Picture This

Passage: Lord’s Day 35

“Do you take the Bible as the literal word of God?” If you’ve ever been asked that question, you probably felt as though the right answer was “Yes”, and that if you didn’t say “Yes,” you were going to be in trouble. Great battles are fought within the church every day about whether or not we should take the Bible literally. The truth is, there isn’t a right answer to the question because it’s the wrong question. To say, “I take every word of the Bible literally” is to demonstrate utter ignorance about what the Bible really is. Within our tradition we believe the Bible is the Word of God. We believe that it is the clearest and most reliable source of God’s self-revelation. And as such, we understand that God uses human language to describe realities that are essentially indescribable.

The God of the Bible is a God of paradoxes. One of these paradoxes is that God wants us to understand him, yet tells us we can’t understand him. In fact, God discourages people from trying to make too much sense of him. Consider God’s prohibitions against attempting to make images of the divine. The second of the Ten Commandments reads,
You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God…
To be fair, this is a prohibition against making an image of anything you intend to worship. But there are two reasons why this rule applies specifically to making pictures of God. First, God is the one being in heaven and earth who not only deserves to be worshiped but must be worshiped. Any attempt to render an image of God is by definition an attempt to create an object of worship. Second, no human creation, no matter how majestic, can begin to compare to God himself. Therefore any attempt to picture God can do nothing but diminish and degrade the real thing.

How then are we supposed to relate to God? The Bible is full of language that describes God’s attributes and God’s actions. But the best any Biblical author can give us is analogies and metaphors. “God is like this…”; “God does this…”; “God has told us that he desires this…” Each phrase and each account gives us a snapshot of one small part of who God is and how God works. When we piece them together, we end up with a constellation of words, attributes, and actions that gives us a glimpse; a shadow; an afterimage of the one true God.

Does God have wings (Psalm 17)? Does God carry a rod and staff (Psalm 23)? Does God sit on a throne (Psalm 40)? Perhaps, but not in the literal way we think of any of these objects. It’s just that, given the limitations of our language and our imaginations, these are the best we can do. The closest any of us can get to a picture of God is the full witness of those who, throughout history, have caught glimpses of God in action. This is what we find recorded in the Bible. If you want to know God, start there. Read the whole thing. Accept that what we get is a vastly reduced and vastly incomplete picture of the majesty and glory of God. But be satisfied with what God has chosen to reveal about himself. For now we don’t need more; and for the future God promises an eternity in which to get to know him better.