Jesus offers us a clear definition of God

I often think about the nature of God, just like everyone else does. Or maybe not.

My thoughts wander all over, back and forth, between the extremes of a god who is too small to be omniscient, omnipresent, and mysterious beyond human imagination – you know, the god whose every move, past, present, and future, we can chart in detail – and a god who is so immense and remote he really can’t be bothered with what happens in my mundane daily life.

My daughter, Becca, once gave me some good insight into who God is. She was just 5, and we were on our way to Grandma’s house, driving through the blossoming trees of an apple orchard.

“Mommy,” she said, “is God a man?”

“No,” I told her.

“Well, then, is he a woman?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, “God is neither a man nor a woman.”

“Then why do we say, ‘God, He?’ ” she pressed. “If God isn’t a man and he isn’t a woman, we should say something different, like ‘God, Te.’ “

I noted that Becca had used masculine pronouns while trying to think of God without human gender, but I knew that she had had an important insight. Our vocabulary and categories cannot adequately describe all that God is and does.

Maybe this is part of what Jesus meant when he said we need to be as little children in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Little children often realize that they don’t understand much of what goes on around them. They have moments of frustration when their vocabulary cannot adequately describe their feelings and thoughts.

They also make some very strange deductions – like wondering where their batteries are.

This was a major concern for my son when he was 2. Most of his action toys ran on batteries, so he assumed he must, too.

Really, life might be much more manageable if we did run on batteries. We could blame all of our laziness and procrastination on low batteries, our fits of pettiness and intolerance on some sort of wiring problem.

And best of all, we probably wouldn’t have to argue on and on about creation, since we’d all be factory-produced and stamped, “Made by God,”

God is not human, so knowing him is more difficult – and, paradoxically, much simpler.

Each time we try to use our ever-changing scientific models and social constructs to give the final “truth” about God, we fall short and focus on who we are and what we know rather than on who God is and what he wants for us.

Think of all the righteous energy the church wasted on Galileo when he blasphemed and declared that the Earth rotated around the sun. The God Squad put him under lifelong house arrest for that heresy.

Yet the simple truth is that God gave us a clear definition of himself in our own time and dimension: Jesus.

Jesus said that whoever saw him had seen God.

It’s sort of like those early learner picture dictionaries: Examine the life of Jesus, the human incarnation of God, and we will see God.

That should be pretty easy to do. After all, there are four gospels, three of which are pretty repetitive, that describe Jesus’ life and what he said.

Maybe it’s Jesus’ impracticality that throws us. I mean, he once told a rich guy to sell all of his possessions, and for us that might mean forgoing our obscenely huge HDTVs and trophy SUVs.

And the kicker to selling all that stuff was Jesus’ command to give the profits to the undeserving poor. How un-American!

Like the rich man, I like to keep the laws – go to church, pray, sing, put cans in the food bank box – but please don’t expect me to take seriously the hard teachings of Jesus.

That drive through the apple orchard didn’t give me enough time to teach Becca all about God. That’s good, because I myself continue to learn.

Still, I do know one thing for certain: God sent Jesus to show us how to live. Even a child can understand this.