Good Friday morning! I checked first to see that other trash bins were out on the street. So, I have a fairly good indicator that it is, in fact, Friday today. Corporate workers and slaves you may celebrate today... unless you have to work on the weekend, which is, alas, much more common than in the days of old. We survived another gully washer of a storm last night. It's called a gully washer because the runoff creates new gullies in the church parking lot and washes the sand and gravel down the street. To my knowledge we suffered no flooding this time in my neighborhood, although my little tree almost drowned in the swamp created out back. I had to prop it up with some bits of this and that found in my garage. Today, I see that quite a bit of my fresh soil got washed away last night from around the newly transplanted tree. I guess my first or second landscaping job is already on the slate this morning. Alright, enough with the chit-chat already.
Who is God? If you grabbed just any literature from the shelf, you might come up with some quite different opinions on that question. Some would answer the question with a simple, "There are no gods." Others would take it even further and say that there is no God at all. Others would tell us that God is love and that all the nice things in life come from him. Some have said that God did create everything, but then he simply left his creation and went to do other stuff. A few would only acknowledge that there is a God when they are in what appears to be the very last moments of their lives; the entity to direct that very final and desperate plea toward when all else has failed. Some others agree that there is God, but then spend their lives ignoring him completely. And of course, we have the smiting God who sits up in Heaven watching our every move with his godly stick raised to smack us when we step out of line. Then we have what God says about himself. His own word that we call the Bible.
Part of the problem is that we try to describe God in our own terms. How does the clay pot spinning around on the potter's wheel describe the potter? The pot has no 'eyes' to see the potter, so it thinks and thinks over the years and gives it a good try. The pot has a few clues such as, "made in His image," so it feels its curves and says that God must be curved like the pot sides. The pot goes a bit further and says, "God must be hollow and empty since I am hollow and empty." The problem with that is that the first 'pot' sinned and was broken, and the image the pot has to look at is not quite what it was when that first pot lived in a garden called Eden. We cannot look at what we are, or the people around us, and say that God must be thus. The question of who God is must come down to what the potter has told the pot.
First question: Does the pot believe what the potter has to say? Without starting with, "In the beginning, God created..." the pot has nowhere to go and any wild guess is valid. Trying to answer the question of who is God would take a book or perhaps a shelf of books. I cannot do this in one little Friday devotional. The answer is in God's Word. If the clay pot believes the word of its Creator, then the little blind pot can take the Word, read and study and accept it, and begin to find the answers it seeks. If the little pot doesn't believe God's Bible, then nothing anyone can say is going to help the blind thing understand more about its Creator. We need God's own word to help us perceive the Creator whom Adam lost the ability to walk with as a friend.
I have mixed the metaphors back and forth because we often use the image of the potter and the potter's clay to describe our relationship to the Creator. "I am not the potter, but the potter's clay," is one that I hear fairly often. I can write many things about God that I have read in His Word, but to sit down and write the definitive answer to, "Who is God?" would take me a lifetime and then some. Praise God for providing the answer in His Word and sending His answer in the person of Jesus our Lord. I have written very nearly this same thing before, and yet, I am no closer to the answer than God's Word. I am also no more distant from the answer than God's Word.
Have a wonderful day in Christ!
Bucky
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