So who is God anyway? Part 2

Originally posted: THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2008

So who is God anyway? Part 2

So why does God elude so many people?

There is only one way to begin to know God and that is found in (John 8:31-32) “[Jesus said] If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples. 32And you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.”

As in any relationship, knowing God is a progressive revelation and you encounter more of Him the longer you invest in that relationship. 

So why do many Christians live a life that in many ways is contrary to Gods’ Word and thus portray an incorrect image of God?

I believe they have “left (abandoned) the love that you had at first [you have deserted Me], your first love” (Rev 2:4 AMP). 

Love should be the foundational principle of the Christian life. Ephesians 5:2 AMP states “[Walk in love] Therefore be imitators of God as dear children”. If we do anything without love, then we are ultimately bound to fail as only the love of God can sustain us, otherwise we just end up pretending, losing our focus and the motivation to continue.

 Fundamentally we are "fake" without "love".

The purpose of our Christian life is to reflect a true image of God, so that people who may not know Him, don't want to know Him, or may be learning about God, can easily witness Him. As a result of our relationship with God, we live more productive and abundant lives [Ephesians 3:20] and become “living epistles” (or examples of God and His Word), thus portraying Gods true nature.



Jesus, who was constantly questioned (more usually than not) in order to undermine Him, gave us a simple instruction on how to connect t0 God & connect people to Him (found in Mark 12:30 AMP); “And you shall love the Lord your God out of and with your whole heart and out of and with all your soul (your life) and out of and with all your mind (with your faculty of thought and your moral understanding) and out of and with all your strength. This is the first and principal commandment.” 

In context, this statement by Jesus was after a succession of questions by the Sadducees and Pharisees and was in direct response to a question posed by a Scribe (writer of the Law – The Kings’/Military Secretary).

The Pharisees and Sadducees were two of three main Jewish political parties at the time of Jesus and can be distinguished respectively as “formalists” and “freethinkers”, and they spent a fair amount of time questioning Jesus’ knowledge of the law, in order to catch him out.



The exact origin of the Sadducees is not clear, however it is supposed that at the time of the desecration of Solomons’ Temple, they bestowed the mantle of the “kings priests” upon themselves, expelling the incumbents (Hasmonean high priests).

The Sadducees denied that the “Oral Law” (The Pharisees believed in the Oral Law) was the revelation of God to the Israelites and believed only in the written Torah (it is believed that the “Oral Law” was obtained by Moses on Mount Sinai, in order to clarify the Torah). The Sadducees also denied the resurrection of the dead and did not acknowledge the after-life (again in opposition to the Pharisees).



So the questions being posed to Jesus were based on the written law (the Torah). The Scribe, who himself was competently versed in the Torah and who is described in this verse as acknowledging Christs’ comprehensive understanding of the law, then took the conversation back to basics and asked “which commandment is first and most important of all [in it’s nature]?” [v. 28]. Jesus' simple answer = “love”. 



So what is love?

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary explains love as “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties”. Christian theologians describe Gods’ love as agape love or self-sacrificing, unconditional love.

Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 all refer to God as “Abba Father”, which is a term used to express deep, warm affection from the perspective of His children. So we are to love the Father as His children.

Now you're perception of a father may differ greatly from that of the image of our Heavenly Father so I will attempt to paint a picture of God from His word, using the discussions of love in the new testament.

Pure love - Heavenly Father - Unconditional Love. These are concepts that many of us will find very hard to grasp. So I hope that you will allow me to reveal Gods heart and His nature to you. At some time in the future I also hope to gain understanding of why the majority of old testament portrayals of God seem to depict Him as vengeful & full of retribution, which contradicts the new testament description.

So how do we prove God exists? We do! Our lives do! The example we set and the abundance of our lives prove He exists.