What If God is Like Jesus

In the next couple of days we’ll engage with some of the trickier ideas/scriptures that were raised in the message. Today, we want to think about this: the incarnation of Jesus doesn’t just mean that Jesus is God. It means that God is like Jesus.

For many of us, our religious communities or families - knowingly or unknowingly - taught us that God is angry, emotionally distant, and judgmental. But it might be time to rethink those images of God. The scripture teaches us that:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of God’s being. - Hebrews 1:3

So if we want to know what God is like, all we have to do is look at Jesus. For example, when it comes to being judgmental, is there anyone in the world less judgmental that Jesus? So that must mean that God is not judgmental!

And think about how many times we’ve been confronted by the violence of God. But Jesus was the victim of vioence and never its perpetrator. (There’s a great bumper sticker that plays on the old WWJD adage: Who Would Jesus Bomb?). So now we have to rethink God through the lens of non-violence, since the “exact representation of God’s being” is Jesus.

Take some time to ponder this idea: how might your view of God need to be adapted by what you see in the person of Jesus?