by Louie Giglio
You may be thinking, That sounds all well and good, Louie, but I have a friend who doesn’t even believe in Jesus who would say something similar—that when she’s out in nature that’s when she communes with God and feels connected to the “divine universe.” Yet her view of God doesn’t sound a whole lot like yours!
I get it. So how do we find an accurate view of God? How do we know which view is right and good? We begin by realizing God is constantly revealing Himself to us.
Coming Into Focus
In Romans 1:19b–20 (nasb ), God weighs in on Himself. He begins to define for us the image He wants to put in our minds. God wants to make sure we know who He is.
That which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
According to this passage, anybody, anywhere on planet Earth, can look up and look around and consider the universe—the mountains and waterfalls, the animals and sunsets, the stars and volcanoes, the marvelous flight-producing design of a feathered bird, the half a billion neurons in the motor cortex of your brain that are present just so you can talk—and conclude that there must be some divine force behind it all.
That’s good news. Nature shows us indeed that there is a God, a creative, beautiful, intelligent God. And we can see evidences, like perfect fingerprints, of God all around us. For instance, not long ago, scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot a galaxy they named GN-z11, the farthest galaxy away that we’ve ever seen. It’s 13.4 billion light years away from us, 5 and according to Romans 1, God’s eternal power and divine nature can in fact be understood from what has been seen. Thanks to this far, far away galaxy—and many other evidences of God—people are “without excuse.” When we consider that galaxy and the sheer craziness of how big the universe is, most people can’t help but be drawn toward a divine being that is bigger than us all.
Besides leaving clues all over His creation, God gets even more specific in telling us what He’s like. Hebrews 1:1–3 describes how the revelation process trickles down. First, creation reveals God, as the Romans passage pointed out. Then the writer to Hebrews picks up the chain of events:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.
The prophets of the Old Testament reveal God in a more specific way than even Creation reveals Him. They point people to a coming Messiah, and that’s where the funnel ends, with the coming of the Messiah, the person of Christ. Look at that phrase more closely—when Jesus, God’s Son, stepped onto planet Earth, He is described as, “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being.” In other words, Jesus showed us clearly who God is. God showed us who He is by sending Jesus, and Jesus was a walking, talking, living, breathing picture of God on earth.
Because God wanted you to have an unmistakably clear picture of what He is like, He sent Jesus into the pages of human history with this hope: For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).
Don’t miss these two powerful truths—
God has given us the light of the knowledge of His glory.
This knowledge of God’s glory is found in the face of Christ.
That’s what we’re going to camp on a lot in this book, because we want to consider how amazing this is. Jesus’ life is recorded in the pages of Scripture, partially so we can know what He did and stood for and came to offer the world, and partially so we can know what a glorious God looks like. Jesus sketched on the canvas a picture of who God is for all of us to see and understand so we can respond to God in the right way.
Now, when Scripture says in Hebrews that Jesus is the “exact representation” of God’s being, that doesn’t mean that God is a smiling five-foot-eight, dark-haired, bearded Jewish man with a lamb in His arms. It means that if we look at the heart of Christ, the mind of Christ, the attitudes of Christ, the way Christ treated people, the things He said, the way He lived, the way He valued the world and all things in it, we’ll see in Jesus a picture of what God is like.
This is so key for us to grasp. In Jesus, God most clearly says, “Here I am. Here’s the most accurate picture I can give you of what I’m like.” The Tozer quote I mentioned earlier, which I first heard from Dan DeHaan, has been driving my life in my relationship with God for a long time, and I realized long ago that if I want to answer Dan’s question with any kind of accuracy, then I need to look at Jesus. The life and death of this peasant from Nazareth teaches us so much about God—that God is powerful, holy, omnipotent, ruler of all things, greater than all things, loving, saving, good, generous, compassionate, and much more.
Yet there is something even more amazing that Jesus teaches us about God, and it’s a revolutionary truth that truly sets us free to become everything God created us to be. The number one image of God that Jesus paints for us again and again is that God is a Father . He is our perfect Abba Father.
Did you catch that? Of all the things that Jesus teaches us about God, the big idea He’s seeking to get across to us is that God is a Father . God wants you to know Him, and He invites you to call Him Father. He wants you to know you can live as a loved son, a loved daughter.
Can I say that again: God wants you to know that you can live as a dearly loved son, a dearly loved daughter.
And He wants you to live under the waterfall of His blessing. Jesus shows us this both in His teaching and in His relationship with His Father. Let’s follow this roadmap to develop a “right-side-up” view of God. After all, who better to give us that right view of God than His own Son?
Chapter 3
A God to Call Father
A few years ago I was flying home to Atlanta after speaking at an event in Texas. I boarded the plane and settled into my seat in 2C. This particular plane was a smaller regional jet with two seats on each side of the aisle, front to back. I was in the aisle seat on row two on the right side of the plane facing the cockpit. I always aim to be the last person to board, so once I made it to my seat, it was odd to see the flight crew standing idle as our departure time came and went. Pretty soon I figured out (from bits of the conversation I overheard) that we were waiting for another passenger.
I noticed seat 1B was empty and my mind began to race with the possibilities. What important VIP were we waiting on? Maybe it was an entertainer, a well-known politician, an actor, or a famous athlete.
We waited, and I watched the front of the plane. Most people sitting around me were oblivious to what was happening, clueless to the fact that an online tabloid moment was about to happen. The lady across the aisle was enraptured in her Sudoku puzzle and the guy next to me was already sound asleep. But my eyes stayed glued.
Finally, I heard commotion in the jetway and then he appeared!
Hmmm. That’s the guy we’ve been waiting for? I thought. I didn’t recognize him. A guy in his late twenties rounded the corner and plopped his messenger bag down in the seat. He wore medical scrubs. Who is this guy? Why have we waited for him?
Then I saw he had a small Styrofoam container under his left arm, about the size of an old-school toaster. I was thinking, Who brings a Styrofoam chest through security and onto a plane? That’s when I noticed the decals on each side of the container: Human Eyes.
I’m sure my eyes opened wide as he casually opened the overhead bin, slid a lady’s sweater to the side, shoved the container in, along with his messenger bag, and slammed the compartment shut. He slumped into his seat, fastened his seat belt, and pro
mptly dozed off.
Everything in this picture was unnerving for me. I was arrested by the fact that someone had lost their life. I didn’t know any details, their age or the circumstances of their death. But I knew that the person had been an organ donor, and their eyes were now in that container. I also knew that my seatmate’s role on the transplant team was to rush those eyes to an operating room where a hopeful patient was waiting. I didn’t know anything about the patient either, except that they needed sight. But mostly my eyes were riveted on the overhead bin. What if the bin somehow popped open during a patch of turbulence? As far as I could tell I was the only person paying enough attention to know there were human eyes in the storage compartment above row one! I felt totally responsible for the safe passage of this precious cargo, but soon after takeoff it was business as usual inside the cabin.
Would you like something to drink? Some pretzels or peanuts? the flight attendant offered.
No , I blurted, diverting my eyes from the bin for only a fraction of a second. How could I have a snack when there were human eyes in that overhead bin?!
I stayed transfixed. Once we landed and pulled up to our gate, the man popped opened the bin. Thankfully, the container with the eyes was still there. He grabbed up his gear and was the first one off the plane. But I was pretty close behind. Not within stalking distance, but close enough.
When we reached the midpoint of the concourse, I knew my car, my arriving baggage, and my house were toward the right, but I went left, following the eyes down the escalator and onto the train. I didn’t get in the same train, but I could see my man through the glass windows at the end of each car. I was still in contact with the eyes.
The guy and the eyes were headed to Knoxville. I knew this because that’s what it said at gate C-22 where he was waiting for his connecting flight. I sat across the wide walkway in an adjoining gate area his until his flight departed. Once he disappeared down through the boarding door I walked to the wall of windows nearby. Soon they pulled the jetway back from the plane, and the door was closed. The Knoxville flight backed away from the gate, and a sense of relief flooded over me. I had done my job! The eyes were safely on their way to Tennessee.
Maybe my actions seem silly, but I really did feel an attachment to the mission of getting those eyes to their intended destination. I headed to baggage claim and gathered my suitcase from the luggage carousel and headed home, all the while thinking in amazement: Someone in Knoxville, Tennessee, is going to see today! Because of the death of one person, sight was coming to another. The corneal transplant that was about to take place in Knoxville was going to bring clarity of vision to a person who hadn’t been able to see for a season, or maybe for their entire life.
Someone in Knoxville was going to see! What a miracle day this day was going to be!
In the same way I’m writing this today in hopes of another miracle of sight—that moment when the Spirit of God opens someone’s eyes to see what Jesus was showcasing through His teachings and His relationship with His Father. To see that God wants us to know Him.
This is how the apostle Paul described it as he was praying for some of the first believers in Jesus: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (Eph. 1:17–18).
That’s my prayer for you and me as we are talking about the possibility of seeing God as a perfect Father. I’m praying that God will give us a Spirit of revelation by opening the eyes of our hearts so we can know Him more.
We’ve already talked about some faulty views of God, but even leafing through the pages of Scripture it’s possible to end up missing the point and not seeing the main image of who He is. If we hold too narrow of an image, even though it’s found in Scripture, it can still skew how we think of God and how we respond to Him. Our image needs to be biblical, and our image needs to be balanced according to how Scripture weighs the various images and words used to describe God.
I’ve already given you a sneak peek at the primary mental image of God that Scripture shows us, the image that Jesus points to again and again. Keep in mind, this is not the only image of God presented in Scripture. It’s the main image of God. The chief image. The principal image. The key image. This is the image we need to direct our primary response mechanism toward.
Watch closely, because what follows is going to sound suspect if you gloss over this concept too quickly or don’t follow it through to the end. The number one image of God that Jesus draws for us again and again is something different than all the things in the following list.
It’s not that God is king.
It’s not that He’s the ruler of the universe.
It’s not that He’s the God of justice.
It’s not that He’s the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
It’s not that He’s the rock, the God of faithfulness and steadfastness.
It’s not that God is the hope of eternal life.
It’s not that He’s immortal, invisible, the only wise God.
It’s not that He’s the creator of the heavens and the earth.
It’s not that He’s a merciful God.
It’s not that He’s the Logos, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us.
It’s not that He’s the great I AM.
It’s not that He’s the Lord , the God of Israel.
It’s not that He’s the Lord of hosts.
It’s not that He’s our redeemer.
It’s not that He’s a mighty warrior.
It’s not that He’s the owner of the cattle on a thousand hills.
It’s not that He’s light.
It’s not that He’s Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace.
It’s not that He’s the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy.
It’s not even that He’s love.
God is not primarily any one of these things alone. And this gets straight to the heart of what I want to focus on. To be clear, God is all of those images and realities in the above list. All those images and realities come straight from Scripture, and all are true about God. Yet none of those are emphasized by Jesus as often as something else. Jesus repeats it over and over and drives this characteristic of God into our souls. The number one image of God that Jesus draws for us again and again is this:
God is a Father.
The Father Is Near
Both through His relationship with His Father and His teaching, Jesus wants you to see God in a new way. Jesus is saying God is powerful and majestic and glorious and full of wisdom and grace and truth—and yes, He’s all these things—but there’s more. Get this: all of God’s characteristics are wrapped in the Person of a Father. It helps us so much to see God this way, because so many of God’s attributes are difficult for us to grasp. For example, the essence of justice. Justice is merely a concept, and it’s hard to put our arms around a concept. But we can embrace a just Father. Further, it can be hard for us to embrace grace and truth. These are wonderful concepts, but only concepts. Yet, we can embrace a Father who’s full of grace and truth. God is relatable. He’s knowable. Because the fatherhood of God is the main characteristic that holds all of His other attributes together.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the words of Jesus. Time after time, in some of the most well-known parts of His teaching, Jesus draws our attention to God in a very specific way.
Once Jesus chose His inner circle of disciples, He quickly showed them how to pray. Surprisingly He opened His model prayer with some words that must have sounded unbelievable to the disciples’ ears. Jesus didn’t begin His prayer with “Dear sir,” or “Your Majesty,” or even “Most Holy Lord.” No. Jesus said in Matthew 6 that when you talk to God, here’s how you talk to Him. You start by saying,
Our Father . . .
Jesus immediately affirmed for them that God is not just any ol
d kind of father when He continued:
who art in heaven, hallowed be your name,
Yet He reframed the God of the Old Testament faith, a God who no one could approach, as Father.
Later, in that same message, Jesus talked about how to best live our lives. He said how faith in action is like a light that you set on a hill, so you can give glory to who? Your spiritual boss? No. To the “man upstairs”? No. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). In other words, we’re invited to live in such a way that the world doesn’t merely see that we do good things, but that we do good things because we’re in a relationship with a perfect Father.
In John 14:6, Jesus provided one of the clearest explanations of what it means to live in relationship with the Father. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” And in John 14:9, Jesus said these ultra-clear words: “Don’t you know . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father .”
We find this type of clarifying-father-understanding again and again in the teachings of Jesus. In fact, 189 times in the four Gospels alone, Jesus referred to God as a father, far more than any other term, distinction, or characteristic Jesus used to describe Him. Even when Jesus was dying on the cross, with His last breath He said, “Father , into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
This is how we come to know and embrace and relate to the Almighty One. We come to see God as a heavenly Father.
We see this is the way Jesus relates with His Father, but also the newsworthy declaration of the Father about His Son. One of the first places in Scripture that the Fatherhood of God is displayed is in Matthew 3 when Jesus came to John the Baptist to be baptized. There’s John, ribcage-deep in the Jordan River. His camelhair clothes are sopping wet. He’s baptizing people right and left as He teaches, preaches, and prepares the way for the Lord. Suddenly, up walks Jesus and says, Hey, baptize Me . And John’s like, Wah-what? You got that backward, Jesus. You need to baptize me! So, they talk back and forth, but finally John relents and plunges Jesus into the Jordan River and brings Him up again. Jesus is baptized to identify with sinners in their redemption, new and clean.