God

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

Pray a Psalm

Where could I go to get away from your spirit?
Where could I go to escape your presence?
If I went up to heaven, you would be there.
If I went down to the grave, you would be there too!
If I could fly on the wings of dawn,
stopping to rest only on the far side of the ocean —
even there your hand would guide me;
even there your strong hand would hold me tight!
If I said, "The darkness will definitely hide me;
the light will become night around me,"
even then the darkness isn't too dark for you!
Nighttime would shine bright as day,
because darkness is the same as light to you!

— Psalm 139:7-12

Get The Conversation Rolling

Roll a six-sided die and answer the corresponding question from the list below.

1. What sight, sound, or smell do you associate with God, and why?

2. Name one actor and one actress you would cast as God in a movie, and briefly explain your choices.

3. If you were God and wanted to prove your existence to the world, what would you do?

4. What's one thing you wished everyone believed about God?

5. What currently popular, nonreligious song most makes you think about God, and why?

6. If you could ask God to do any one thing to prove God's existence, what would you ask for?

Consider the Creed

Can We Talk About God Without Blushing?

Early in June 2016, a certain piece of "news" flooded my social media feeds. Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku had supposedly made a stunning announcement. One website breathlessly declared:

World Renowned Scientist Michio Kaku Proves Existence Of God

Turns out, he didn't.

As I followed a long trail of hyperlinks away from that clickbait headline, I never found a source I could trust telling me when, where, or to whom Dr. Kaku had made this groundbreaking revelation. But I did find a year-old article by him in which he writes, "We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word 'God' and not blush."

I also found, on YouTube, an even older interview suggesting what he meant by those words. In the interview, Dr. Kaku describes the way Albert Einstein thought about God: "the God of order, harmony, beauty, simplicity and elegance" — the ultimate reason we find structure in the cosmos where there could have been chaos, and loveliness where there could have been ugliness. Since Dr. Kaku is an expert in cosmology (the study of the universe's origin and development), I suspect this is the kind of God he can talk about without blushing.

When the people who wrote the Bible looked at the heavens and the earth, they too saw structure and beauty:

• "Heaven is declaring God's glory," the psalm-singer rejoices; "the sky is proclaiming his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1).

• In Isaiah, God insists that God did not "create [the earth as] a wasteland but formed it as a habitation ... I didn't say ... 'Seek me in chaos'" (45:18, 19).

• The Bible begins, in Genesis 1, with a highly structured poem about the highly structured world God made: a "supremely good" world (verse 31) where waters and land, trees and plants, birds and beasts, man and woman all exist in well-balanced harmony.

Scripture affirms that God is a God of order, harmony, elegance. But it also says more about God than scientists, even those who are religious, ever can.

Science cannot prove or disprove God's reality. Science is a powerful tool for observing and analyzing the natural world; it's indispensable for forming, testing, and refining ideas about how the world works. But no amount of natural structure observed or theorized by scientists leads to the inescapable, ironclad conclusion that an intelligent, intentional Creator exists (or doesn't), much less the God in whom we Christians believe.

The Apostles' Creed identifies God as "the Father Almighty." That phrase is partly about our belief that God is the "creator of heaven and earth" (although notice that the Creed doesn't give a blow-by-blow account of how God created; it simply states God did). But it's even more about our relationship to our (and everyone and everything else's) Creator. And this relationship means weshould blush when we talk about God — not from embarrassment, but from love.

What Calling God "Father" Really Means

Christians call God "Father" because Jesus did, and told us to as well.

He taught his disciples, "Pray like this: Our Father who is in heaven ..." (Matthew 6:9). Jesus wasn't dictating a specific set of words his followers must recite exactly as he spoke them every time they pray; he didn't wake up that morning and say, "Today I'll write 'The Lord's Prayer.'" He was showing his followers the attitude they should have when talking and listening to God. He was teaching them to talk with God not as a creature talking with the "creator of heaven and earth," but as a child talking with a parent. He was inviting them to experience the same kind of close, personal, loving relationship with God that he experienced.

Jesus wasn't the first person to talk about God as a father. The exact phrase "Father in heaven" isn't a name for God in the Old Testament, but Hebrew Scripture pictures God as the father of the people of Israel (for example, Deuteronomy 1:31; Jeremiah 31:9; Hosea 11:1-4) and, occasionally, as father on a more personal scale: "As a father has compassion for his children," the psalm-singer assures us, "so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him" (103:13 NRSV).

But by Jesus' time, the name "Father in heaven" had become one way Jewish rabbis identified God — less frequently than names like "King of the universe," but about a hundred uses of the phrase "Father in heaven" show up in rabbinic writings. "Upon whom can we rely?" asks one of these texts. The answer: "Upon our Father in Heaven."

As a name for God, "Father in heaven" isn't without potential problems. For some people, it reinforces an unbiblical assumption that God is literally male — the Big Old Man on a king's throne in the sky, usually with a long white beard, often seen in old religious art.

For other people, the name associates God with human fathers in painful ways. Fathers who abuse, abandon, or simply don't pay enough attention totheir kids can make it hard, if not impossible, for those kids to think about God as "the Father Almighty" at any age. How could anyone worship, let alone love, a bigger version of someone who let them down, made them angry, or scared and hurt them so much? How could anyone else tell them they must?

I think Jesus understands those kinds of concerns. I know he cares about the people who have them. His church should too. No one should be criticized or made to feel uncomfortable because they don't want to call God "Father."

But the church shouldn't lose "Father" as a name for God either. It connects us to biblical truth, historic tradition, and Jesus' own prayer life — but it also does...