We Know What God Looks Like

It’s incredible how often an idea about God replaces in the Christian mind the God revealed in the incarnation, life, miracles, teaching, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. In other words, the God revealed in the words and actions of Jesus.

Jesus reveals the true God. Whatever the Greeks thought they knew about God (all of the classical attributes, etc., blah, blah, blah), they could only draw a partial sketch and it always ended up looking like fallen humanity on steroids (apart from a few).

Jesus reveals the true God. Whatever the Jews misunderstood from their experiences of God (and Jesus goes to great pains to reveal these misunderstandings on just about every page of the gospels)—even with all the visitations, interventions, miracles, words and merciful care of the Old Covenant—they just kept getting the nature and character of God wrong (apart from a few).

If your idea about God begins anywhere but in Jesus Christ, you cannot know God.

You might have a lot of information about him (observed from nature, read in stories or treatises, intuited from the reality that you are made in his image) but like someone you’ve only ever seen on television, or who’s voice you know but have never met in person, the true character and reality of God will escape you.

I once met Charlton Heston, sitting alone with his wife and a friend at a book fair at UCLA, waiting for folks who might want a signed copy of his book  I walked over and chatted with him for awhile. Charming man but he was not Moses or Ben-Hur. I really didn’t know Charlton Heston.

The person of Jesus Christ, revealed for all time by the Spirit’s anointing of the apostles words and in the church by the Sacraments, is a full portrait of God. By these we know God.

We know what God looks like; God looks like Jesus. We know what God sounds like; God sounds like Jesus. We know how God acts; God acts like Jesus.