Who is God?
Do you have an answer to the question? What is your answer to the pagan who asks you to say a word or two about the Christian God? How do you describe your God to the non-believer? What is your answer to your children who inquire about your understanding of God? Can you reach into your pocket and pull out an answer? Or are your pockets empty? What shall we say? Is their agreement amongst Christians on how to answer the question, 'Who is God?'? There is only one God . Surely, therefore, there is only one answer.
Because the greatest threat to our salvation is that our understanding of God is superficial - that we are lightweights in our understanding of God, the God project was born.
What is the God project?
The God project is an attempt to figure out
1) the best way to articulate the Christian understanding of God and
2) the most robust foundation on which to rest it.
God made our job easy. Jesus himself gave us the answer to the question, 'Who is God?', on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. We don't have to invent an answer to the question. We can just use the answer that Jesus gave us.
What is the best articulation of the Christian understanding of God? My suggestion is this: Our God is the God who forgave us even though we tortured and killed him. It is short and sweet. Yet, it is a high fidelity representation of the reality of God.
From what robust foundation was our understanding of God derived? The source of our understanding of God is the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. On the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, Jesus and the evil that we did to him met in a violent collision. The violence of the collision was bigger than the Big Bang and larger than CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Out of the violent collision erupted God's most important revelation about himself. On the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, Jesus himself illuminated the darkness of our understanding of God in a glorious burst of epiphany. Our God is different than us - much different . Creator is radically different than creature. Radical asymmetry exists between us and our God. The radical asymmetry is epitomized in the following expression: The brutality of the Crucifixion makes the intransigence of his love for us extraordinarily amazing.
Why did I pick this articulation of God as the best articulation? Why did I pick this foundation as the most robust foundation? I didn't pick. God picked. God gave us a hint.
To pinpoint the precise location of the best understanding of God and the best foundation, God erected a landmark. God planted the Cross of Christ (1 Corinthians 1:17) in the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection to serve as the flag that rallies Christians to the Son of God. RALLY 'ROUND THE CROSS!
You may disagree. Or you may never have tried to put your understanding of God and its foundation into words. Now is the time. In what manner do you articulate your understanding of God? Moreover, on what foundation do you anchor it?
You are invited to join the God project. Welcome.
Note #1: To answer the question, "Who are you, God?', God sent us a Love Note - a Love Note from God to us. Jesus is the expression of God's love for us. Furthermore, the Love Note came with a guarantee of genuineness - a certificate of authenticity. It survived the brutality of the Crucifixion. If the Love Note were counterfeit, it would have faded as we tortured him and died when we killed him. However, it did not. He and his love for us survived the evil that we did to him.
Note #2: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
