What is God Like?

How we view God is essential. If we see God as harsh, demanding, or stern, we might obey, but we won’t love. Yet, in much of the Hebrew scriptures, that is exactly how God is portrayed.

Worse, if we envision a God who orders genocide, hates certain people-groups, and tortures humans in everlasting fire, we will know nothing beyond fear. Ever since the homogenization of church and state (which began when Emperor Theodosius the First issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, declaring Nicaean Christianity the state religion of Rome and theologians rushed to make the gospel compatible with money and power) that is too often how God has been portrayed. Today, Christian nationalists hold a similar and equally false view of who God is.

The difficulty is compounded by the fact that we can back up our picture of God as a harsh, judgmental, genocidal-ordering tribal deity from scripture. We’re told God drowned every living thing on the earth, including the babies and puppies, excepting only those in Noah’s ark.

The books of Joshua and Judges in the Hebrew Bible plainly depict a tribal God ordering his favored warriors to slaughter their neighbors, plunder their goods, and seize their lands and young women for themselves.

Centuries later, David, the sweet psalmist, the shepherd king Israel, remains a man after God’s own heart in spite of adultery, murder, and unmerciful brutality towards his enemies.

Many passages in the Greek Bible (the Christian New Testament) can, and have been for centuries, interpreted to depict a King of kings who has an eternal torture chamber in his castle. Fundamentalists are quite content with this vision of the Creator.

The problem, however, is Jesus. Jesus is unconditionally nonviolent, welcoming of all, forgiving of all, nontribal, and loving everyone. He even loved and forgave his greatest enemies. Moreover, Jesus is the exact image of God.

^1:1 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, ² but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. ³ He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ⁴ having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Hebrews 1:1-4, NRSVUE)

Jesus always did what pleased the Father (John 8:29). He told his apprentices that if they had seen him, they had seen the Father (John 14:9). He said that he and God the Father were one. (see John 10:30-38)

Jesus forbade the use of weapons (Matthew 26:52). Jesus insisted we forgive and help our enemies. (Matthew 5-7) Jesus broke down all the walls of racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and national division. (Ephesians 2) Jesus created one universal ecclesia made up of people of every nationality, color, status, and ethnicity. (Revelation 5:9) Christian nationalism is not Christian – it is diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ.

Jesus’ beloved disciple John taught us that God is love – pure, perfect, unconditional, universal, never-ending love. (1 John 4:7-12)

If that is true, then God never rides the red horse. God eschews all wars, all hatred, all killing, all dehumanizing, all coercion, all manipulation, all neglect of the poor, all racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia. Killing, hating, enslaving, lying, manipulating, are anathema to God.

If that is true, then God requires us to be forgiving, loving, sympathetic, caring, gracious, kind, and active in helping the marginalized and disenfranchised. They are the “least” of Jesus’ siblings. Ministering to them is ministering to Jesus. (Matthew 25)

If God really is love, then God is nothing like how God is portrayed in some parts of Scripture. Why then does the Bible say God commanded genocide and condoned merciless slaughter?

The problem is not with the Bible. All scripture is God-breathed (1 Timothy 3:16). The problem is how it is interpreted by fundamentalists and atheists alike. Both are reading a flat Bible in which every verse carries equal weight and where every passage is to be taken with wooden literalness. We wind up with the absurdities of young earth creationism, mistrust of science, a perversion of history, and a vengeful tribal god. The atheist throws the baby out with the bathwater. The fundamentalist drinks the dirty water.

Violence in the Hebrew scriptures can be understood as the way ancient nomadic tribal people saw their deities. They interpreted God in terms they understood. For the early Israelites, YHWH was the most powerful warrior-god among a bunch of warrior-gods. God, in love and kindness accommodated their beliefs. God met them where they were and dealt with them in ways they could understand. In other instances, God simply withdrew and allowed the consequences of human choices to become manifest. God did so when God’s son was on the cross. On still other occasions, a closer reading of the original language reveals that the violence is caused not by God, but by malevolent principalities and powers led by the satan. There are even a few instances (Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23-25; Peter in Acts 5) where servants of God may have misused the supernatural power God gave them.

(For a thorough understanding of violence in the Old Testament, read Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God. Fortress Press; ISBN-10: 1506420753)

The most apparently violent book in the Newer

Testament is Revelation. It too is often taken with wooden literalness in spite of the text itself telling us it is symbolic. Revelation is apocalyptic literature. Read responsibly, it contains no divine violence at all. John takes violent images and artfully flips them.

A responsible interpretation of Revelation is far more radical than anything I had imagined. It is subversive, Kingdom-centered, cruciform, radically pacifist, and courageous. It requires willingness to die while loving my enemies, believing that evil is overcome by “the blood of the Lamb” and by our “not loving [our] lives even unto death.” It shatters civil religion, the American myth of a Christian nation, and challenges empires and their rulers to the core.

It is impossible to take Revelation literally. In Revelation 6:13 all the stars fall out of the sky. In 8:12, they are back in the sky. All the kings and nations of the earth are destroyed, and all rebels are devoured in Revelation 19:15-21, yet kings, nations, and rebels are back in chapters 20 and 21. John is using imaginative symbols to alter our understanding of the world in order to motivate us to live lives that reflect the nonviolent self-sacrificial nature of the Lamb of God. He is not writing history before it happens.

Revelation was first written to followers of Jesus in Asia Minor who were under pressure to compromise with the Roman Empire. All of it is God-breathed and applicable to anyone under pressure to compromise with any empire. That’s because human empires all draw their moral authority from human religions, and human empires and religions are both empowered by the Prince of Darkness.

{To understand Revelation, I suggest Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation, by Michael J. Gorman (2011 Cascade Books); Richard Bauckham’s The Theology of the Book of Revelation (1993 Cambridge University Press); and Discipleship on the Edge: An Expository Journey Through the Book of Revelation by Darrell W. Johnson (2004 Regent College Publishing)}

God is exactly like Jesus. There is nothing unchristlike in God. God is pure and perfect love. God is all-forgiving, gracious, and kind. God is nice. God likes you. God wants to lavish divine love on you and spend eternity with you.

Everything changes when we grasp who God really is. Colors brighten. The air is fresher. We love all of God’s creation and all of God’s creatures (even bugs and snakes). We discover we can really love ourselves, fully accepting unconditional forgiveness. We find we are capable of forgiving the most heinous of hurts and genuinely loving those who have declared themselves our enemies. We snuggle into the warm, everlasting, loving arms of God. Our souls fill with wholeness, shalom, joy.