From the Pastor’s Study

Does God Want to Be Known?

Rev. Ken Schurb

Zion Lutheran Church

People have many confused ideas about God. You can hear all sorts of opinions. Often when people are asked why they think particular thoughts about God, they themselves wonder where they got these ideas.

What does God Himself say? Does He make Himself known? Does He even want to?

Someone quipped that “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.” The Bible teaches that “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by [His] Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). Christians can point to Jesus and say, “There’s God!” He is the Word made flesh (John 1:14).

Suppose your daughter lives away from home at college. On the phone and via e-mail she starts telling you about a guy named Josh. Before long, you amass a lot of information about Josh. You know his hometown, his major, his favorite kind of music, what he likes on a pizza, and more. Perhaps at some point she even attached a picture.

Yet you find all this data unsatisfying. It’s not that you don’t trust your daughter. You simply don’t know quite how to add it all up. And you are just careful enough to wonder whether he never looked better all semester than on the day she snapped his picture.

So when your daughter comes home at Thanksgiving, you suggest that she invite Josh to spend a day at your home over Christmas break. For no amount of description she gives can substitute for ushering him into your front door, pointing, and saying, “Here he is!”

For centuries the Church has been able to point to God by pointing to Jesus – God become Man to bring wayward man back to God.

The destiny for which all people were made is not merely to muddle through life on our way to the grave. It is to live in ongoing relationship with God our Creator. Human sin ruins the Divine-human relationship, though. Loneliness, worthlessness, sickness, suffering, and death result from the ruination. They signal the terminal sickness of our nature. Nothing is worse than being without God forever, but by ourselves that is where we will end up.

So it is great good news that “God was in Christ.” He was “reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Do you want to know what God is like? He makes Himself known above all in Jesus Christ.

Do you want to know what God was willing to go through to save you? Think of Christ on the cross in your place.

Do you want to know how God feels about you? Think of Christ your Substitute, risen triumphant from the dead, Victor over sin and death for you.

When you know Christ by the power of His Word, you know God and are known by Him!