Our imaginary God?

Here's my June magazine article:

What do you imagine when you hear the word 'God'?  Even if you don't believe in God, you will have an idea of who the God is that you don't believe in (and perhaps as Pastor Timothy Keller wrote “Describe the God you’ve rejected. Describe the God you don’t believe in. Maybe I don’t believe in that God either.” !)  This is not an academic question because our image of God (or our non-belief in God) is a major influence on the way we live our lives and the way we view ourselves, others and the world.

Having realised what our image of God is, the next question is where we get that image from.  For example the Greeks and Romans imagined their gods to be just super versions of humans, thus sharing our characteristics of selfishness, pride and ambition.  And different cultures have come up with different representations of the divine leading to different moral teachings. So if God does exist, is there any way of knowing what he is like?

If we try to imagine what God is like by ourselves we will inevitably create a God that is in our own image: venerating the things we like, and denouncing the things we dislike.  As Christians we believe that we can know what God is like but only because God has chosen to reveal himself to us.  He has done this through his Word, the Bible.  The Creation account in Genesis shows us a God who wants to be known by humanity and wants a personal relationship with humanity, even walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3).  The Old Testament is full of accounts of God revealing his character and his will to people, but it is in the New Testament that God's self-revelation finds its apex.

There we find that Jesus is the image of the invisible God in whom all the fulness of God dwells (Colossians  1:15,19) and that he is the exact representation of God (Hebrews 1:3).  Jesus himself said that anyone who sees him has seen the Father (John 14:9).  So if we want to know what God is like, we need to look at Jesus.  The disciples' experience of the divinity of Jesus, distinct from both the divinity of the Father and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, lead them to the doctrine that is known as the Trinity: “God is one divine Being eternally existing in three divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (“To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism” Qu. 38). This doctrine is particularly recalled on Trinity Sunday, which this year is 4th June.

This complicated doctrine is not one that would be invented, but could only come in response to God revealing himself to us.  And it is no surprise that our finite minds struggle to comprehend an infinite being – as St Augustine said “If you understood him, it would not be God”!  But if we look at Jesus we will get a glimpse of the God who longs for us to know him.