Truth Link

THE HEART OF GOD

DISCOVER

God is love in the most personal, other-centered and beautiful sense imaginable.

What’s In A Name?

A Swedish couple attempted to name their child, “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprx-vclmnckssqlbb11116,” to be pronounced, “Albin.” They stated that the unusual name was “a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation.” The court in Sweden that makes rulings on such matters said some-thing like, “Um, okay … NO,” and ordered them to come up with a different name for the child. Turns out, the name carried a more deliberate message. The couple chose the strange name as a protest against the Swedish government’s naming law, which gives the state the final say on whether a name chosen for a child is acceptable.

Everyone has a name, and everyone’s name means something (Google will tell you what yours means, if you don’t already know). This is especially true in the Bible. Every name carries a message, revealing something about the character or story of the one who bears the name.

“Adam” means of the earth, and the Bible says that God created him from — you guessed it — the earth.

“Jacob” means deceiver, and we see this character trait played out in his life’s experience.

“Israel” means one who prevails with God, and that was the name God gave Jacob once he told the truth and overcame his deceptive tendency.

You get the point: in Scripture names carry meaning.

The first time we meet “God” in the Bible is by a very specific and peculiar name that reveals the most incredible thing imaginable about the Creator:

“In the beginning created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

You likely wrote the word “God” in the blank, as most Bible versions indicate you should. But in the original language of the text (Hebrew), it’s not the generic word “God,” as if to say, “In the beginning Deity created the heavens and the earth.” Rather, it’s a proper name, and the name is Elohim. But there is something odd about the name: it’s a plural noun, which would be like your neighbor introducing himself to you by saying, “Hi, I’m Johns.” Tilting your head with confusion, you might think he was just a very poor student of basic grammar, or perhaps that he was imagining himself to be more than one person. Whatever the case, you certainly would not take his plural introduction to be an accurate description of himself.

Why?

Because there is no coherent sense in which an individual human being can be named as a plural person. And yet, this is precisely how God introduces Himself to us in the first verse of the Bible — as a plurality of being in some sense. The idea is made all the more certain later in Genesis 1:

“Then God [Elohim] said, ‘Let make man in image’” (Genesis 1:26).

ELOHIM

There is some sense in which God is composed of an Us and an Our, not merely an I and a Me. God’s own reality, apart from and before Creation, involves a plurality of personhood. God is Elohim—the Plural One.

ONE, AND YET MORE THAN ONE

While the idea of one God involving more than one personal being may sound strange at first, we begin to understand what it means when we take into account the most fundamental and essential truth about God stated in Scripture:

“God is love” (1 John 4:16).

Meaning what, precisely?

When the Bible uses the word “love,” it means something very specific:

“Love is … not self-seeking” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, NIV).

Love, by definition, is self-giving and other-centered. So in order for love to exist, there must be more than one person; there must be a relationship. If you lock yourself alone in a room and stay there for the rest of your life, you will never experience love for the simple reason that a solitary self cannot experience love. It logically follows, then, that since “God is love,” God is more than one personal being while at the same time existing as one essential divine entity.

In other words, God is not a solitary self, but rather a social unit of self-giving love in perpetual motion.

Throughout the Bible God is described as one God and yet more than one: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Father is God (Isaiah 64:8; John 3:16), and yet not all there is of God. The Son, Jesus Christ, is God (John 1:1; Philippians 2:5-6), yet not all there is of God. The Holy Spirit is God (Job 33:4; Luke 1:35), yet not all there is of God. This is why we call God a Trinity, or a Tri-unity—because God is an eternal fellowship shared by three distinct divine persons who are of one essential nature, one in purpose, mind, and character.

This text isn’t meant to be a demeaning jab at the atheist, but rather a rational observation regarding the logical incoherence of atheism. Of course, many intelligent people refuse to believe in God because religion has often made God appear ugly and only worthy of unbelief. But here in Psalm 14:1 the Bible is offering an analytical observation regarding the general foolishness of denying God’s existence. It is foolish to say, “there is no God,” for the simple reason that if God did not exist it would never occur to us to wonder if He does. The fact is, only that which exists in some form occurs to human awareness and things that do not exist can never occur to our awareness. It is impossible for the human mind to conceive of anything that has absolutely no basis in reality.

No negation statement is ever absolutely true. We cannot complete the sentence, “There is no ," without reference to existing realities.

Even when we construct our wildest fictions, we have simply reassembled pieces of things that do exist. The fact that we conceive of God at all is evidence that a God of some sort does exist.

It is also intellectually incoherent to deny the existence of God for the simple reason that we all know life does have meaning, that good and evil do exist, and that we long for a totally trustworthy quality of love that finds no perfectly satisfying match in the current moral order of our broken world. Atheism is, therefore, counterintuitive and requires an intellectual and emotional leap away from what we know we are meant to be.

We all have a nagging suspicion, a divinely implanted intuition, that we are meant to be creatures of astounding nobility and that evil, suffering, and death are unnatural intruders. We can’t help but wonder if the reason we so persistently long for something more is because there is something more.

God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NLT).

There resides within us a sense of eternal realities that we find very difficult to shake off. Because we were made in the image of God, we can never be truly satisfied unless, and until, we return to God. Only God can fill the God-shaped hole in our hearts.

CONNECT

In Jesus Christ we see what it really means to be human as humans were originally created to be.

The key word in this study is “image.” We’ve seen that “God made mankind in His own image.” As we fast forward to the New Testament, we encounter strategic uses of the word again, this time pertaining to Jesus Christ as a new and restored manifestation of what it means to be human. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Paul tells us that Jesus “is the image of God.” Hebrew 1:3 states that Jesus is “the brightness of His [God’s] glory and the express image of His person.” Jesus now carries the descriptive title, “the image of God,” because He is, in His humanity, the new pattern man. He is, as it were, a fresh enactment of the human experience, living once again in God’s love as originally intended.

Now, through identification with Jesus, “as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man [Jesus]” (1 Corinthians 15:49). The image of God may be restored in us through coming into trusting association with Christ. As we “behold” Him, Paul explains, we will be “transformed into the same image, from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

EXPERIENCE

I commit myself to “behold” Jesus and I look forward to being changed into His image.

To “behold” Jesus simply means to contemplate, examine and become acquainted with His character and teachings. As we engage our hearts and minds in the transformative task of beholding Him, the Bible promises that God’s image will take on new and living form in our lives.