Isaiah 6:1 NIV
In the year that King
Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train
of his robe filled the temple.
What Do You See In God?
The other day I was in a high school class and a
couple of the students asked me how old I was.
It was of course somewhat presumptuous on their part but I decided to
play around a bit with them so I asked the kids how old they thought I
was. I did not expect them to be as wildly
off base as they were since they were fifteen years old but they guessed 42, 44
and 45. I just smiled and walked away,
leaving them without an answer. The next
day the same group asked me again how old I was and this time I told them. “Sixty.”
The shocked expressions on their faces were the best Christmas gifts
ever. They argued that I did not look
that old and once more I smiled and walked away. How fascinating to learn something new about
someone, to discover secrets about that person you might never have guessed.
We often fail to consider the fact that God is a
person. He is not an idea or a premise. The God spoken of throughout the Bible is
not a theological concept but someone specific with actual characteristics that
are His. I have had conversations with
different ones who have opinions of how the Lord should be if He really existed
as if they are the ones who determine God’s nature and personality. Either God is or He isn’t and if He is, then
we do not decide what He is like any more than biographers can chose the
qualities of George Washington or Pocahontas.
It does no good whatsoever to speculate about the characteristics of the
Lord; one can only discover them through experience.
There is a rather humorous account found in the
Bible that illustrates just how wrong we can be in our speculations about
God. After the Arameans attacked the
Israelites and got soundly beaten by them, the counselors to the king of Aram
insisted that the reason the Arameans were soundly defeated by the Israeli army
was because they had fought in the uplands of Samaria. The God of the Israelites they speculated
was a god of hills. What they needed was
a change in location. Meanwhile, the officials of the king of Aram
advised him, "Their gods are gods of the hills. That is why they were too
strong for us. But if we fight them on the plains, surely we will be stronger
than they. Do this: Remove all the kings
from their commands and replace them with other officers. You must also raise an army like the one you
lost — horse for horse and chariot for chariot — so we can fight Israel on the
plains. Then surely we will be stronger than they." He agreed with them
and acted accordingly. (1 Kings 20:23-25 NIV)
When the Arameans were crushed again by the
Israelite army, one wonders if the Arameans might have pulled out their canoes
to fight on the lake, hoping that God was not a god of lakes. The Arameans were certainly right to guess
that the Israelites had a God who brought victory to His people. They however were wrong to make
determinations about Him without actually knowing Him. It is like watching movies depicting aliens
when no one has ever seen an alien and if they exist have no idea how they look
or act. There is absurdity in the way so
many talk about God without having the least bit of experience interacting with
Him. When the patriarch Jacob ran away
from his furious brother and exhausted fell asleep he was unprepared for what
came next.
He had a dream in
which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven,
and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said:
"I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I
will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the
earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to
the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your
offspring. I am with you and will watch
over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not
leave you until I have done what I have promised you." When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought,
"Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it." (Genesis 28:12-16 NIV) Jacob’s
reaction is priceless. He did not
realize God was where he was!
Nearly the entire world is oblivious to God. Ambulances run to heart attack victims, senators
discuss tax plans, shoppers comb the stores for deals, librarians restack books
and hardly anyone realizes God is there.
Cynics decide God is cruel, professors think He is a myth and
pharmacists believe He is a legend and all the while God is among us with His
own specific personality and characteristics waiting for someone to notice
Him. The old pop song, “One of Us”,
absurdly wonders what God would be like if He was one of us. “What if God
was one of us? Just a slob like one of us. Just a
stranger on the bus tryin' to make his
way home?” The idea
is that we cannot know what God is really like so we just make up things about
Him. For many, we can read the Bible and
take what is said there as one person’s view of Him or maybe even the
impressions of lots of people but we cannot really know what He is like because
He is an idea or a concept and not an actual person.
When Jesus Christ was born and placed in a cattle trough
after He was born, grew up and became a man, everyone who met Him discovered
that God had specific, observable characteristics that made Him unique with
certain qualities and personality traits.
God did this and behaved like this and reacted this way to these kinds
of things. God was not Fred down the
street or the imaginative ideas of Marvel Comics. He was not Thor, a made up character that could
be anything the writers or the movie director wanted him to be. God was there and He was just as He was seen
and heard. But you may argue that that
was then and this is now. How can we
know what God is like now?
The last book in the Bible, the famous book of
Revelation, or as the Greek name for it would be translated, “unveiling”,
presents us with two specific groups of people.
The first would be those who are either oblivious to God or opposed to
Him. They react to circumstances they
face without any sort of relationship to God.
There is no interaction with Him, no attempt at communication with Him. They fear what is happening, are angry with
their circumstances but never reach out to God or try to align themselves with
Him. The book of Revelation describes a
typical response of those in this group to the destruction God will bring to
the economic structures of the world. "When the kings of the earth who
committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning,
they will weep and mourn over her.
Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: "'Woe!
Woe, O great city O Babylon, city of power!
In one hour your doom has come!'
"The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no
one buys their cargoes any more— (Revelation 18:9-11 NIV)
If you can just not let the nature of the events
that are described in this chapter distract you, the point is that no one here
looks to God for help or even tries to reach out to Him. The entire crowd only reacts to the
circumstances as if that is all that is there, as if there is no God involved
in it. Yet there is a second group of
people described in the book of the Revelation and that is those who are aware
of God all the time. They view Him not
as a story or an opinion or a thought but as He is, there, present, with
characteristics that are specific and certain.
They do not speculate about God, they interact with Him and the result
of being with Him is worship and undiminished love for Him. Then
I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters
and like loud peals of thunder, shouting: "Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him
glory. For the wedding of the Lamb has
come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to
wear." (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)
(Revelation 19:6-8 NIV)
There is a clear and defined line of demarcation
between two parts of humanity. There are
those who live without any consciousness of God, who live within the world and
see nothing beyond it but the wins and losses of what they do and what they
face. God, the real God Jesus Christ, is
beyond their mental scope. The second
group is made up of those who worship Christ, who love Him and yearn for His
affections. Worship is the mechanism
through which those who are born-again experience Christ; it is the means by
which God becomes known to us. Like your
ears enable hearing and your eyes seeing, worship enables you to be aware
of Christ. You cannot know God without
worship. You can read about Him, think
about Him or have conversations discussing Him but you cannot know God without
worship.
A disturbing statement made by the Apostle Paul
under the direction of the Holy Spirit is found in the book of Romans. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to
him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21 NIV) Literally, it reads, “Formerly knowing God
not as God they neither glorified nor gave thanks…” In other words, what knowledge these people
had of God did not lead to them worshiping Him or thanking Him. The result of this was that they could not
think clearly or understand what they saw.
Without worship, you become irrational and mentally dull. Worship of Christ is the gateway to seeing
and understanding what you see. Why is
worship so critical to the church service?
It enables you to see God as He is and live with your eyes wide open and
your mind able to comprehend what you face.
To skip worship or to not try to worship is like taking a pill that
shuts down your brain and deadens your ability to comprehend.
When you are born again and have Christ as your
Savior, your operating system is completely reworked so that worship of Christ
is the way you connect with God and access His gifts. Peace, joy and wisdom all flow into a heart
that worships Christ and without that worship, it all gets blocked. Practice worship this week. You might not be very good at it. You might get quickly bored with it. But like any habit crucial to your
well-being, practice is the only way you will develop it so that your mind will
know Christ and understand God as He works in your life.
