Cats and God, part 1

The McCulley household once more includes cats, by name Haley and Susie. They are cute, I must admit, even though I'm not a cat lover. They do what cats do -- eat, sleep, play ChasePounce, stretch, test their claws on the furniture, and so forth. It's easy to see that they are cats; they act like cats. And the reverse is true: if I see claw marks on something, I know they've been around -- clawing is one of those things cats do (and I don't).

It's like that as we come to know God. We can know God by what he does (I don't care how many meteorological explanations there are for a sunset, God makes them!), and by what he tells us he is like in the Bible. And we can be sure that what we are told about him is not only true, it's according to his nature -- to who he really is in his being.

God told us a lot about himself in the Hebrew scriptures, what Christians usually call the Old Testament. But as the opening verses of Hebrews (the epistle in the New Testament) say, now God has spoken to us directly: "Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son." However, more than his speaking, but in his very essence, Jesus the Christ was the person of God among us: "The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command. When he had cleansed us from our sins, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven."

If I want to know what cats are like, I watch cats. If I want to know what God is like, I watch Jesus, because he wasn't just a representative from God, he was and is God. That's why Jesus could say to Philip, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father" in John 14:9. Jesus wasn't an apparition, he wasn't an angel, he wasn't an exalted human, he wasn't just a special teacher -- he was (and remains) God in the flesh. He deserves all honor and glory and praise because he is God. And on top of that, we have an eternal debt of gratitude to him because he did us the eternal favor of dying to pay the penalty of all sin, so we could enter into shared life with him.

God really is who he reveals himself to be through the Son. We can fully trust that Jesus truly reveals the will and character of the Father, and his love for us. The surprise, when we finally get to see God, will be in the sheer magnitude of his person; not in what he is like. That, we already know, through the Son. Hallelujah!