What is your God like?

Sometimes, in my work as a missionary, I meet people who tell me, "I don't believe in God!"

"That's interesting," I'll reply. "What sort of God don't you believe in?"

Invariably, they'll tell me all their negative pictures of God, all the things that make them feel angry or bitter about the possible existence or role of a divine being.

Usually, I listen quietly, and then I say, "Well, I don't blame you. I don't believe in that sort of God either."

This usually takes them by surprise and makes them curious to know more about what God is really like.

But the truth is, even among Christians, you'll find some very diverse and sometimes inaccurate pictures of what God is like. And just like those non believers who don't want to believe in Him, our picture of God will very much determine our experience of God. If our experience of God feels inadequate, it's very probably because our picture of Him is inadequate and inaccurate.

I've been reading in the book of Genesis over the past month, and this week I reached chapter 31. It's the story of how Jacob, (who has lived for 20 years in Paddan-Aram - an area of the Middle East that's in the north of modern day Syria) decides to take his family, flee from his father in law, Laban, and head back to Canaan. Laban pursues him, but there comes a point, at the end of Genesis 31, where the two men decide to make a treaty or a covenant.

The usual way to make a covenant was to swear it in the name of your god, and that is where things get kind of interesting. You see, Jacob and Laban, as well as being in-laws, were also second cousins. You'd expect that these men, from the same family, would worship the same God and see God in the same way. But that's not at all what we see in this passage. The way they refer to God is very telling, and it seems that neither of them really sees the Lord as "my God" at this point in the story. In fact, we see several different perspectives of God emerging in the family lines of these two men.

In verse 42, Jacob calls Him, "the God of my father," but then goes on to say, "the God of Abraham and the fearsome God of Isaac." The Hebrew text literally says, "the fear of Isaac." This would seem to confirm what I had been suspecting as I read earlier chapters in Genesis - that Isaac had a negative picture of God and perhaps even was afraid of Him. Did it date back to that day when it looked as if Abraham was going to sacrifice his son? Did Isaac struggle to understand what God was actually doing at that time?

A little later, in vs 53, Laban refers to God as, "the God of our ancestors, the God of your grandfather Abraham and my grandfather, Nahor." Was it simply a cultural norm to refer to the grandfathers, or was it a sign that succeeding generations had never really made God their own God to the extent that Abraham and Nahor did? Abraham and Nahor seem to have known God in a real and personal way, but it seems that the generation of Isaac and Bethuel kept Him a bit more at a distance. Then, in the third generation, we see that Jacob is on his own journey of finding out who God really is, while Laban actually has other "household gods" - idols that he kept in his tent and that were stolen by his daughter Rachel as Jacob's tribe was fleeing back to Canaan.

There's an old maxim that, "God has no grandchildren," and this family is an illustration of that. It highlights the importance of each individual having a personal relationship with God. It's not enough to have parents or grandparents who knew Him.

I have a friend who used to say to the teenagers on our KKI camps, "You can be as close to God as you want to be." That might sound surprising at first; you only need to have a few conversations to realise that some people are closer to God than others. What my friend meant is that it isn't God who decides who's close and who isn't. Each one of us has a choice about how close we want our friendship to be. The Bible says, "Come close to God, and He will come close to you." James 4: 8  

When it seems that He's distant or that we don't feel we know Him well, it's almost always because we've believed lies about Him and we've allowed those wrong pictures of God to form a barrier to a close and intimate friendship with Him. The more we stubbornly hang on to our wrong beliefs, the less likely it is that we'll be able to see Him as He really is. Perhaps that's what Isaac, Bethuel and Laban did to some extent.

However, Jacob and Laban both seem to know a bit about what God is like. Laban refers to Him as "the Lord" - using the Hebrew word Yahweh or Jehovah. Both men seem to understand that God is an all-seeing witness to their covenant and that He is a judge between them. (vs 50 and 53.) They knew a bit about God, but they didn't yet know Him as well as their grandfathers had done.

Jacob, however, was on a journey - not just a physical journey back to the land where he was born, but a spiritual journey of discovering the reality of the God that his grandfather had known and served. 

We read more about that in the next chapter. (See the blog post below.)