Glimpses of God: Introduction

Do you have a mental image of God, a likeness that pops into your thoughts when you pray or consider Him? Does your picture include a cloud, perhaps swirling mists, maybe light rays of unimaginable brightness? Is God a stately figure dressed in white and sporting a flowing beard? Is He seated on a huge throne? I recall from the pictures in my childhood Sunday School materials that God might be represented as a pillar of cloud or a pillar of fire (the guide posts He provided for the exodus of the children of Israel) but nothing else. We learned that God is a spirit. Nebulous. Inscrutable. To attempt to draw a portrait would come close to violating the second of the Ten Commandments which prohibits making and adding images to our worship.

God’s Selfie

No living person knows what God looks like. He’s never posed for the paparazzi, yet He yearns for us to become acquainted with Him. God desires a vibrant relationship with each of us and, as we know from our human experiences, strong relationships develop when two strangers grow in their knowledge of one another. God knows all about us, but how can we grow close to and learn about One we’ve never seen? Well, God gave us a selfie. In the record of the Bible, God reveals Himself through an incredible collection of snapshots depicting aspects of His character, His attributes, His feelings, and His deeds. I call these snapshots glimpses, hence the title chosen for this work, Glimpses of God.

God’s Eternal Existence

With careful study we can piece together much about God. For example, He had no beginning. He is alive and has been from eternity past, long before the brief segment we call human history. That’s an important fact because who wants to worship a dead god when a living God is available?

God opens His Book with no introduction of Himself—no resume, no biography, no references—just jumps straight into the account of creation and His entrance into human history. That’s the starting point for what we can know about God.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 NASB

God’s Sovereignty

God is sovereign and His sovereignty often rubs humans the wrong way. We think we are wiser than the One who spoke dirt into being and are qualified to judge His actions. God does what God deems best. He has no committee to convince or approvals to secure. From a human standpoint, His sovereignty may result in less than desirable circumstances such as the grind of slavery experienced by the children of Israel in Egypt. Or the stoning of Stephen for nothing more than his controversial retelling of Israel’s history.

God doesn’t fit into a box.

We can’t stuff God or our concept of God into a neat little box and expect that He will stay inside that boundary. We can’t exhaustively describe Him so that at the end of our writing no additional aspects of His nature await discovery. God is mysterious, and that mystery (mentioned in more than twenty verses of Scripture) is part of His person. We may as well try to gather all the stars, assign a number to each, and stuff them into a box.

God is the Master Planner

God excels as a Master Planner. Paul, a well-traveled missionary and church planter arrested because of his faith in Jesus Christ, shared this description of God in a letter from his jail cell in Rome.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us,
Ephesians 3:20 NASB

The aging apostle hoped to continue his work, yet his incarceration seemed to have ended that mission. Paul used the downtime to write letters of encouragement to churches he had planted. He had no idea that believers two thousand years later would still turn to his letter to the Ephesians (written somewhere around A. D. 60-62) among others for edification and comfort. Those mold-covered prison walls could not limit our infinite God or derail His plan.

His attributes do not fit a straight line.

In my research I’ve captured well more than a hundred aspects of God’s character, attributes, deeds, and feelings. I will not attempt to place God’s attributes in an ordered list as that does not describe Him. God is not a straight line nor does He follow one.

His attributes do not fit a pyramid model.

I am not qualified to order God’s attributes in pyramid fashion with the most important as the base and others stacked as the tower grows. Should the base be God’s sovereignty or His love? How can we forget His wrath (mentioned 300+ times)? What about the three omni’s – omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent? The pyramid method of describing God also seems unworkable.

God is a mysterious puzzle.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle, thousands of pieces, jumbled on the table before you while the box top with that helpful picture is hidden. Your task is to sort and, as best you can, piece together the parts to discover the image. But this puzzle has no straight-edged border pieces, and portions of an image appear on both sides of each piece. And someone repeatedly slips in stacks of new pieces as you work. The example falls short because God is infinite, but the description roughly approximates a study of His nature.

We can gather glimpses and gain insight. Our challenging study will deliver encouragement as well as motivation for our walk with God. We will learn that He is awesomely incredible and that He’s revealed what He wants us to know about Him in a trove of data, the Bible, God’s selfie to us. Let’s dig through that treasure together. The more we grasp about Him the greater will grow our love for Him.

Boilerplate:

I’ll post additional Glimpses of God material to my blog and website as the book progresses. Interested web surfers can register for the blog to have notices of updates delivered via email. A sign-up link appears at the bottom of each article. The plan is to publish this material in print and e-book formats at a later date, but in the meantime, please, feel free to share the Glimpses of God material, use the work with a Sunday School class or small group, and in general distribute this to help spread the knowledge of God to a needy world.