Jesus shows us: God is personal. (Notes from last night)

by | Apr 8, 2014 | Monday Study Notes | 0 comments

Last night we continued our study of the different things God showed us by sending Jesus as the ultimate expression of who he is. We looked at three intertwining truths we see from God’s revelation in Christ: God’s intention to communicate and be known, his personal nature, and his desire to be near to us. Here are the notes:

1. Jesus shows us that God intends to be known. He communicates.

See John 1:1, John 1:14, Mark 1:14 (Mark 1:21, 1:39, 2:13, 4:2, 6:6, 10:1)
The fact that Jesus came, and was who he was, shows us that God wants to make himself known. He wants to communicate. He is a God who shows himself, gets his thoughts across, and is open about who he is and what he’s doing in the world.

What makes us doubt this?  For non-believers, it’s often something like this: his apparent absence based on wrong expectations about who he is and how he works. (It’s like if you didn’t believe in gravity, because you were expecting to see rubber bands pulling things down all the time.) But he has made himself known in his way. And he still does. For believers, it’s often something like this: we struggle with thinking God plays hide and seek because we so often experience confusion about what his will is. So we can develop a view of God where he is constantly withholding his thoughts from us. But often this is because we are not paying attention to all the things he has told us about our lives, and all the ways he has communicated, and we are instead looking for a certain set of things we are particularly interested in.   (See Mark 8:27-32, 9:31-32 and notice the confusion when Jesus does communicate directly and openly about the future.)

2. Jesus shows us that God is personal.

God is not less than us. He is more. He is the original thinker and feeler. We have personality because he is personal, and he gifted it to us. We are small versions of what He is infinitely and originally. (This is Paul’s reasoning in Acts 17:26-29.) God is not an impersonal force, or a giant cloud, or a vibration.  Why do we think this? Maybe because we know He is Spirit (see John 4:24) and since we’ve never seen “spirit” we aren’t really sure what that means. And we only have experience with things that are human, or less than human. So we assume that to be “spirit,” since it is different than human, is to be something less than human. But of course, in the Bible spirit is greater than flesh (the merely human) and God is the ultimate personality who is both not human and greater than human.

See John 11:1-3, 33-37    
Jesus shows us God is intensely personal.  Here he has a friend, and weeps when he dies. And the people around him recognized this about him.

3. Jesus shows us that God desires nearness.

See John 4:1-17
In Jesus, we see that God was able and willing to become a human. He desired closeness with us, even to the point of becoming one of us. In Jesus we see that God wants to be in the mix–he was even willing to be in the human mix of sin–in order to close the gap between us and himself once and for all.

Challenge:

  1. Do you struggle to believe any of these things? You need to let Jesus define God to you, not your own thoughts interpreting your circumstances. To repeat: We can’t build our picture of God from our own interpretation of our own lives. We must let God describe himself to us and we must let him do it his way—by describing himself in Jesus.
  2. Are there any things in your life that make you doubt that God is like this? Identify them, and make them bow to what God has shown us in Jesus.
  3. Do we communicate this about God with our lives? Do we think that to be like God is to be less personal, more withdrawn, more mysterious? We’re being conformed into the image of the Son.