On His Terms

3/26/14                    Jonathan                          26

A young man named Jonathan graciously stopped to talk with me today on his way home from work near the train station.  Even though he said he doesn’t believe in a God we could ever understand or in any kind of existence after death, he said he is open to the idea and that it is worth talking about.  I agreed that we could never really understand God – unless we were made in a way that we could relate to Him – “in His image” – and unless He were to reveal Himself to us rather than expect us to find Him on our own.  I admitted to him there are many parts of the Bible I wouldn’t and couldn’t have come up with about God if left up to my own imagination, and there are parts that have made me uncomfortable.  But we have to come to God on His terms, not our own, and we have to be careful not to create our own image of God that we are more comfortable with.  Jonathan said he believes our concept of God is like a rock surrounded by writers, all describing it from their own unique perspective.  This might be true if God were just an inanimate object, or some sort of impersonal force and we had to depend on our own abilities to describe Him, but if He were to describe Himself, to actively reveal what He wants of Himself to humans, then we could expect to have much in common with each other in our understanding of Him.  And this is what I do find when I read His Word – 66 separate books written by 40 different authors from all walks of life about a very controversial subject, yet unified in their understanding of God’s personality and purposes throughout history.  By the end Jonathan wasn’t so doubtful about God’s existence, asking more about my church, thanking me for stopping him to talk, and telling me I would probably see him again.