The Unknown God

Acts 17:22-23
“Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

John 17:25-26
“O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”

REVIVE wants to introduce people to the most wonderful character in the Universe. Many people claim the description of God coming from the world is the same in all religions, sometimes the world says that humans are god, or else, that God cannot be trusted for He’s vengeful, selfish, unforgiving and arbitrary. Is God like every other religion describes Him? Is God in everyone, or is everyone a god? Is He selfish, vengeful? Because there’s no cohesive answer it’s easy to say the one and only God is unknown.

Fortunately, His Son, Jesus Christ, living on the earth has made God known to humanity. The problem, though, is the picture of the Father, in many people’s minds is not the same as that of Jesus. For many, God is angry, unapproachable, selfish, demanding and nothing like the Son. People have always tried to appease God though all major religions of the world, including Christianity. Religions have created ways to calm His anger and overall, it’s always by trying to change their behavior. They offer sacrifices and increase those in numbers, even human sacrifices, they beat themselves up, starve themselves, strip themselves of any relation to other human beings, all in order to feel accepted, to escape the fury, the anger of God.

From ancient times until today, however, the problem of humanity has never been in essence a behavioral problem, but it’s always been relational. By not knowing the reality of God’s heart toward us, we automatically do things in order to get on the good side of God. God, however, is told in Zephaniah, one of the minor prophets of Israel (in terms of literary contribution amount), that “He will take great delight in you. The quietness of his love will calm you down. He will sing with joy because of you.” (Zeph. 3:17) In fact, the word delight in the Hebrew language is Lyg. It literally denotes a rotating motion, rejoicing and rotating, and it’s translated as rejoice, delight, etc… Huh, could God here be described as dancing over us, singing with joy?

If that’s the case, then why do many religions out there feel like they need to appease God, calm Him down? Is it because He only rejoices on His good behaving children? A parent never stops counting the misbehaving teenager as part of the family, then why would God do that? More than that, why would God only rejoice over me if I’m doing the right thing or giving Him what He wants? If that’s who He is, than He is really not worth anything, because only doing something once you get something in return is the essence of selfishness.

The good news is, Jesus showed us God for who He really is as the verse above says. God has made everything possible to restore our relationship to Him, He was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19) This world had a horrible picture of Him through the work of sin and the fallen angel. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil, and that work is not behavior, but relational.

By showing us who the Father is, we can begin to understand what He wants from us, and in one simple word: love. God wants us to love Him like He loves us. Let’s learn the true picture of God from Jesus Christ Himself. What do you say?

Love is the essence of the truth. Selfishness is the essence of the lie.