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An elementary truth claim of Christianity is that God is a “Person”. Not a thing. Not a force. Not a principal of reason or intangible construct, or a feeling.

But what does that mean?

We may smirk at the practice of people in the Bronze Age who constructed gods out of hand-made objects and worshiped them. We may think ourselves better than primitive people who worshiped the sun, moon,  mountains, and trees. We may not worship physical objects anymore (most of us), but are we any different than they?

When we conceive of God as a force indistinct from the universe, we are doing the same thing, albeit with more subtlety. Our concepts of God may be more sophisticated than most people in primitive cultures in the past, but only in degree.

When we approach think of God as an intellectual construct or a feeling, we may be walking in the footsteps of our primitive ancestors. The same is true when we view God as an abstract idea. An abstract idea, or ideal, is still a thing. Not a thing made of human hands, but a thing imagined by human intellect.

When we construct a god, whether by our hands or in our minds, or view God as indistinct from the universe, we are not perceiving God in the way He is revealed in the Bible. These are constructs are “idols” that are poor substitutes for the “person” of God.

Tim Keller takes it a step further. He says that anything we rely upon and view as our highest desire, our greatest good, is an idol. If we count on any “thing” other than God for our happiness, our sense of fulfillment, or our worth, we have substituted an idol for God.

Even good things become idols if we make them our “ultimate things”, says Keller.

Parenthood, money, career, achievement, recognition from others, pleasure, a home, nice things – even church, politics and morality – can become an idol if we rely on them for self-worth, happiness, and fulfillment. These are all good things, but we distort their value if they become our “ultimate things”. We make them idols if we pursue them and value them as our greatest good.

We may not even realize our dependence on these things to make us happy, fulfill us and define our self-worth, especially when life is going well for us. When those things are threatened is when we begin to see our reliance on them. If we are undone by some loss or failure in the things on which we have relied, our dependence on those things is exposed – our idols are revealed.

Sometimes, we can only realize how much value we have placed in things other than God when we lose them and they fail us.

We often think or act as if we can manipulate and control our relationship with God. We pray for the things that we think we need and must have. We pray for God to protect those things in which we have placed our confidence, happiness, and self-worth. Prayers like can be indistinguishable from putting coins in a slot machine or wishing on a star – except that we treat God like the genie of our desires.

When we approach God like that, we are not treating Him as the Person He is – the God who made us and has plans and purposes for us – the God who loves us and desires us to love Him.

When we think we can earn the favor of God by our actions, we are not perceiving accurately who God is. When we approach God in a transactional way, we are not perceiving Him in the Christian sense.

God, in the Christian view, is a “Person”. He is not something to be controlled or manipulated. He is “not a tame Lion” as CS Lewis says. God is separate and distinct from us and from the creation. He has plans and purposes. We can only relate to and connect with Him as He is – not something we desire Him to be that we can control, manipulate, or earn favor from.

I believe people in the Old Testament were prone to rely on idols for this reason: God is not one to be manipulated by human will. People were more comfortable with an idol they made and could appease than a God who has His purposes and plans for us and the universe.

We are no different today because we are tempted to want a relationship with God, but only on our own terms. We may not even realize what we are doing – reducing God to a construct created in our own minds.

The central claim of Christianity is that God is a Person, and He is not just a Person who remains aloof. He became a human being and participated in His own creation. He emptied Himself of all that privileged Him above His creation and became one of us. Because of this, God can relate to us, not only because he made us but because He became one of us.

We can take heart, then, that God fully understands us and knows full well what the human condition is like. His plans and purposes are not arbitrary and capricious. God made us in His own image to be like Him, to relate to Him and to reflect His love back to Him – forever.

He also gave us choice, which is a fundamental requirement of love. Love is reciprocal. We could not love Him if we could not choose otherwise.

Our lives are designed to allow us to seek God because we want to know God and to love Him because we value relationship with God above all things. (This necessarily means that we can choose otherwise and value other things above God.)

All this is not to say that believing in God is irrational or without emotion. It’s just that God cannot be reduced to the dimension of reason or the dimension of human emotion. God is multidimensional like a person. He has personality and agency.

We err when we think that God is like us; rather, we are like Him!

We are made in His image. As multidimensional we are as human beings, even at our best, God is greater. We are but facets of the multi-dimensionality of God. Individually, we each reflect some combination of the aspects of the various characteristics of God.

Imagine all the facets of God that require millions and billions of people to reflect who He fully is.

The Christian claim is that we are not gods, and the creation is not god. We and the creation are separate and apart from God who created everything. We can relate to God and God can relate to us, but He is “Other” than us.

We must approach Him as He is. Not as we want Him to be. He desires for us to desire Him, and He is waiting for each of us to desire Him more than we desire anything else in the world.

God desires us to be His children – not workers who earn wages, but His children –  who inherit all that He is and has for us. We only need to want that more than we want lesser things.