Starting with 'God'

What is God like? How would you describe him (of course, you might not use the pronoun ‘him’, preferring to use ‘her’ or ‘it’ or something else altogether)?

I remember once speaking with a young woman who was an atheist. When she found out I was a Christian she immediately assumed we had nothing to talk about. The conversation went something like this:

“You won’t want to talk to me. I’m an atheist!” she said.

I asked, “Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

 “That’s right,” she said.

 “Then tell me, what sort of a God don’t you believe in?”

 “What do you mean?”

 I said, “For you not to believe in God you must have some idea of what other people think God is like in order to reject that notion.”

 She worked out what I meant and proceeded to describe what she thought other people thought God was like. When she finished I said to her, “If that’s God, then I’m an atheist too!” The God she described certainly wasn’t anything like the one I believe in, nor that the Bible describes.

 J.B. Phillips once wrote a brilliant little book called Your God is Too Small. It deals with some of the ideas people carry about God. The chapter headings reflect people’s views (which Phillips labels as distortions): the resident policeman, the grand old man.

 Phillips works through a dozen or so misconceptions and clearly implies that one of the biggest hindrances to people finding life and reality in the Christian faith is not unbelief, but that people just don’t bother to find out what God is like, especially sources that claim to be God’s self-revelation.

 No one has an understanding of God that is faultless. John Stott once said, “If you think you have God in a box in your mind, it’s not God in the box.” But God has gone to considerable lengths of self-disclosure and, in the Bible, we have a remarkable account of God’s nature and character.

 According to this account, I would suggest there are three essential things to understand if you wish to grasp God’s self-disclosure:

 1.       God is Life

2.       God is Light

3.       God is Love

So, I'm planning to spend some time pondering these three things over the next few days and seeing what we come up with.