“A picture is worth a thousand words,” as the old saying goes. And the Old Testament is full of pictures of God—metaphors of what God is like. These pictures come from everyday people like you and me who met God because God encountered them. Each encounter brought some new understanding of this God who is INCONCEIVABLE, and yet “with us,” making himself known to people. People reflected on those encounters through stories, songs, and poetry. These stories, songs, and poetry use pictures, or metaphors, to describe what God is like. A metaphor is a way of understanding something new or unfamiliar by comparing it to something familiar. That’s really how we understand anything, but if we are to understand God (who truly is INCONCEIVABLE), metaphors are essential.
The Old Testament answers the question “What is God like?” with pictures, pictures describing God from encounters with him. No one picture, however, can describe God because “God is too full, too communicative, too bright and piercing,”[1] and so the Bible offers a tapestry of metaphors, each drawing us closer to the heart of God.
What are your pictures of what God is like? Here are a few from ancient men and women who encountered God:
God is My Rock
One of the first, and most repeated, metaphors used in the Old Testament is the description of God as a “Rock.” When everything is crumbling around us, God alone is faithful, trustworthy, stable, reliable. To say God is my Rock is to describe God as a “Rock of refuge,” a strong tower or fortress that we can run to for security and safety. In desert regions, a refuge for safety would often be a high plateau situated on a solid rock, and this place “above the fray” would be a place of rest, security, protection, and recovery. The Psalmists say things like, “Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I,” and “my soul finds rest in God alone; He alone is my Rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.” (Ps. 61: 2; 62:1,2).
God is My Shepherd
The Old Testament uses many impersonal metaphors to describe God: He is fire, thunder, wind, ocean. God is even a roaring lion! But the most prominent metaphors for God are personal, relational images. God is not an object to be studied; he is a relational being to be encountered, who gives affection and desires our love. Shepherd is a dominant Old Testament metaphor. Unfortunately, this image doesn’t communicate like it once did. We might translate this today by saying God is my “Keeper;” God is the one who takes responsibility for my life, who protects me, watches over me, cares for me, provides for me, defends me, brings me back when I stray. David, a shepherd himself, penned the most beloved of the Psalms, describing God as my shepherd, who loves me.
God is My Loving Parent
The metaphors of Rock and Shepherd are used interchangeably with another tender, personal metaphor: God is like the most loving of parents. God often describes the nation of Israel as his son, and he longed for Israel to see him as their tender-hearted father: “I thought you would call me Father” (Jer. 3:19). Because God is “Israel’s father,” he says: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness (hesed)…. I will lead them beside streams of water…and watch over his flock like a shepherd” (Jer. 31:3, 9, 10). God is “a father to the fatherless” (Ps. 10:14; 68:5), and “as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him” (Ps. 103:13). “Father” is not the only parental metaphor used to describe God; the Old Testament is rich with the metaphor of describing God as like a “Mother.” God is described as like a female eagle “hovering over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions” (Deut. 32:18, 11), and he tells his people, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you,” (Isa. 66:13).
God is My King
A dominant metaphor repeated throughout the Old Testament is God is King. It was the metaphor with which the people of Israel were intimately familiar because they came to know God in this way from the very beginning, when God rescued them from slavery and death under the clutches of Pharoah, king of Egypt. Yahweh, the God of Israel, appeared as a greater king than Pharoah and fought against the political ruling power to bring justice and dignity to the oppressed. The Pharaohs, like the king/dictators in the city-states of Canaan, used religion to legitimize their power. In Egyptian and Canaanite culture, only the “king” had a direct line to God; only the king was “made in the image of the gods” and only the king was a “son” of the gods. But Yahweh changed all that. Yahweh says every person, even the least, is made in the “image of Yahweh” (Gen. 1:27), and each person is a “son” of Yahweh (Deut.14:1).
Yahweh was intent on building a kingdom alright, but it was to be a kingdom of priests, serving one another, and not a kingdom of warriors. God knew that power corrupts, and so he warned against the power-hungering corruption that would come with a human king. But the people pleaded for a king, and so God permitted it, but with strict limits: the king should not get rich at the expense of the people, and he should write for himself a copy of Yahweh’s laws and meditate on it, so that “he may learn to fear Yahweh his God…that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers” (Deut. 17:19). The first king, Saul, proved God’s point and was a disaster when power went to Saul’s head. But the second king, David, was different: he had a heart for God. So, God anointed David to be the king of Israel, and in time David’s kingdom stretched all the way from the Mediterranean sea to Mesopotamia. But power went to David’s head, too. In lust for personal power and pleasure, he committed adultery, lied, even murdered, and then tried to cover it all up. The scandal rocked his kingdom, and when the dust settled, he had lost his family, his reputation, and his kingdom. Only because of God’s faithfulness and David’s repentance and humility was some semblance of his kingdom restored.
The Lost Kingdom of God
None of the kings of Israel would prove any better. Power does corrupt, and instead of being a light to the nations around them, the people of Israel became just like the rest of the world. The kingdom was soon divided between warring factions. The northern portion was conquered by the Assyrians and sent into captivity in 722 BC; the southern portion was conquered by the Babylonians and taken into captivity in 586 BC. The nation of Israel would no longer have a king or a kingdom. But God continued to speak to his people through his servants the prophets, and while exiled in Babylon, God showed the people a coming kingdom, one that would last forever.
In a vision, the prophet Daniel saw someone like a “Son of Man,” a human, approaching God’s throne in heaven, and he is given “authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and people of every language worshiped him” (Dan. 7:13, 14). This “Son of Man” will give this kingdom to the people, and together they will possess a kingdom that will outlast the kingdom of Babylon and the coming empires of Greece and Rome. While in exile, God promised that one day “I will raise up on David’s throne a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land” (Jer. 23:5; Ezek. 37:24, 27). As the years wore on, this promised king is spoken of as someone who is more than just a descendant of David, and whose kingdom reaches beyond the nation of Israel. It begins to look as though Yahweh [God] himself is coming as King:
“I am coming, and I will live among you, declares Yahweh. And many nations will be joined with Yahweh and will become my people. I will live among you” (Zech. 1:10).
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).
Where is the Promised King?
The people of Israel did return from exile to Jerusalem in 520 BC. But that grand vision of the coming kingdom, a kingdom of priests where people loved truth and peace and in which all the people of the world would be a part, never materialized. First, in 334 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Judea along with the rest of the Middle Eastern world., and then in 63 BC, Judea became subject to the conquering Romans. But the Jews still looked forward to a great King to come like the prophets promised–a “Messiah,” God’s anointed one. And the Jews continued to sing and pray all those Psalms that proclaim God as King of the world. But history displays another story, and with all the violence, political corruption, wars and rumors of wars, how in the world could God really become “King”?
The King Who Changed History
The world was quiet in the first century. Rome’s fierce boot of oppression brought a “peace” that exacted heavy taxes and the quick quashing of any revolution. The leaders of Israel were more than willing to comply with the Romans as long as their families and friends were well taken care of. By their complicity and through a long line of political maneuvering, first century Jerusalem’s “king,” Herod, was a Roman puppet and wasn’t even a Jew. Herod was a ruthless politician, using religion for personal purposes, even building an impressive Temple to retain his power, and stocking it with his political cronies.
But then the most incredible, amazing thing happened. A peasant carpenter/teacher appeared in the outskirts of the Jewish world, in Galilee, “the land where so many Gentiles lived,” and proclaimed, “The time has come. The Kingdom of God has arrived!” (Mark 1:15). Like a tiny seed planted in the middle of nowhere, a giant sequoia emerged, providing shade to humans all over the world for 2,000 years. Like yeast permeating loaves of bread, what he did and taught slowly and completely changed everything– how we think about life, death, ourselves, and others, and most importantly what we think about God. His words and his actions shocked everyone, and those shock waves reverberate still. Herod and the priest-pretenders didn’t like this finger-pointing revolutionary one bit, and so they plotted to kill him. And the amazing thing is that he let them! He said his brutal death was all part of God’s plan, part of God’s way of revealing just what kind of God he is, part of the way in which God would bring about his “Kingdom.”
What a strange person this Jesus was. And yet what he said and did completely and irreversibly changed the history of the world. In the next blog, we answer the question: Why did this peasant carpenter/teacher forever change the world, and what does that have to do with me?
You can read more of what God is like in my book Meet God (Before You Die), available at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/meet-god-before-you-die and on Amazon.
[1] Benjamin Myers, quoted in Lauren F. Winner, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (New York: HarperOne, 2015), 9.