Who is Your God?

Luke 10:22, All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

I'm only in my early twenties but I've already lived enough life to know there are plenty of "good" people in the world who put my feeble efforts at pious living to shame yet who, because of their rejection of Christ, will be in hell. It's not easy to say that, especially because according to our lowly human understanding of "goodness," these people seem like stellar examples to the rest of us not only in their apparently admirable actions but in their sophisticated understanding of the divine.

I know I can easily feel confused by the many religious folk in this world who seem to have a handle on God. They appear to know Him and can talk easily about their experiences with Him. Even many of their thoughts on their deity seem in keeping with the Scripture's revelation of God’s character as kind, loving, personal, powerful, etc. Yet these are the qualities our age has ascribed to God and too often this understanding is divorced from an acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as the sole mediator between a righteous and indignant Judge and us sin-laden, rebellious humans.

According to this verse and so many others in Scripture, those who have not been led to the Father by Christ’s own hand do not know the real God. They see an image of God conjured in their minds by extrapolating and exponentiating whatever goodness common grace has allowed them to see in their lives onto a projection of God. But this is merely a god created by man.

The true God can be seen only through the lenses given us by Christ, the only One who can show us the divine for what it really is (for those familiar with philosophy, think of Kant’s a priori framework of interpretation only supplied to us by Christ during and after salvation). Jesus alone reveals the Father, and we can only come to Jesus for this knowledge if drawn by the Father (John 6:44a). As Romans 3:10-12 explains, man will not come to God on his own so God must draw man!

Who then is our God? A God who is socially-constructed? A God who shape-shifts to fit our preferences? Or is He the true and immutable God as revealed in Christ and unveiled to us through Christ? Who is your God?