Making sense of God

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25 January, 2019

Life’s full of moments when we find ourselves trying to make sense of something or other. Actually, more often than not it’s making sense of someone or other. Do you ever have my struggle - making sense of ‘self’? Sometimes I surprise myself and often I disappoint myself. I’m left puzzling over a particular comment or action.

One of the great puzzles in life is making sense of God. If it’s hard to make sense of life and people then is it even harder to make sense of God? I have a feeling it is.

One of the challenges is that God is presented in very different ways by people who claim to be in the know. So who’s right? And how can we tell?

During confirmation lessons I learnt that God was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, i.e. all knowing, all powerful, and always present. Are these attributes of God, good news or bad news?

It depends. The attributes of God when removed from a relationship with a loving God are just plain scary. If God’s all-knowing and all-powerful and always-present but not all-loving then sinners beware!

But the good news, which I failed to learn in confirmation lessons, is that God is omniloving, i.e. all-loving. God created us in his image. God called us by name and made us part of the family.

We see the good news in the flesh and blood person of Jesus. When we look at Jesus and what he did we see some of the divine attributes and we know that he’s God the Son. But John reminds us in John 1:18

 No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is truly God and is closest to the Father, has shown us what God is like.

We don’t discover what Jesus is like by studying the attributes of God but we discover what God is like by studying the life of Jesus. This doesn’t deny the attributes but puts them into perspective and anchors them in the loving relationship we have with God. God made us and loves us. Jesus said we can call the Father, Abba (Daddy) because we are his children.

That’s how you make sense of God.

 

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