But what if we are wrong about God?
One of the best people in all of the Bible totally underestimated the Lord. His name was Job. His story is one of the most heartbreaking, troubling, and confusing of all time – at least to me. The book begins by describing Job as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). The Bible continues, explaining that Job was an incredibly wealthy man and a loving father to ten children (seven sons and three daughters). But then the setting of the story unexpectedly shifts from earth to heaven.
God and Satan are having a conversation. As if that’s not hard enough to wrap our minds around, God then draws Satan’s attention to Job, whom He calls, “my servant.” Satan challenges God, explaining that the only reason Job serves and loves Him is because God protects and blesses him. In response, God tells Satan that he can do what he wants to everything that belongs to Job, but he can’t lay a finger on Job. God told Satan what he could and could not do. “Even the devil is God’s devil,” Martin Luther said. Satan had to come to God’s throne for permission.
As the scene shifts back to earth, what would certainly be the worst day of Job’s life begins to unfold. Before the sun sets, much of Job’s wealth would be gone and all ten of Job’s kids would be dead. Here is his response:
Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong. Job 1:20-22
WHAT? Wow. Job is an upright guy and these crises that came in rapid succession proved his character. But Job’s story doesn’t stop there. In the second chapter of the book there is another conversation between God and Satan. Again, God brings up Job, calling him “my servant.” Satan argues with God that if he could touch Job’s body, Job would abandon his integrity and curse God. In response, God gives Satan authority over Job’s body, but with the limit that Satan cannot kill Job. Keep in mind, Job is not privy to any of God and Satan’s conversations.
Satan quickly and ruthlessly strikes Job with “loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 2:7). Job becomes such a pitiable sight that his wife mercifully encourages him to “curse God and die.” But Job refused. He responds, “’Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?’ In all of this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:9-10). Job was sick, broke, and childless. Then his “friends” show up.
The next 35 chapters are a back-and-forth conversation between Job and his “friends.” Notice I keep putting friends in quotation marks. Just imagine Job in this terrible state and these guys want to show up and give him some advice. More than that, they want to figure out what secret sin Job has been hiding that led to this calamity. Honestly, when you keep Job’s emotional and physical condition in your mind, these “friends” are pretty cruel.
However, these conversations are brought to an abrupt end when God finally speaks to Job. And frankly, God isn’t what Job expected. When God finishes, Job responds:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore, I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. Job 42:5-6
What is interesting to me is that prior to God speaking, Job’s one actually wise friend says, “God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable” (Job 36:26). God wasn’t what Job or his friends had pictured in their minds.
When you hear a voice on the phone or on the radio or a podcast, unless you know the person or have seen a picture of them, naturally we create an image of what that person looks like. Rarely have any of the images I created in my head been accurate. Usually, they aren’t even close! Job had heard things about God, but it turned out God was much bigger, grander, more powerful, and way beyond Job’s simplistic ideas and imagination.
The same is true for us. We may “hear” things about God, and then create in our imagination what God must be like. And again, like the voice on the radio, we are way off! We rely on clichés, pithy sayings, and second-hand knowledge about God that falls abysmally short of reality. Very often our deeply held convictions about God are just plain wrong. The god we create in our heart, mind, and imagination isn’t worthy of faith or reliance because he isn’t real. It isn’t the God of the Bible. We settle for worshiping or praying to a caricature of our own making. Like Job, we need a real encounter with God. We need to stop talking and let God speak.
What does God say about God?
Throughout human history, God has revealed Himself to all people in a few specific ways. Whether or not someone reads a Bible or encounters a missionary, basic knowledge about the character of God is accessible to all people for all time, across all languages, races, cultures, countries, and continents. Regardless of how remote a certain tribe may be, God has revealed Himself to them. These general revelations include creation, conscience, and eternity.
- Creation is a display of God’s character. Romans says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Romans 1:19-20
- As Creator and Designer, the Law of God has been hardwired into every person. Romans 2:15 says, “The law is written on their hearts.” This is an inherent, basic sense of right and wrong that every person is born with. We call this conscience.
- Mankind’s pursuit of immortality is a result of God implanting the very concept of eternity in our hearts. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, God “has put eternity into man’s heart.” John Calvin wrote, “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.”
To reject the testimony of creation, moral absolutes, and the “awareness of divinity” is to reject God as He has graciously revealed Himself. The Apostle Paul, while explaining the one true God to the polytheists in Athens, explained that “they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). God is not playing the unwinnable game of hide and seek.
God has allowed us to seek and find Him through the true stories and teachings of the Bible. “No prophecy,” the Apostle Peter writes, “was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). God spoke to and through the writers of the Scripture. What they wrote was inspired (God-breathed). Often the Bible is called “God’s Word,” because it is God’s words about Himself.
God’s Word declares God to be in complete and sovereign control of the universe. Defining sovereignty, A.W. Pink writes, “We mean the supremacy of God, the kingship of God, the Godhood of God. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that God is God. To say that God is sovereign is to declare that He is the Most High, doing according to His will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth.”
Sovereignty means that God is the boss, the owner, and the ruler. Absolutely nothing in the universe happens that does not first come to His throne. Here are some verses from the Bible that affirm God’s sovereign control of every inch of the universe.
Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. 1 Chronicles 29:11
He is unchangeable, and who can turn him back? What he desires, that he does. Job 23:13
I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Job 42:2
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. Psalm 24:1
The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. Psalm 33:11
The Lord reigns. Psalm 97:1
Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. Psalm 115:3
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. Psalm 135:6
Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. Proverbs 19:21
His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?” Daniel 4:34-35
In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will. Ephesians 1:11
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Revelation 19:6
The Bible unapologetically claims God is in absolute control in Heaven and on earth. He has been ruling and reigning over the entire universe from the very beginning to the very end. And by saying the beginning and end, the Bible includes everything in between.