordance to our finitude and ability to comprehend. God condescends, in other words, to communicate to us in ways we can grasp. He even gives us the Spirit in rebirth, by which we are enlightened to properly understand His revelation.

And so Jesus revealed God to us as a man, in ways that we can fully comprehend as men. His human nature and humiliation, in a sense then, both veiled and revealed the divine nature.

Jesus revealed God to us not merely through His human nature, abstractly conceived, but specifically with His words and deeds as an actual, particular man in history. It is noteworthy that the Gospel accounts refrain from communicating Jesus' physical appearances. It is His words and actions which reveal God to us primarily - human actions, and words spoken with the human tongue, to be sure. But they are also divine actions and divine words, unique to Jesus by virtue of the union of the human and divine natures in His incarnate existence. Though the apostles experienced Christ "in the flesh," the representation of God in Christ is now experienced primarily through the Word and Spirit. Hence J.I. Packer's warning about representing Jesus' physical appearances with pictures and paintings. We tend to make Jesus into our image (white, black, asian, etc.). This is potentially dangerous as well. God, even in Christ, cannot be domesticated to our concepts and cultural assumptions. As C.S. Lewis wrote, He is not a tame lion. Or, as Martin Luther famously wrote, "let God be God." We might write, let Christ be Christ - the Christ of Scripture, and not of our wandering imaginations.

So what is critical is that we derive our understanding of God from the revelation given us, and most especially, the revelation contained in the writings of Scripture. It may not reveal everything that can be known about God, but it reveals faithfully everything we need to know, in order to truly know Him (Dt.29:29). We can be confident that there are no pulled punches in His revelation, or skeletons in His closet, awaiting later exposure. We know enough to know that He is all worthy, and enough to be responsible to respond appropriately. And that response is, in a word, worship.