4.1 God Is a Person

God is not a Thing; He is a Person. And as a Person, God is all here now. An infinite God means that God is all here. An eternal God means that God is all now. And this all-here, all-now God is the most intensely personal and private Person in the universe.

In order for you and I to understand what the Bible is and what God’s purpose is in putting that Bible into our hands, we need to consider one of the most important verses in the Old Testament. Since God is Himself personal, He deals entirely with persons.

I Will Speak with You. And there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the Testimony… (Exodus 25:22a).

Certainly, God is speaking directly to Moses, one Person to another, regarding His instructions for Israel. But this is not some unusual or uncommon thing. The following words are, according to Paul, far more holy and glorious than anything regarding Moses.

Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written… with the Spirit of the living God, …on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart (2 Corinthians 3:3 condensed). Paul claims in this same chapter that Moses cannot compare.

Face to Face. Here is God’s point. The thing He wants most is to speak with you, personally, Face to face.  And God speaking to you personally becomes something very New Testament, it becomes Christ in you, for Christ is every word God speaks. Now here is the problem. Look at most Christian writing and speaking. You will find that almost the only topic is “the things” of God or some discussion about Christianity. Few Christian teachers consider this Person who is everywhere and all and here and now, this Person directly in front of your eyeballs and in your heart, and what He might be interested in conveying to you, personally and intimately.

The Mercy Seat. You will find that many Christian teachers, just like the blind men of Hindustan, are investigating some small aspect of something they cannot understand because they will not deal directly with the Living Person Himself. Many Bible scholars will teach you that connecting directly with the Living Person of God Himself, making the words of the Bible His personal word, not just to you, but now living inside of you, is wrongful Bible interpretation.

The mercy seat in the Old Testament represents our hearts in the New. We know that because Jesus sprinkled His blood upon our hearts and because He lives enthroned there. Thus it is in our own hearts that God would speak with us.

Jesus in Our Hearts. Christ lives in your hearts through faith (Ephesians 3:17a). – Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me (John 14:11). It seems pretty plain to me that I find Jesus inside my own heart, living there in all of His Person and glory, and that I find the Father there as well, inside of this Jesus inside of me. Yet this simple fact is somehow missed by too many Bible “interpreters.”

Why is it, then, that we can know God only in our own hearts, by heart, and not as any Thing far away from us? Because God is a Person, and all that He is and does is personal to Him and thus must be personal in us.

Defining Person. As Christians, we do not maintain a mental relationship with the Bible; rather, we maintain a personal relationship with God inside our own hearts, using the Bible and our minds as servants to that living relationship.

I want to look a little further at what we mean by saying that God is a Person. A person is a sentient being, one who knows him or her self by thoughts, feelings, and choices. A person is one who has a unique personality different from all other persons. But most of all, a person is a being who possesses a heart. Does God have a heart? Does God desire and dream? Does God want something special that He does not yet possess?

Does God Desire? Now, many will answer that last question, “does God want something He does not presently possess,” with a decided NO. They would assert that God is sufficient in Himself; He is eternal, He possesses all things already.

But let’s look at the heart of the New Covenant. None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them (Hebrews 8:11). Does God want the entire creation to KNOW Him, whatever that word “know” might mean? And do all created beings know God as He really is right now?

God desires something He does not possess.

God’s Heart. Does God have a heart? I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart, who will do all My will (Acts 13:22b). God does have a heart, and He is suggesting here that if we want to understand God’s heart, we should begin with understanding David and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember Jesus’ words: He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9). Then Jesus also said: Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:29). If Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart, then we know that God is gentle and lowly in heart as well.

Lowly of Heart. God is lowly of heart. What on earth does this mean? God gives us one context clue only concerning any definition of His heart. That context clue is the adjective “lowly.” Now, the Greek word here is tapeinos, which means: humble, lowly, in position or spirit (in a good sense). 

Tapeinos (from Strong’s): cast down, humble, lowly; depressed, i.e. (figuratively) humiliated (in circumstances or disposition) – base, cast down, humble, of low degree (estate), lowly. Some dictionary writers want to limit that word to humans, to how we see ourselves in relationship to God and to each other. Few consider it as a word God uses to describe Himself.

Esteem Others. In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself (Philippians 2:3b). The word “lowliness of mind” is the same word that God used to define for us the nature and essence of His heart.

Does God esteem you and me better than Himself? 

God does not ask us to live by a lowly heart that esteems others better because we are “low” from a human perspective. He asks us to live by Himself, to live in and out from His own Heart. We could just as easily say: In God, let each esteem others better. The God who lives in us is always lifting others up.

Jesus as Heart. That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Is Jesus the revelation of the Father’s Heart? Is knowing Jesus knowing the Father’s Heart? If Christ lives in our hearts, does the Father’s Heart live in our hearts? Do we know God only by heart?

Placing God as Heart inside of us, a Heart that is gentle and lowly of mind, causes us to see and know God quite differently from anything we have ever considered. Now we know God to be a Person, alive and real, someone we know by heart just as any close friend.

The Heart of God. The purpose of this brief lesson is simply to place in front of ourselves the concept that the Bible is nothing more than a means of connection enabling us to know this Person, our Father, who thinks more highly of us than He does of Himself. Yet through all the schemes of Biblical interpretation we find so little about this Person or about His heart.

So few care about God.

May I suggest that knowing God by Scripture begins, not with what we humans define as the high and the exalted – Knowing God begins with lowliness of heart, with caring about God’s Heart, with wanting Him to win the thing He desires and longs for, the thing He has paid everything to gain for Himself.