Who is He?

Number 23:19
God is not man, that he should lie,
    or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it?
    Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (ESV)

We are around people all of the time.  People who disappoint us and upset us, get on our nerves and continually change their minds.  Naturally, we tend to view all relationships through the lens that is tinted with those poor experiences.  However, we need to be very careful not to view God through that same lens.  God is not man.  He is unchanging.  Faithful.  True.  Perfect.  Being in a relationship with God is nothing like being in a relationship with another broken human being.  As scripture says, He does not lie.  He will follow through with what He promises.  He is also gracious.  Forgiving.  Loving.  Dependable.  Omnipresent.  Omniscient. He is everything good, and moreover, as He told Moses, “I AM THAT I AM,” He is everything we have ever needed, everything we currently need, and everything we will ever need in the days to come.

So often, we allow our human relationships to affect how we believe God; they cause us to doubt what God says.  We doubt that He will stay faithful to us or always love us, we doubt that He forgives us as promised because we are so used to broken human beings.  Moreover, we allow our own attitudes and tendencies to cause us to project onto Him our own inconsistencies.  It’s a psychological process in which we expect others to contain all of the flaws we ourselves carry, but if we do that with God then we are making Him out to be imperfect and broken which in turn causes us to lose the hope that we should receive from a relationship with Him.

We must calibrate and correct our view of who God is in order to have a strong, healthy relationship with Him.  He is God.  He is the creator of all things.  He loves us deeply and wants us to know Him fully.  What a privilege it is to be the adopted children of the creator of all things!  We can know Him, if only we change the lenses with which we view Him.