God Looks Nothing Like the Sketch
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 4-75
If you want to know what God is actually like, stop reading the critics and read Jesus.
Demolition is not the same as construction. This distinction sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it is one of the most important things that can be said about the state of the contemporary conversation about faith, and almost nobody is saying it.
The previous pieces in this series have been, in significant part, a work of demolition. They have identified the caricature, named the wounds that produce it, traced the intellectual sleight of hand by which the skeptical movement substituted a cartoon for the real subject and then declared victory over Christianity. That work is necessary. You cannot build honestly on a foundation that has not been cleared. The false pictures have to be named before the real one can be seen, because the false pictures are everywhere and they are loud and they have been given enormous cultural authority and they will keep doing their work until someone points at them and says plainly: that is not what we are talking about.
But demolition is not enough. It is not enough to know what God is not. You cannot live in a cleared lot. A faith constructed entirely from negatives, built on the rejection of false pictures without ever arriving at the real one, is not faith at all. It is a sophisticated form of avoidance dressed in theological language. The person who has spent years carefully cataloguing everything wrong with the caricature and never once sat down with the Gospels to look at Jesus directly has done a great deal of intellectual work and arrived nowhere in particular.
So here is the move that changes everything. Here is the simplest, most direct, most consequential answer that Christianity has ever given to the question of what God is actually like.
Look at Jesus.
Not at the institution built in his name. Not at the history of what has been done under his banner, which is a mixed record that includes genuine beauty and genuine horror and deserves honest engagement rather than selective reading in either direction. Not at the theology books, however valuable they are. Not at the arguments, however important they are. At him. At the specific person described in the four Gospels, doing specific things to specific people in specific places, saying specific things that were strange enough and demanding enough and beautiful enough that they are still being argued about two thousand years later.
The theological claim behind this instruction is precise and it is worth sitting with carefully. John 1:18 states it directly: no one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. The phrase made him known is a translation of a single Greek word, exegesato, from the root exegeomai, from which we get the English word exegesis. In its technical usage it means to lead out, to unfold, to explain in detail, to interpret authoritatively. It is the word used for the careful exposition of a text, the drawing out of meaning that was present but not yet visible. When John uses it to describe what Jesus does to God, he is saying something more than Jesus points us toward God or Jesus teaches us about God. He is saying Jesus performs an authoritative unfolding of God. He draws out the meaning. He leads the hidden into visibility.
Hebrews 1:3 pushes the same claim even further. It calls Jesus the exact imprint of God’s nature. The Greek word is charakter, from which we get the English word character, though the original meaning is more precise and more physical than our English word typically conveys. A charakter in the ancient world was the impression left by a seal pressed into wax. The precise, exact, faithful reproduction of the original in a new medium. Not a rough approximation. Not an artist’s interpretation. Not a partial glimpse of selected features. The exact imprint. The complete reproduction. What the seal looks like is what the wax looks like. What Jesus looks like is what God looks like.
This is the claim. It is either the most important claim anyone has ever made or it is the most audacious fraud in human history. What it cannot be, as C.S. Lewis noted with characteristic directness, is merely inspiring. A man who made this claim about himself and was wrong about it would not be a good moral teacher who got a bit carried away. He would be the kind of person you do not leave unsupervised around vulnerable people. The options are limited and mild admiration from a comfortable distance is not among them.
So if we take the claim seriously, even provisionally, even as a hypothesis worth testing, the question becomes: what does Jesus actually look like? What does he do? Who does he seek out and who does he avoid? What makes him angry and what makes him weep? What kind of people does he eat dinner with and what kind of people does he refuse to eat dinner with? Because if Hebrews 1:3 is right, the answers to those questions are the answer to the question of what God is like.
He is furious at the religious leaders who construct elaborate systems of obligation for ordinary people and contribute nothing to carrying the weight they impose. He says so in terms so blunt and public that they become his death warrant. He calls them whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside and full of death on the inside. He calls them blind guides, straining out gnats and swallowing camels. He reserves his harshest words not for the people his culture has written off as sinners but for the people his culture has elevated as the standard-bearers of righteousness, because they have taken the name of God and used it to manage and diminish and control, and he finds this specific abuse intolerable in a way that he does not find ordinary human failure intolerable.
He weeps at a graveside. This detail in John 11 is two words in the Greek, the shortest verse in the English Bible, and it is doing more theological work than most people give it credit for. Jesus knows he is about to raise Lazarus. He has told his disciples explicitly that this is not the end of the story. And yet when he sees Mary weeping, when he sees the community of mourners around her, he is, the text says, deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. He weeps. The God who is about to reverse the death still weeps at the grief that death produced. The miracle does not cancel the mourning. Both are real. He is present in both.
He stops a crowd to speak to one woman. The woman in Mark 5 has been bleeding for twelve years. She has spent everything she had on doctors who could not help her. She is ceremonially unclean, which means she has been socially and religiously isolated for over a decade, excluded from worship, excluded from full participation in her community, perpetually defined by her condition. She reaches through the crowd and touches the hem of his garment, intending to remain invisible, hoping that proximity will be enough. He stops. He asks who touched him. His disciples think the question is absurd in a pressing crowd. He insists. She comes forward frightened, falls at his feet, tells him everything. And he calls her daughter, which is the only time in the Gospels he uses that word for anyone, and tells her that her faith has healed her and that she should go in peace, freed from her suffering. He stopped the crowd for her. He named her. He sent her away with her dignity not just restored but publicly declared.
He eats dinner with tax collectors and gets accused of being a glutton and a drunk because of the company he keeps. Tax collectors in first-century Palestine were not merely unpopular. They were collaborators with the Roman occupation, people who had sold out their own community for personal profit, who operated by a system that allowed them to collect more than the official rate and keep the excess. They were among the most despised people in the social landscape. And Jesus eats with them. Not strategically, not as a calculated outreach program, but apparently with enough genuine enjoyment of their company that his critics feel the need to comment on it. He is accused of being a friend of sinners in a tone that was intended as an insult. He does not dispute the characterization.
He tells a story about a father who sees his disgraced son coming down the road from a long way off. The son has already spent his portion of the inheritance, the portion he demanded early in an act that in the cultural context of the ancient Near East was roughly equivalent to telling his father he wished him dead. He has burned through it in a foreign country on things his father would have found repugnant. He is coming home not in triumph but in desperation, planning to ask for a job as a hired hand because he has correctly assessed that he has forfeited the right to be received as a son. The father sees him from a long way off. He hikes up his robe and runs. A wealthy landowner in first-century Palestine did not run. Running was the behavior of a servant, not a patriarch. It was undignified. It was the visible surrender of status. He runs anyway. He embraces the son before the son can deliver his rehearsed speech. He calls for the robe and the ring and the fatted calf. He throws a party.
Then the older son arrives. The one who stayed. The one who kept all the rules and did all the work and never embarrassed the family. He is furious and he refuses to go in and the father goes out to him too, not to vindicate the rules, not to explain why the younger son deserved the party, but to tell the older son that everything the father has is already his, and to invite him in. The father runs toward the one who was lost and goes out to the one who is lost in a different way, the one who has been standing in the right place doing the right things and has somehow managed to be as far from his father’s heart as his brother was in the distant country.
This is the exact imprint of God’s nature.
Philip asked Jesus directly, at the Last Supper, with the particular kind of desperate honesty that surfaces when people realize time is running out: show us the Father, and that will be enough for us. It is the oldest human request. The longing underneath every religious impulse that has ever existed. Let us see. Let us know what we are dealing with. Let us not have to navigate ultimate reality by inference and approximation. Just show us.
Jesus answered: Philip, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.
Not: I will point you toward the Father. Not: I will give you some information about the Father. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. The unfolding is complete. The charakter is in front of you. The seal has been pressed into the wax and the impression is exact.
The question that remains, the one that all the demolition work in the previous pieces was clearing the ground for, is this: does the God you have been arguing with, dismissing, resenting, or mourning look anything like the man described in those four books? The man who weeps at graves and stops crowds for invisible women and runs down roads and eats dinner with collaborators and reserves his fury exclusively for the people who use religion to diminish other people?
Because if the god you rejected does not look like that man, you have not rejected the Christian God. You have rejected someone else’s drawing of him. You have spent your energy on the cartoon and left the original unexamined.
The original is still there. Sitting with the tax collectors. Watching the road. Near to the brokenhearted, as advertised.
He has not moved. He is not offended that you looked at the cartoon first. Most people do.
The Gospels are short. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John together are shorter than most novels. Whatever you believe about their ultimate truth claims, whatever your position on miracles or resurrection or the inspiration of Scripture, they describe a human being doing human things in a specific place and time, and the description is available to anyone who wants to look at it directly rather than through the filter of everyone who has distorted it since.
Look at Jesus. Not at what his critics say about him. Not at what his worst representatives have done in his name. At him. At the exact imprint.
If what you find there is still not worth believing in, that is a conclusion worth arriving at honestly. But most people have not arrived there honestly. Most people have looked at the cartoon, found it wanting, and called the examination complete.
The real one is still standing there, waiting to be looked at properly, for what may be the first time.