Who is God and Why Should You Care >>Part II

jenniferpoduje
Oct 7, 2020
13 min read

Updated: Oct 12, 2020

Why Should We Care?

In Part One of this post, Who is God, we delved down the rabbit hole, exploring ideas of an unseen Creator, Who though always existed and is responsible for everything, many still refuse to name this catalyst: God.

Starting at the assumption God is the Creator of the universe, let’s dive into why you should care.

First, let’s leave behind the chatterbot refusal to not believe what is unseen. If you take that stance you have to also deny love. Love itself is unseen, yet most can adamantly attest to its manifestations. If you deny the existence of love, you should not be smug in your refusal. It is one thing to disbelieve because you have not experienced something or because you have been deceived. It is another to have experienced something true and continue in your disbelief. Now you are self-deceiving and have no one to blame but your own disillusions.

True love in the Christian sense cannot be attributed to a specific release of chemicals in the brain. It is not physically possible to truly love another as one loves themselves; there is no chemical formula for this type of love. It is only spiritually possible, sprung from an unseen source that is the Holy Spirit residing and moving within man, allowing him to overcome the physical. The love we experience on a daily basis is undoubtably a form of self-serving love. Take a few moments to reflect on those you love. Think of the actions and thoughts you have towards them. Think of what you expect from their actions and thoughts towards you. Be honest with how you would start to view those same people if their actions and thoughts towards you were 100% devoid of love. Could you continue to love them in the same way? Is it even humanly possible to actually, truly love someone in the same way whether they spit on you or hug you?

The only One capable of this love is God. Even if you are not Christian and do not know God, you can still love and be loved. But you cannot express selfless love. The highest form of love from which all love forms come: Agape love. Self-sacrificial love. It sounds beautiful and nice in theory, but in practice it is impossible for mere man to exercise. Only through God, the Holy Spirit within man, is this love possible. This is why Jesus said, “This is how the world will know you are Mine, by how you love one another.” No one else can love in this way! And God loved this way first. Because God IS the highest form of Love, period.

This is a resoundingly emotional and spiritual reason why you should care who God is: He loves you more than you love yourself. He is the only One who will love you more than yourself, for He is the only One capable of knowing you and being as close to you as you are to yourself. He knows more about you than you do. Yet, practical persons may be reading, and they want practical answers. God is emotional and spiritual, but He is practical as well! On the eve of Christ’s crucifixion, after explaining to the apostles how He was going back to the Father three days after His death, He commented on a very practical concern of the disciples. He told them not to worry they will not have the words to say when they are faced with throngs of people, Jewish leaders, or rulers of nations, for He will provide them with the words to speak at these times. It seems that concern would be the last thing on anyone’s mind after Jesus revealed Himself as the Savior of the world, yet He knew their minds and hearts, and He did not dismiss their very practical and worldly concern!

You should care who God is because if He is whom I’ve described, the creator of all, then He also created you. This implies something terrifying to most men and woman: You are not your own higher power. There is no, “do you”. If you were created, then you have a creator to which you are accountable.

Let’s say you were given a gift. It is the most amazing gift you have ever received. Yet, you have no idea how to use it. You try and you fail to figure out how to work this gift on your own. One day someone says, Why don’t you call the manufacturer’s number on the back? You could say, no. You could continue to use the gift in a way you think it will best work, but you will have been denying yourself the experience of using the gift the way it was best designed. You will have never used it correctly, the way in which you reap the most benefits of the gift. Almost all of us would just call the number, receive instructions, and enjoy the gift. Yet it is easy to imagine this analogy as a physical gift separate from ourselves, it is harder when you realize the gift is your life. It is your existence, past, present, and future.

You want to know the best way to make use of yourself, to be the best you can be, but how do we feel letting someone other than ourselves give us the instruction manual to…ourselves? No one wants to find out they have been doing things wrong all along. That they have been on the wrong path, using their life in a way that is not nearly even close to purposeful. It is hard to acknowledge what you have thought was good has all along not been even close. If God created everything, then He determines if it is being used properly. He determines if it is good. This is logical; not unfair, as many suppose it to be. “Why can’t I decide how I live my life? I’m not doing anything bad with it. I’m a good person. How is it fair that God gets to determine what is good and what is not?”

Let’s go to another analogy: A car manufacturer makes a car. A good car. The actual definition of good is something has all the traits and attributes required to serve the purpose for what it is intended. Try not to think right now in terms of good or evil, just think about what good actually means. If a car is good, it works according to how the manufacturer made it. All the mechanical elements work in a way that the car serves its purpose: a locomotive that transports by road. If it is a good car, it works according to how it was designed. If an owner does not follow the instructions on how to operate the car and care for the car, it may not run. It may break down. It may rust and sit in the driveway. This is not the fault of the manufacturers. He didn’t create a bad car, the owner did. If the car no longer runs, if it is no longer able to carry out its intended purpose, it is a bad car. Simply, it doesn't work. If it gets crashed, it is bad. It no longer works. But God doesn’t make bad cars, we do.

We’ve been given our lives and like the owner of the car, we may be driving at high speeds, disregarding the manufacturer’s instructions, maybe our lives are wasted, like that car rotting in the driveway, never taken out for a spin, never having the oil changed or gas filling the tank, and to look at that totaled, rusted heap of junk and say, “It’s good according to me,” is an insult to the car and the manufacturer of the car. Is your life an insult to God? Is it a hollow excuse of an existence humans were destined to live out?

If it doesn’t run, it isn’t good. It’s not up to you to determine if your life is good. Nor your spouse, or your children, parents, or friends. If you are refusing to let God decide how to run your life, you are like a car that doesn’t run. It’s not mean. It is not unfair. It is logical. Your life may not be good, it may be bad, simply because you are not living your life the way God, the manufacturer of your existence, intended you to live. The manufacturer of your existence is the only one who determines if you are good or not. If you are riding along in your life the way that He intended.

I like using these types of analogies, with inanimate objects, because they are not personal. Many people take it very personally when they and their chosen lifestyle is labeled "bad." With these examples, I am trying to take your feelings out of the way. Your feelings can change, your opinions, but objective truth, God's truth, never changes. These examples help us see that it is not a mean God or a cruel, unreasonable God that, "Sets the rules and makes us follow them or He kills us." If a car is a heap of unsalvageable metal and the owner never even attempts to fix it, where does it go? The garage where it gets smashed. It is not unfair. It is logical. It is reasonable. If your life is not lived out according to its purpose, you are not working properly. You are not "good." There is a bar for humanity. The point is not to reach it, but to acknowledge it exists, and that we did not set its heights or requirements, and no matter what we do, we will never reach it, but when we are ready, Jesus will grab us up on His shoulders, set us up there and we will finally see what we've been missing. You think you have a good life now? Wait until Jesus lifts you up.

Color Analogies

Black is not a color. It is an absence of light. No matter how adamantly black carries on about how it accomplished this or did that, it will still never be a color. It might think it is a color, be offended when told it’s not a color, refuse to believe it is not a color, and even go around defining itself as a color. But black is not a color by the very definition. You can’t decide for yourself what is good if you didn’t define or create it.

If an entity of Blue created all things in different shades of blue and one day all blue things will come back to this Blue entity, a black square cannot waltz up and say, Hey, I am blue too! The Blue entity is not being unfair when it tells the black square, Nope, you are not even on the color spectrum. God is good. He didn’t will good into existence; He actually is Good. Our very definition of good was defined first as God. Just as that Blue entity is not a thing that is blue, it actually is Blue. And everything that will ever resemble blue comes from it: a blue chair, blue house, blue mouse etcetera. If something does not resemble or contain blue characteristics, it is not blue. A black box cannot be blue. It can think it is blue, but objectively it is not. And who can determine if something is objectively blue if not the color blue itself, the Blue entity? Since the Blue entity is the highest form of Blue and comes from no other Blue before It; It is the final say and form of comparison by how blue is determined to be blue.

You may think I’ve gone way off track. Obviously blue is blue and black is not a color and it certainly is not blue. But this is exactly what most of us spend our lives trying to argue. That we are good. That we can define and have knowledge as to what good actually is as determined within ourselves. Who is God and why should you care? He is the creator of the universe. He is good and creates good things. You are God’s ultimate creation; His masterpiece. He has specifically designed you and knows exactly what a good life for you entails. If you can accept that you were created, wouldn’t you want to know what you were created for? Wouldn’t you want to know if you are a car that is running down the road smoothly or stalled on the side of the road?

If you are thinking, I am not a stalled car, my life is going well. I don’t need a creator, even if He is out there objectively defining me, His creation, as good or bad, life seems good to me. But how do you know? If you didn’t create good and you didn’t create yourself, if you didn’t create humanity, how do you know your life is running smoothly, that it is good? What if you are stuck and don’t even know it, just spinning your wheels in the mud or stagnate and propped up with a green screen behind you like in movie car scenes? How much more of your life do you want to spend not knowing?

God is a God of big dreams, a God of amazing feats, a God that never loses a battle or sees defeat. He is the winning side. Whatever dreams and ambitions you have are nothing compared to the good He has and has always had in store for you. God did not create anyone to be the slackers or the underachievers of His Kingdom. He did not create 10% of us to live amazing lives and the other 90% to be the slackers who live life out on the couch, Netflix and chilling. All of mankind is meant for more. They are meant for more than they are living. There will always be an opportunity to grow, to strive, to step it up. God is looking for people who are done with small dreams and petty living. He wants us to wake up and stand up. To actively seek His face. To allow Him to use us in ways only He can, providing us an existence that is beyond what we can ever imagine. Why should you care who God is? Because He is the only One who knows who you are. He is the only One who knows what you can be.

Action steps

If you are a Christian

Pray with an open mind and willing heart, asking God to reveal how you can make room for Him.
Ask God to show you one thing you need to let go of and one thing you need to start doing.
Ask God to help you want to make those changes in your life that will meet and serve His purpose for you.

If you are not a Christian

Pray for God to reveal Himself to you. If you, with a sincere heart, ask God to reveal himself, He always will.
Will you have a willing heart to see Him when He does reveal Himself or a doubting, testing heart? A man whose child was sick asked Jesus to save the child. Jesus said if he believed, his child would be saved. The man cried out; “I believe! Lord, help my unbelief!”
It is normal to disbelieve, but are you open to believing? My prayer is that when you pray for God to reveal himself, you do so as this man did. Acknowledging your doubt while at the same time having hope that it can be turned to belief.

Everyone

Research what the scientific community says about the origins of the universe. Can you decipher biased science from objective scientific observation?
Research what the Bible says about the origins of the universe and who God is. Be specific with your research.

As Christians we need to be growing. It does not matter your age or intelligence, the kinds of questions you ask are based on the maturity of your faith. If you have been a Christian for a long time, you have already asked and wrestled with the answers concerning many questions new believers will ask. You may have more challenging and complex questions the deeper and further along you are in your faith. The longer you are a Christian does not mean the less questions you have. No! The more you learn about God, the more complex and detailed your questions of Him and His ways become. This is why you should be specific in your research.

What Biblical questions concern you? What questions reveal your doubt and lack of faith? What Biblically Christian idea or passage leaves you with uncertainty? Did that really happen? Did God really give the okay on that? Research these topics! Ask God for guidance and understanding. You may never receive a complete answer, but I can promise, what God gives you will be enough for you to confidently move on from that issue with faith and conquer the next!

Know the Bible. Read the Scriptures.

Much of our Biblical knowledge is passed down. Whether you realize it or not, most of what you know about God is from media, society, school, and your family. Even if your family has always prayed and spoken of God in the home, when was the last time you actually read for yourself in the Bible some of the truisms you believe and repeat to others! If you have a belief about Christianity yet cannot pinpoint where in the Bible it states that belief, or from what Bible study this belief was expanded upon, you need to go back to the Word and examine your beliefs and find sure footing within the Word. At times the Bible requires complex critical thinking. Sometimes it only requires eyes and a minimally working brain. The greatest minds and the smallest minds alike can comprehend the Bible’s basic elements. Yet, there are many layers of the Bible and your study of it will produce a deeper understanding than an initial first reading.

Christians need to be knowledgeable. This not only deepens our faith, but the faith of others when they hear the truth of our words and how they glorify God’s truth. Christians should be able to debate and reason with others concerning their faith.

There will also be times when it will only be an exercise of casting pearls to swine. Let God lead your heart as to when you need to open your mouth and speak out and when it is better to save your energy, offer a kind word, and walk away.

Biblical References:

Here is a small sampling of Bible verses used as reference for this post.

God is Good

Mark 10:18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone./

/Psalms 119:68 You are good and do good; Teach me Your statutes/ Romans 2:4/

1 Timothy 4:4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude/ James 1:17 Every good thing given, and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow/ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect/ Psalm 19:7 The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

God Existed Before Time

John 1:3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made/

John 17:5 Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was/ Revelation 22:13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end/ Isaiah 41:4 Who has performed and accomplished it, calling forth the generations from the beginning?‘I, the Lord, am the first, and with the last. I am He'/ Psalm 100:5 For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations/ Romans 1:20

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 Exodus 3:14 God said to Moses,“I Am who I Am.”And He said,“Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’”

Mark 9:23-24 23 Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”