subject: Different Pictures Of God [print this page] Mental images, I think, are as reductionary as visual images, and specifically I"m talking about mental images of God. Let me explain. This past week I went fishing with four of my friends here at the church and we were out in a very, you"re talking about remote, I mean, radio contact was all that we had. We fished for six days. One of the gentlemen on the trip is a great photographer and he got us all together and he took one picture of all of us on the trip. That"s it. He said, "I"m just going to take one picture." How many believe that? You can tell I"m lying. This guy took hundreds of pictures. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I don"t know anything about cameras, but he had zoom lens, wide-angle lens, black and white pictures. He had the whole thing and he wanted to document the trip. He wanted to get so many pictures that twenty years from now he looks back on this trip and goes, "Oh, we did this. We did that. Look at the beauty. Look at the fish. Look at the water. Look at the boat."
Our spiritual photo album, it should be packed with pictures of God. I"m talking about different pictures of God. Look at God"s Word. On one hand, God is a just judge. On the other hand, God"s a loving Father. Isaiah described Him as a nursing mother. Jesus said, "I"m your best friend." The list goes on and on and on. But too many of us, we are operating on a little single photograph of God that someone gave us twenty years ago and that"s the only thing we think about when we think about God. Maybe it"s a God who"s watching us. Maybe it"s a policeman God. Maybe it"s the female God.
A lot of those pictures are wrong, they are incorrect, they"re not the God of the Bible. Some of you think God is a judge, the big gavel, the black robe. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Here"s what the Bible says concerning that, Romans 8:15, God says "Call me dad. Call me dad." Some of us think of God as a general, don"t we? Ed Young Pastor tells us that with the knee-high leather boots and the Ray-Bans, the policeman tights, this and that and giving commands and it"s all legalistic and we have all these rules and most of us who have an approval-type personality problem, we have a concept of God like that. Because again, someone gave us this or maybe we took a picture of God, we have it in our photo album, and that"s all we look at every day.
Some of us have an image of God and this is a dangerous, dangerous snapshot of God. In fact, this is the most deadly, the grandfatherly image of God. The grandfatherly image of God. The George Burns-type, thick glasses, toupee, cigar. "God is my grandfather. God, He wouldn"t deny me. Hell? He"s going to open the doors of heaven. He"ll pat me on the head and say, "Eddie, it"s okay. Even though you didn"t live for me, even though you took my name in vain, even though you lived an immoral life, even though you were filled with lust, even though you had this rebellion, even though you were abusive to your spouse, come on into heaven, man! Come on in! Everything is cool with me. I"m like old pa-pa, just come on in!" That picture of God sends more people to hell than any other picture. It really does. Yes, God"s a God of love and a God of grace, but He"s also a God of judgment and a God who will see to it that our sins are paid for and will judge us on whether or not we know Christ. Then if we know Christ, He"s going to judge us on how we use the gifts that God gave us while on this earth. Do you have a concept of God like that? If you do, that comes again dangerously close to being an idol in your life, an inaccurate mental picture of God.
