THE GOD WHO SEES - Introduction
We are storytellers. From the longest novel to the shortest piece of prose, we have a need to share stories with each other. Some stories are engaging, others not so much. Some stories ramble, others get right to the point. Some stories draw us in on an emotional level, others actually cause us to disengage because we have no connection to any of the characters. No matter how they turn out, though, we all tell stories every single day of our lives.
Our modern culture has wholeheartedly bought into the idea that there is a difference between stories and “just the facts, ma’am,” but the truth is, we are forcing a false distinction where none exists. I read an article while preparing to write this series wherein the author stated unequivocally that people don’t read stories to gain information, they read stories to experience whatever the story’s author wants them to experience. People read reports, claimed the author, for facts and information. While I can appreciate what the author of the article was trying to say, I don’t think I could possibly disagree with him more. There really is no such thing as a dry reporting of facts and figures outside the context of story.
Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Yeah, she never heard my high school / college history teacher,” to which I would respond that not all stories are told well. However, that doesn’t make them non-stories. What about math, might be your next question. Mathematics is simply a way of telling stories by using numbers instead of words. We think of numbers as these concrete concepts that have existed since time immemorial, yet historians tell us that the first culture to develop a counting system was the Sumerians 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. And it’s interesting to note that the Sumerian system didn’t have a symbol for zero. Just like language, numbers have changed throughout the centuries in order to communicate our stories.
You’ve heard me talk many times about the Enlightenment in Western Europe and its effect on the world, including those who would start a little political experiment called the United States of America. I return to that point in time often because I cannot overstate just how monumental and far-reaching it was in changing the way people thought about every aspect of life, particularly how we communicate with one another. Concepts like objectivity and scientific proof began dominating all institutes of learning. Stories, rather than being a means of sharing and expressing information, became relegated to “those things people tell when they want to entertain” and thus were seen as not strictly “true.”
The Enlightenment also had a radical impact on how people viewed the Bible. An obsession with objective, dispassionate, and impartial thinking led people to start seeing the Bible as a guidebook at best or nothing more than an historical artifact at worst. Even pastors and teachers succumbed to the spirit of the age, allowing their teaching to reflect the idea that the Bible was more a dead document that must be deciphered instead of what it claims to be—the Living Word of God.
And so, over time, we tried to transform ourselves from storytellers into scientists, attempting to leave the telling of stories to the artists and entertainers. But here’s the thing. We were created in the image of God, and God is the Master Storyteller. Have you ever wondered why the Bible doesn’t start with some theological or philosophical treatise on the existence of God? I think one reason might just be because He’s more interested in telling you His story than He is in having a theological argument.
Genesis, as well as most of the Old Testament, is told in story form. David and other psalmists told the history of Israel in poetic story, and even in the writings of the prophets, God poured out His heart to Israel through story. Jesus and the writers of the New Testament continued to share God and His truth through story. The Gospels are stories themselves and what do we find Jesus doing a whole lot in the Gospels? Telling stories. Paul, Peter, James, John, Judah, and the author of Hebrews wrote letters that are basically the story of how they related to and addressed issues in the early church.
Stories are one of the main ways God chooses to communicate with us through His Word, and they are also one of the main ways we communicate with each other. But we must be cautious as we tread the sometimes treacherous ground of interpreting those stories. You may have heard the phrase, “Pics or it didn’t happen,” the implication being that pictures are an objective source of information. As we know now, however, there is nothing objective about pictures, particularly with the increased use of AI. I would go so far as to say that the concept of objectivity is a total myth. We aren’t able to be objective about anything because we are always interpreting what we observe through the lens of our own experiences and emotions. And when it comes to interpreting the stories in the Bible, we must guard against allowing our subjectivity to color God’s truth.
What I mean this — we sometimes come to God’s Word with a particular desire or point we want to prove and rather than allowing the Word to speak His truth to our hearts and minds, we overlay our own experiences and emotions on what we read and sometimes come to conclusions that don’t really have much to do with what God is trying to tell us. For example, when some of the men who were instrumental in the European Reformation determined that they wanted to distance their new movement as far as humanly possible from Roman Catholic traditions and practices, they made a decision to ban certain types of music and musical instruments. One of the foremost proponents of this was Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland. Proclaiming that he could find nowhere in the New Testament that God commanded musical instruments in worship, he had the great organ of the People’s Church in Zurich broken and dismantled. Zwingli allowed his personal mission to dictate his interpretation of the New Testament and as a result, one of the most beautiful instruments in Europe was destroyed and thousands have been led to copy his practices in worship because he used the Bible to promote his own story instead of sharing God’s story.
We tell each other stories because we’re trying to communicate something, and God is no different. He has something specific He wants to convey to His people. Another consequence of the Enlightenment was the shifting of what God was trying to tell us from a grand story of redemption for His entire creation to a small tale of personal salvation. It became easy to tame the Gospel when believers were convinced that life in Jesus was only about a personal relationship with Him. It also became easy to draw people into thinking that the Bible was up for personal interpretation and as long as believers agree to disagree, it’s all good.
The problem with that way of thinking is that it requires a radical reimagining of God’s story. Let’s say that you lived in Ireland at the time of the Great Famine during which approximately one million people died. At great cost to yourself, you gave up food so that others could eat and you tended to the sick even though you weren’t in the best of health yourself. You survived and had a child of your own, and as he grew up, you began telling him about what you had done and what you had endured. Your son starts relating your story to others, but you notice that he adds little embellishments here and there or leaves out certain details entirely. Pretty soon, your son has changed your story from being about how you sacrificed so much for the survival of your entire village into a parable about a mother’s love for her son.
When we tell God’s story in any way other than what we find in the entire Bible, we are like the son in my example. God had His story written in the way He desired and while we certainly are free to share what He’s told us in creative ways, we are never, ever given permission to change the foundational truth He has communicated in any way. If I wanted to tell you about the Palo Verde tree in our front yard, I could so so by taking a photograph, drawing it with pencil, or painting it with water colors. I could describe the process by which it draws water from the soil and uses that water to produce leaves, or I could write a story about the beauty of its yellow flowers. What I couldn’t do is take a picture of our neighbor’s dog and tell you that because my personal experience with and emotional attachment to them is identical, the dog and our tree are one and the same. In the same way, I can’t say that having a personal relationship with Jesus so that you can “go to heaven when you die” is the same thing as what God is communicating through His Word. Shrinking life in God down to only having a personal relationship with Jesus is misunderstanding and mistelling His story.
How, then, can we be sure that we understand God’s story ourselves so we can share as He wants it to be shared? First, we need to see the Bible not as a guidebook, a resource book, a rule book, or even a personal devotional book — we need to see it as God telling us His story and telling it in a very specific way for specific reasons. Second, we need to realize that the Bible wasn’t given to us in order to tell us the truth (bear with me on this one). The Bible does contain truth, of course, but its purpose is not to spoon feed it to us but to make us people of wisdom who can use the faculties God gave us in order to discern the truth of the Bible...but this only happens if we are disciples of Jesus. As Paul said, spiritual things can only be discerned by those who are of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:12-16), and the only way we can be assured that we are of the Spirit is to continually be seeking after God through His Word, which is what a true disciple of Jesus does. Third, we need to grasp that we don’t read and study God’s Word to learn about God and stop there. That would be like putting food in your mouth, chewing, then just letting it sit there without swallowing. Your body would gain nothing from that (aside from some pleasant taste sensations). We read and study to be reminded that we are the image-bearers of the Creator God, and we must continue to be those through whom He unleashes His redemptive and restorative healing on His entire creation as we live our stories in the context of His. Fourth, we must remember that we are indeed living the story of our lives not in our own little universe but within the magnificent and majestic scope of God’s own design. No one is insignificant in His design, no one is inconsequential, no one is trivial.
God’s calling of Jeremiah was nothing short of awesome:
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
(Jeremiah 1:5, WMB)
I think we tend to look at those words and think, “Yeah, God really had something great in mind for Jeremiah, but I’m not Jeremiah.” Then we take a look at Ephesians 2:10, a verse which is pretty familiar:
“For we are His workmanship, created in Messiah [Jesus] for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.” (WMB)
In a sense, Paul’s words echo the great call of Jeremiah, only he was referring to all believers, not just the Jeremiahs of the world. Our Creator has prepared something for each and every one of us to do, and it’s something designed specially for us. Because our Creator is a God who sees. He doesn’t just look past us in His search for the perfect servant. He sees you and He sees me. He knows us — He knows what we’re capable of, He knows our personalities, He knows our desires. And He has crafted things for us to do that are perfectly suited to us.
Sometimes, though, in order for us to start or continue doing the things God has for us, we need to be reassured that our stories matter. Every life is a story and every story deserves to be told. Your story may not reach a global audience, but it deserves to be told nonetheless. Throughout this study, I’ll be sharing some stories with you based on the lives of people who affected me in one way or another, and my great hope is that you genuinely comprehend the profound truth that you are impacting people all around you whether you realize it or not. It matters that you exist.
God sees you. And He’s constantly drawing you to Himself so that you can be a beautiful part of His story.