The God I am writing about is the one that the Bible presents in its pages.8 I wear glasses for driving and without them all is blurry. My glasses make all the difference. Color is sharper, shapes are well defined. I am not a menace on the road. John Calvin, a famous Christian leader of the past, employed the useful metaphor of the Bible described as a pair of glasses. He wrote:
Just as old and bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.9
For Calvin, the Bible was not an end in itself but a means to an end. This book showed him God.
The Bible brings God into focus. It did so for me. Before I started reading it I had the vaguest notion of God. God was the idea that there was a something behind everything. So what did I find? In its pages I found stories of God the creator who made creatures (Genesis 1), God the judge who holds human beings accountable for their actions (Genesis 11), God the rescuer who saves people (Exodus), and God the restorer who will one day make the world right (Revelation 21-22). These stories, I saw, centered on Jesus Christ (the four Gospels) and in so doing one big story emerges. I have more to say on that a little while later in this essay.
In terms of God’s character, I discovered two terms that summed up that character: “light” and “love.” Both ideas are found in one of the brief letters found in the New Testament. In 1 John 1 we read the claim that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. What is John talking about? In context, John is claiming that God is morally pure all the way through. “Holy” is the classic term. Personally speaking, I find this extremely important. I don’t think that I want to trust a God who is only power. I might find myself submitting to sheer power. Prisoners of war had to do that to survive. So what can nuance power? That’s where love comes into play. John also claims that God is love (1 John 4). He grounds this claim on the story of Jesus. The coming of Jesus into the world and his dying that we might live show us what God’s love looks like. It is sacrificial. It removes the barrier between God and ourselves if we are willing to embrace it. I can trust a good God who loves me and who has done something about the brokenness of the world and promises that there is day coming when right will prevail (2 Peter 3).
Second, we see ourselves afresh
Knowing who you are is not a new quest. The saying “Know yourself” was inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Last century, existentialist writer and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre was bleak in his assessment of humankind: “Everything that exists is born without a reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by accident.” A man is born by accident, lives by suffering and dies without a reason.”10 Also last century, zoologist Desmond Morris described us as “naked apes.”11 We have bigger brains than other primates but far less hair, he argued. This century, noted scientific thinker Richard Dawkins argues that human beings are the products of a blind evolutionary process and are soft tissue packages through which the selfish gene replicates itself. In an interview he stated that “… living organisms and their bodies are best seen as machines programmed by the genes to propagate those very same genes.”12 Jordan Peterson captures the anxiety of many when he writes, “It’s easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specs on a trivial spec out of some misbegotten hellhole-end-of-the-galaxy among hundreds of galaxies.”13
The book that understands me tells a very different story. Yes, we are creatures just as other animals are. Creatures are finite, limited. Granted. But there is a special descriptor used of us in the earliest part of the Bible. We are in the image of God, both male and female. We are precious. That’s why to take a human life is a very serious moral matter. To take a human life could mean your own life is forfeited (e.g. in the case of premeditated murder). However, we are also now fallen creatures living in a ruptured relationship with our creator. Augustine in late antiquity wrote of the fall of humankind.14 Jacques Ellul in the twentieth century wrote of the rupture of our relationship with God, with each other and with the environment.15