The goal of this series is to address the common perceptions and misperceptions that are associated with the God of Christianity. The reason I want to spend time on this is because these misperceptions are causing people to leave the church and, often times, those misperceptions are perpetuated by Christians themselves. Furthermore, these misperceptions prevent us from experiencing the fullness of what it means to be a Christian and the fullness of what it means to experience God.

Now, to start off this series on the right foot, I think we need to acknowledge a couple of different issues when talking about God. First of all, I think we need to acknowledge that everything I’m talking about here is based on a singular assumption being that there is a God. This is something that we cannot prove. Although we believe God is real, this is no definite proof that God exists. Then again, there is no proof that God does not exist.

Generally speaking, what I have found is that the difference between those who believe in a God and those who don’t believe in a God is based on a feeling. You either feel God is real or you don’t. To be clear, I believe that God is real. I always have from the time I was young. Some of my atheist friends, I’ve asked them the question if they ever believed in a God and they often tell me they never felt that God was real. So to the same degree that I have always felt there was a God, they have felt the exact same thing to the opposite degree.

Okay, so we’re assuming, for the purposes of these sermons, that there is such thing as a God. I think the second assumption that we need to put out there is that we’re also assuming this God is responsible for creation of the universe. God caused all of this to be and we’re not just talking about life here on this planet. We’re talking about life throughout the universe, which is something we will touch on later on in this series.

Let’s recap: Assumption 1) there is a God and Assumption 2) God is the cause or creator of the universe. From these two assumptions, we now have a choice to make. How are we going to define this God who created the universe? Well, generally religion is the way humans define God. And there’s lots of different religions, so we have lots of different options to choose from. And, of course, every religion has a different perspective on God.

Our religion, the Christian religion, is how we define God. Therefore, our understanding of God is really derived from the Bible. So all we have to do is read the Bible and we’ll understand everything we need to know about God. Easy, right? No, not so easy because the Bible is not an easy book to read. Within the Bible are 66 different books that were composed by different authors at different points in history.

For instance, the first page of the Bible is Genesis chapter 1, the creation narrative. This story was first written down around the 7th century B.C., but the story itself was originally an oral tradition that dates back prior to 1000 B.C. By contrast, the last book added to the New Testament was written around 120 A.D. Therefore, the books of the Bible represent more than 1000 years of thinking about God. More importantly, this thinking changed and evolved over time.

Many Christians who read the Bible today assume the God we meet in Genesis chapter 1 is the same God we encounter throughout the rest of the Bible. This is not true. Depending on when a particular book was written, the author or authors of the book vary in terms of how they conceived of God. This is why God can seem so wildly inconsistent from one part of the Bible to the next.

In Genesis chapter 1, God’s name in Hebrew is Elohim. In Genesis chapter 2, God’s name in Hebrew is Yahweh. Christians often assume that these are just different names for the same God. In fact, they are completely different gods with completely different origins. I want to take a moment to describe the origins of Elohim and Yahweh because the Hebrew people will eventually combine the various attributes of these two gods together to create the singular God that they still worship today.

The original god of the Hebrew people was the god El. We know this because El is found in their national identity: Isra-El. The Hebrew people originally lived in an area known as Canaan and worshipped some 234 different gods. At the top of the food chain, was El, the supreme deity of the Canaanite gods. El was the creator god, responsible for creating the universe and those 233 other gods beneath him, as well as human beings. El was considered to be good-natured and benevolent, but also somewhat divorced from the world. El eventually became Elohim in the Hebrew scriptures.

Yahweh comes into the picture a few hundred years later. Yahweh was a divine warrior that was worshipped in regions south of Israel. Yahweh became popular when the Israelite tribes invoked his name during battle and they started winning. The continued success of Yahweh in the battlefield caused the kings of Israel to push for Yahweh to become their national deity who was worshipped alongside El.

In terms of personality, Yahweh was prone to shifts of emotional volatility. Yahweh could swing from loving embrace one moment to raging jealousy the next. If you’ve ever wondered why God in the Bible sometimes reads like a hormonal teenager who wants to burn the world to the ground, that’s because the Hebrews thought of Yahweh as a win-at-all-costs god who was out for blood. What made Yahweh unique was that he had no iconography, meaning there were no images of Yahweh.

About 500 years later, when the Jewish people are writing down the Hebrew scriptures for the first time, they combine these two gods together—Elohim and Yahweh. The Jewish people, having been influenced by monotheism, can now only worship one God. Therefore, when the Jews are writing the Hebrew scriptures, Elohim and Yahweh appear side-by-side in the scriptures and are worshipped as a single God.

This is the God the Jews will worship for the next 500 years. In fact, this is the same God that Jesus worships by the time we get to the New Testament. But then Jesus does his own update on God. Jesus’ version of God is the one who Christians worship today. So there are really three different versions of God in the Bible: El, Yahweh and then Jesus’ version of God in the New Testament.

It is Jesus’ version of God we are going to focus on throughout this series and we are going to begin with what we read this morning from the letter of 1John. In this letter, the author defines God for us in very simple terms. The author says that God is love. This is a very good starting point for us. In the Christian faith, we define God as love. Love is critical to the character of God. But love can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

For some people the word love is purely romantic, where you feel that instant intense connection with another person. For others, the word love is about feeling a deep connection with another person in your soul. Still others see love through the lens of family. And still others see love as platonic among friends. For some love represents all of these things. For Jesus, the love associated with God is unconditional love and we know this because of the parable of the prodigal son.

This story revolves around a father and two sons. The younger son approaches his father and states that he wants his father to pay him his inheritance. Of course, this is a horribly insulting request because the son is essentially saying that all he cares about is his father’s money and he wishes his father was dead. Practically such a request would be extraordinarily difficult for the father to grant because it would require the liquidation of assets and land, a process that could be quite complex for a family of means. For the hearers of this parable in Jesus’ day, they would have understood that such a request would irreparably damage the relationship between the father and son, essentially severing the younger son from the family.

The younger son then takes his inheritance and moves to a foreign land where he indulges his every desire. Today we would say he lived the party lifestyle, meaning he probably ate huge amounts of food, drank day and night, slept with prostitutes and gambled away his inheritance. This goes on until, one day, he runs out of money. Facing starvation, he resolves to return back to his father, ask his forgiveness and become one of his father’s slaves.

As he gets closer to his home, he is anticipating how his father will react to seeing him again. Since he is no longer part of the family, he is expecting an icy cold reception. But before he gets to the house, his father sees him off in the distance. Interestingly, the father does not become angry, but rather, runs out to meet his son. The father embraces his son, hugging him close. The son attempts to state his case as to why his father should accept him back, but his father doesn’t seem to be listening. Rather the father calls to one of his slaves to bring out his best robe and to kill a fatted calf. They are going to celebrate because “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”

The parable of the prodigal son is a resurrection story. It’s a story of someone who cared only about himself. He was not concerned with anyone else. More importantly, he didn’t care who he had to hurt to get what he wanted. He was willing to sever the most important relationships in his life so that he could fulfill his wants, needs and desires. He believed the path of selfishness would bring him happiness and would allow him to experience life to its fullest, but, eventually, that path left him destitute. He was not physically dead, but on the inside, emotionally and spiritually, there was nothing alive.

After he hit rock bottom, there was a moment of reckoning. After losing all of his money, he could finally see clearly how he had squandered the most important treasure in his life—he had squandered the love of his family. And once he wakes up to this reality, he begins to connect with that love again. That part of him that was dead on the inside comes to life. So he returns home, having seen the error of his ways.

And what does the father do in the story? Does the father reject the son? Does the father turn him away? Does the father call him out saying, “You took your inheritance before I was even dead and now you come crawling back? You had your chance. I will never love you again.” No, the father welcomes his son back with open arms because this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!

What Jesus is trying to tell us through this parable is that, central to God’s being, is unconditional love. This means that our actions, regardless of how vile or sinister they might be, will never prevent God from loving us. God will never reject us. God will never deny us forgiveness. From God’s perspective, the door is always open. We simply have to be willing to walk through it, and once we do, we will find restoration.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that idea of God to be revolutionary. And yet, that is not God who you find in many Christian churches. Sure, they’ll talk about how God loves you, but that love is not unconditional. They teach that God’s love has contingencies. Perhaps the most important contingency is that, in order for you to gain access to God’s love, you must first believe in Jesus. Without having faith in Jesus, God cannot love you.

I will tell you that, from my perspective, this makes no sense. The reason why it doesn’t make sense is that believing in Jesus is often based on where you’re born. If you’re born in a predominately Christian society, like the United States, then you will likely be exposed to Christianity. Whereas, if you’re born in a different part of the world, say the Middle East, which is predominately Muslim, or China, which is predominately atheistic, then you might not ever be exposed to Christianity.

Of course, you have no control over where you’re born. That’s a total roll of the dice. So to make God’s love contingent on geography and chance is crazy to me, but that’s how a lot of Christians believe God works. Therefore, you have to make a choice: Is God’s love based on conditions (like what you believe) or is God’s love completely and fully unconditional?

I know that a lot of people don’t like the idea that God’s love is unconditional because then, why should I be a good person? If God will love me and forgive me no matter what I do, what incentive do I have to be a good person? My response to that is quite simple: the vast majority of people, including Christians, do not make choices based on whether or not God would approve of their actions. It’s like thinking of the electric chair as a deterrent for murder. Ask anyone on death row if they were thinking about the electric chair when they committed their crime and, I guarantee you, 100% of them will tell you no.

Generally speaking, God is not a deterrent for bad actions. People are going to make bad decisions regardless of their belief in God. However, what I have found to be true is that people who believe in God are more likely reconcile, forgive and heal the wounds caused by bad decisions. And the reason they’re willing to do this is because of their experience of God’s unconditional love.

In my opinion, if you subscribe to the idea that God is love and you believe in the God promoted in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, then you have no choice but to accept that God’s love comes without conditions. And so for me, this idea that God is love is one of the most important aspects of our Christian faith. It is one of the most important reasons why I am a Christian pastor. I have seen that unconditional love change lives again and again, and I hope that it will change yours! Amen.