Who is God? Do pronouns take us away from God’s love?

Who is God? Or is it what is God? Not to mention, what are His “preferred pronouns”? I read a recent article that makes me feel like all this political correctness is taking us away from who/what God said He is. Most of all, God is love. But the article never used the word love. Not even once.

Who is God? Or is it what is God? Not to mention, what are His “preferred pronouns”? I read a recent article that makes me feel like all this political correctness is taking us away from who/what God said He is. Most of all, God is love. But the article never used the word love. Not even once.

Is God a lion?

Is God a lamb?

There are references to Jesus as both the Lion of Judah and as the lamb of God.

But does that make Jesus either one of them?

Does it make Jesus an animal?

Or are they useful references to tell us, using something we’re familiar with, to tell us something about Jesus that we don’t/can’t otherwise know? And I don’t mean Jesus incarnate who walked the earth for 30+ years. I mean Jesus, in Heaven, who will judge us.

The difference between who God is and what God is like

We’ll get into the article shortly, but first I want to make a point. Back in 2017 there was another controversy about who/what God is. It was the movie version of The Shack.

In that case, I wasn’t calling God a dog.

What I was saying is something about how God might reach out to me. Me. Not everyone Not you, unless the scenario fits you.

We say, and claim to believe, that God reaches out to us where we are. Where I was at the time was the same place as the guy in The Shack. A father figure came with baggage.

And that’s even considering one of my favorite verses, and one that got me to keep coming back to try to find my Heavenly Father, was the one below.

Ask, Seek, Knock – Matthew

^{7:7-11 pp — Lk 11:9-13}

…

^{Mt 7:9} “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? ¹⁰ Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? ¹¹ If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
…

There’s no context here. That’s because, to be honest, it’s the only part of the passage I remembered after some years.

The full version of this post is best read with full formatting, due to the variety of topics and sources.

It addresses each of the following claims from an article titled: A feminist theologian says, ‘Our Father’ is not the only way of referring to God

Scripture is filled with multiple images of God. In some of these images, God is depicted as a father or male. In other parts of Scripture, God is female. The prophet Isaiah compares God to a nursing mother in the Book of Isaiah. A mother hen gathering her chicks is an analogy for God in the Gospel of Matthew. The Book of Wisdom, a book in the Catholic Bible, depicts wisdom personified as a woman. Wisdom 10:18-19 states: “She took them across the Red Sea and brought them through deep waters. Their enemies she overwhelmed.” This account presents God as female, leading Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.

Depicting God as female in Scripture speaks to God’s tenderness as well as strength and power. For example, the prophet Hosea compares God to a bear robbed of her cubs, promising to “attack and rip open” those who break the covenant.

Elsewhere in Scripture, God has no gender. God appears to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3, defying all gender categories. The Book of 1 Kings presents a gentle image of a gender-neutral God. God asked the prophet Elijah to go to a mountain. While there, Elijah experienced a strong wind, an earthquake and fire, but God was not present in those. Instead, God was present in a gentle whisper. The creation stories of Genesis refer to God in the plural. These examples emphasize that God has no gender and is beyond any human categories.

Ultimately, it reaches the conclusion below:

Conclusion – Who is God? Do pronouns take us away from His love?

I’ve tried very hard to not give away my conclusion until now. You may find it surprising. But then, you may also have reached it yourself.

Here’s what the author of the article we’ve been looking at concluded from what she wrote:

These examples emphasize that God has no gender and is beyond any human categories.

As you no doubt realize, I totally disagree. I think she has excellent examples, except the one in Hosea, to show some of God’s characteristics.

However, I don’t see that gender has anything to do with anything she mentioned.

Here’s my question about gender and getting lost in the weeds. Remember the part above from Genesis, let us make man in our image. “Man”, of course, in that instance is short for humans. Men and women. Adam and Eve. And humans have genders. Male and female. Given by God.

No – we’re not going to get into anything other than what the Bible says here. Nothing about all the gender stuff that seems to be so popular and so divisive in our culture today. Maybe another day. But not here. With this topic, it’s so divisive it would derail the whole thing.

The point is, people have genders.

When we try to assign a gender, or genders, or no gender, to God, are we not turning “let us make man in our image” on its head? Are we not trying to make God in our image?

Yes, Jesus came to earth as a man. As we say, God incarnate. Here’s another Christianity 101 type lesson.

The incarnation is the historic Christian doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Second Person of the Trinity, that he has in time taken upon himself a complete human nature by being born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the incarnation teaches that through the work of the Holy Spirit, God the Son has become fully human in time in order to die for the sins of humanity and defeat death by the power of his resurrection. Although the New Testament documents uniformly affirm that Jesus is God in the flesh, certain books of the Bible emphasize this doctrine more than others.  ¹⁰

One of the names for Jesus is Immanuel. God with us. God, spirit, in human form. As it says above, it was necessary, for a whole bunch of reasons, for Jesus to come to earth as a human. God, spirit, came to earth in human form. In the person of Jesus.

Jesus had a gender. But he was 100% God and 100% human.

Why do we insist that God, spirit, must have a gender, just because we do?

Spirit refers to a living “intangible essence” with rational, emotional, and volitional attributes. The Bible primarily uses the concept of spirit for the non-material living essence of human beings (soul, spirit, inner life) and for the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God.  ¹¹

Trying to assign a gender to God is going against the very essence of who/what we believe God is.

We have no idea what, if any relationship exists between human gender and any characteristic of God, as spirit. But by our definitions, if there is one at all, it’s certainly not grounded in what we call human gender, If anything, our human gender is based on something from God not that God has something/anything based on us as humans.

Why did Jesus come as a man?

Let’s address the likely question of: why did Jesus come as a man?

Do you remember, earlier we looked at God meeting us where we are? And that the culture at the time Jesus came was very much male dominated. Why would God come as a woman? No one would’ve listened. If you want to influence someone, you need to first have them even willing to listen to you.

As we saw in the examples, God had ways of miraculously appearing, like in the midst of a burning bush to Moses. Or in the wind to Elijah.

But God didn’t want that kind of miracle. The miracle for Jesus was God with us. Immanuel. God as a human. A human who would be born without sin. Live without sin. And who would, still without sin, suffer and die for all of our sins. At that time, the only way that was going to happen was with Jesus as a man.

History. There’s a saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. There’s also one about those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But, in this case, I think it’s more like those who don’t learn from history are doomed. Have condemned themselves. You know – as in a famous passage.

John 3:16

^{Jn 3:16} “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. ¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. ¹⁹ This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. ²¹ But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

If we change history, we’re not going to learn the right lessons from it.

If we get lost while trying to change history, we’re not going to learn the right lessons either.

If we get so lost in trying to remake God in our image, aren’t we doomed to condemn ourselves, because how can we believe in a God that we don’t even know? How can a God we don’t believe in transform our lives and make us want to be Holy like He is, when we don’t even know who He is?

So let’s accept that we are human, God is spirit. Yes, we use things we know to give us ideas about who God is. Jesus did that same thing with the parables. No one thinks the Kingdom of God is a mustard tree. It’s like a mustard tree, in one way.

And since we are made in God’s image, it’s not surprising that we can use examples of things we’re familiar with to in some way, describe God. But there’s no reason at all to think God actually picked up any traits/characteristics/anything, from us. There’s just no way we can assign anything of ourselves to God, and say He must have those things because we do.

Finally, remember this. God is love. But even there, we love God because He loved us first.