Knowing The One True God

I grew up with a false view of God. I ended up drawing all over the page in my quest to understand Who God is and what He demands before I found my straight line. As a teenager, I pursued the “God” that I had grown up with. I was desperately afraid of this “God”. He was big and scary and seemed to be ready to “whap” me at the first misstep. I found it easier to hide myself away in music or books rather than learn about him. As a result, although I knew a lot of Scripture, I was spiritually a baby for far longer than I should have been. Over time, it became obvious that this “God” was a figment of someone’s warped imagination. I wanted to know the True God. I looked for Him but I searched for the true God in the wrong way.

I heard about a “God” who was interested in my personal development and happiness. He wasn’t nearly as demanding as the other “God”. He only wanted me to be content and enjoy life. He would allow me to bend the rules where I saw fit. Over time, though, it just didn’t add up. Where, with the “ogre God” there had been so much of a sense of harshness and so that I could never reach him, with this “God” there weren’t many demands at all. He only wanted to please me. This “God” wanted me, He needed me. He felt little to me. I was confused. If God was neither an ogre and ready to “whap” me into oblivion but He wasn’t just waiting on me to decide to play with him, either, who was He?

I kept searching and kept on seeing different “faces” of God. At first, that didn’t bother me too much since He is so, well, big. Only the faces didn’t mesh. They weren’t different sides of the square that I was seeing but different squares entirely. I realized that the “God” that people were preaching and teaching about wasn’t the God that I read about in the Bible. I knew the Bible stories of God’s provision and care as well as His demands for righteousness. His miracles seemed, well, miraculous but removed from the modern world and His demands for holiness seemed to not fit into today’s society. Arminian taught Preachers told me that God did not involve Himself in our lives too much. He didn’t really “love” us emotionally, He simply acted in “love” towards us by doing what He had to do. They said that He didn’t draw us to Him or help us to figure Him out. In essence, we were totally on our own until we just “happened” to stumble upon him. That also made no sense. The ogre “God”, the just want you to be happy “God” and the distant “God” didn’t line up with any of the Bible stories that I knew. The verse about Jesus being the same yesterday, today and always kept going through my head. If it were true, and, as I believed in both the inerrancy and the infallibility of God’s Word, I believed that it was, then there were a whole lot of people preaching and teaching about God who didn’t really know Him. Understanding that, I set off on a journey that lasted several years and resulted in my finding the Treasure of a lifetime: the pearl of great price.

Pursuing God as He reveals Himself in His Word rather than as something born of fear, a formula, fun or fulfillment proved to be my straight line. In finding the real God, the God of the Bible, I found something both worth living and dying for.

Too many of us, like myself, spend our lives serving a God with a little “g”: this “god” isn’t the Creator, Sustainer and Savior of the world although he wears His name and mimics Him. The “god” with a little “g” is entirely a “god” of our own making: we decide who we want or need him to be and then we tell ourselves that’s who he is. But we are mistaken to think that we have that option. The real God, the One True God, the God of Scripture, the only “God” Who matters, tells us Who He is and then He invites us to come know, worship, serve and love Him. When we respond to Him through repentance and obedience, He reveals more of Himself to us and we grow in knowledge, obedience and holiness.

Becoming a follower of the “True God” shuts everything else out and leads to the pinnacle of joy and happiness. He reveals Himself through His Word. It is people who fail to understand and know Him. Pursuit of the “True God” is life-changing: once you know Him, nothing else matters. When we obey Him, we are reoriented from the temporary nature of this world and refocused upon the eternal world just beyond our sight. The result is a life spent seeking and finding, The Way of holiness: Jesus Christ Himself.

The God of the Bible IS the One True God: His Son Jesus IS the only way to Him. We must understand this. We must know Him as He reveals Himself and not as the world, or the church, tries to convince us He is. We must also know ourselves as He reveals us to be: desperately wicked and unworthy of Him. If we think we have any good in us at all which we can offer Him, we have misunderstood the Gospel. If we think that there is something in this world that can compete with Him (and that it is okay with Him), we have failed to know Him.

If we know, however, that there is nothing at all that is truly important outside of the fact that Jesus Christ came to earth and suffered under the hand of His Own Father and was crushed by Him for our sins; if we know that He hates sin and that we are the vilest of sinners, that He reveals Himself to us in His Word through love and that His grace saves us; if we have grasped that coming to Him must change us; that through repentance and obedience, we may know Him, serve Him and live with Him; and that He must be, not only our “one” thing, but, also, our “only” thing–the only thing that matters, then we have found the One True God.