There's a portrait in my mind of who I believe God is. This portrait is one that I have taken all of my life to paint. I have lines and colors that were painted in anguish, and I have strokes and hues that are vibrant in joy. Some were carefully executed, and others were slapped onto the canvas just to put something on the page.
That portrait defines the way I think God lives, moves, and exists in my life.
There were times when my painting was purposefully painted without color. I was careful to keep them out, because I wasn't able to see where He was still moving and acting in my day-to-day life. My painting was intricate, full of details and character that took time to put in, but my painting wasn't alive. It was meticulous, but it was flat.
There have been times when I have changed my painting to make it vibrant. Ignoring the details and intricacies to focus on getting as dynamic and contrasting colors as I could. I wanted to understand that passionate, unrelenting fire that I have seen in Scripture. I didn't care to be careful, I wanted to be vivid. There was an incredible desire to have my portrait be one that felt like it was never still. That painting was exquisite, it had nothing defined and everything flowed, but it had no structure. There was so much movement, but there was no substance.
Each of these is right in some ways, and wrong in others. My portrait of color captures the amazing wonder of God, because He is alive, and moving, and active in my world today. The problem is it misses how intricate God truly is. My black-and-white portrait recognizes how unbelievable His work is. It captures the tiniest of details, fleshing them out into the most intricate of features that would otherwise be unnoticed. But that portrait leaves it there, as if God is finished, and can be fully known and understood, if you can only get all the details right.
I have realized that there is another painting, not made by me, but painted by God Himself and with His own hands. He has been overwhelmingly detailed. He who created the Heavens and the Earth, laid out the constellations of the stars, designed the atom and made all the relationships between all the infinitesimal aspects of His creation work together in a way that is astounding. He has also been unfathomably vibrant. Life that He created takes shape in uncountable ways across uncountable places; He has painted sunsets and sunrises for millennia, and He continues to astound with the beauty of His works. He has painted it with care and precision, and He has painted it with passion and intensity. This painting will take me a lifetime to learn, for every glance and every moment I study it, I see new and more things about His work. Here is where I must live and breathe, here is where I must spend my life.
Each page of Scripture is a brush mark to the painting, and in every stroke the Painter reveals Himself more and more.
God has given me the choice to paint a portrait of Him. He gives me the choice to paint the portrait in my heart of who and what I think God is. My choices in this painting will color everything about my perception of God. Whether I find Him good and benevolent or harsh and vindictive is dependent on how I choose to portray Him. It changes my prayer life; do I see God as listening and caring about me, or is He aloof and far from me?
I have been looking at my portrait, and I have realized that my portrait of the Savior needs updating. Some pieces of it are more reminiscent of what He has done; I know that He is good in all that He does. Other places are poor. Some are even what I think He should be, not reflections of who He is.
The parts that I think look close are the ones I need to examine closely.
It is not enough to have something that could sound or look like it could be true of God; I must ensure that these places are true and accurate, or I run the risk of beginning to worship something that He is not.
The places that are poor renditions are easier to see where I need to make changes. They are the places that have clear differences. They are where I need to be more deliberate in my study of God, to actually look intentionally at the things that I have been avoiding because they're hard or challenging topics. That God can be angry, that He does judge me, that His wrath can appear harsh. These are places that my rushed handiwork won't hold under scrutiny. These are the places where I think I need to refine what I actually see in the portrait of Scripture.
This last part is something I wish I didn't have. The place where I have chosen, either willfully or unintentionally, to create a version of God that isn't accurate. I create aspects and representations of God that come from what I would prefer Him to do, who I want Him to be, not who He actually is. And ultimately these are the places where I have to erase. I have to remove them because they aren't right, and they aren't true. It doesn't matter if the way I want to picture God adds to His mercy, because that's not who He is.
This is the place where I can accidentally create a new god, thinking the one I have made is the One from Scripture, and lead myself willingly down an avenue of death.
The portrait I am painting of God will always be flawed. I cannot encompass all that He is in the strokes of my mental image. The more I practice, the closer I can get to His true character and His nature.
It is this that I must pursue, ever refining, ever critiquing whether the things I believe about God are true, or if I would like them to be true.
If they are true, then I must continue to reinforce them and make them more prominent in my understanding of His nature.
If they are not true, I must remove or refine them until they are.
Ultimately, I long to worship and see the God of Scripture. The One who is a Rescuer, a Redeemer. The One who is a Judge and Wrathful against wrong.
It is not a failure to restart my portrait, but if I leave the flawed version hanging I cannot grow.