Christmas: God Throwing 'Guess Who?' Out the Window
Do you remember the game Guess Who?
The game is pretty simple. Two players have a tray with 24 hinged portraits of different people. Each player will select one of those characters, and the opposite player has to guess who that character is. Whoever guesses the correct character first wins.
So, as you can imagine, there are good questions to lead with in the beginning, questions like
“Does your character have glasses?”
“Is your character a woman?”
“Does your character have black hair?”
“Does your character have a beard?”
The answer to those questions very quickly narrows down the pool of candidates to just a handful. That’s the time to start guessing who the opposite player’s character is. And if you ask the right questions, the game is over fairly fast. After all, there are only 24 characters.
But what if, instead of 24, there were 24,000?
I don’t think Hasbro has it in them to make a game of Guess Who? like that. But if they did, how long do you think a game like that would take? And would you even want to play a game like that?
I suppose, like you would with just 24 characters, if you ask good, reasonable questions you would still narrow down the pool of possible candidates. But whether you’re playing Guess Who? with 24 or 24,000 characters, you ultimately don’t advance due to the questions you ask: you advance through the game entirely on the truthfulness of the opposite player.
They’re the ones who answer “yes” and “no”, and they are the ones who ultimately reveal the character profile to you.
I remember playing Guess Who? with siblings who absentmindedly answered questions “Yes” when they should have said “No”, sending me on a wild goose chase – never arriving at the right answer. And sometimes they’d deliberately give you bad answers just to sabotage the game.
What about with God? Are we playing a game of Guess Who? with him?
And if we are, how many character cards are on the table? 24? 24,000?
Does God have flowing white robes? A big white beard? Is he toned and fair-skinned, like he looks in the Sistine Chapel? Is he all-knowing? All-wise? All-powerful? All-loving? And if you say he is, how do you know?
Guess Who? With God?
There are loads of religions and worldviews that will tell you who God is. Take for example Greek philosophy. Stoic philosophers saw ‘god’ as an impersonal, cold, emotionless deity, more or less a divine algorithm in the sky – not a personal being.
The Platonists would agree. They argued that, if love, according to their philosophy, implies need, and God needs nothing, then “a God who needs nothing cannot love.”
Aristotelianism thought similarly. Like the Platonists, Aristotle did not believe in a personal god who was concerned with the plight of mankind; his god was the removed and Unmoved Mover.
These philosophies portrayed god as this mechanical, distant deity – a god who isn’t presently immanent nor invested in his created world, but infinitely and inaccessibly transcendent, shrouded in total mystery, and unable to be truly known by the natural world, the human conscience, or by revelation.
Then you have the god of Islam – who is all-knowing, and all-powerful, but on their view, he is a person whose love is ultimately conditional and must be earned by complete and total submissive obedience – as loving as a parent who withholds love from his or her children unless they earn or deserve it first.
If you ask Mormons – such as Joseph Smith or Lorenzo Snow, who God is, they’ll tell you “God once was as we are now, and as God is now we will one day be.” To paraphrase, “God was actually a man like us before he was God, and now no longer is man but became God – and we, too, can become gods like him!”
If you ask a Hindu who God is, they’ll respond “Which one?” If you ask the average American, their definition of ‘God’ sounds more like a glorified, idealized version of themselves – some pushover buddy in the sky who only affirms everything we already think and feel, and never challenges or disagrees with us.
Buddhism will tell you there is no supreme creator or deity.
And atheism will tell you there’s absolutely nothing at all.
But they can’t all be right.
God Can’t Be Both Alfred And Anita
Like a game of Guess Who, all these profiles of God could conceivably all be false, but they can’t all be true. No different than your character in Guess Who? can’t simultaneously be Alfred (red hair, bushy mustache, and male) and Anita (white hair, rosy cheeks, and female).
Christian apologist (and once atheist) C.S. Lewis compares playing Guess Who? with God to grade school math: “As in arithmetic – there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.” But close doesn’t mean correct. To the question “What is the answer to 2+2?”, “5” is certainly closer to “4” than “22”, but they’re both wrong – no more correct than leaving the question completely blank.
There is not only evidence that shows us God exists – there’s also evidence that shows us what God is like.
If the universe in which we live began to exist, then it must have had a cause. And whatever caused the universe must be something (or someone) beyond the influence or need of space, time, and matter. You could even argue this spaceless, timeless, immaterial being needed to be personal - because they freely chose to create a universe they did not need for himself to be who he is.
What is more, if our universe somehow were the accidental result of time + matter + energy + chance, how do we explain how our universe is finely and precisely tuned for the existence of life?
Doesn’t it seem more likely that a divine, personal, powerful Creator made our universe to be a certain, specific way? Uniquely tailored to facilitate life of all kinds and species?
And yet, there still are many who double down and insist that there is no God, and insist that we live in a world where, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” No good. No evil. No right. No wrong. No meaning. No purpose.
Without a divine personal Creator, not only are the inherent value and worth of human beings depreciated, but words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and ‘evil’ mean absolutely nothing. We are just biological accidents with delusions of granduer: machines for passing on DNA, and that’s our only reason for being.
How does that sit with you?
Such a statement should offend everyone.
Our lives do have real meaning, value, and purpose. Because we are inherently endowed with meaning, value, and purpose. But how? And why? Science can’t answer that question. And if there is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (and there is), than we are implying that there is a moral law by which we use to define ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And if there is a moral law, than there must be a higher person who is the foundation of what is moral, virtuous, and good – a moral lawgiver. Now, who could that be?
Nature and Conscience Alone Leave us Guessing
And in just a few hundred words, we’ve made a compelling case for God. By observation of the natural world around us and by our conscience, there before us lies a compelling evidence for God’s existence, but also evidence for what kind of God our God is.
We could infer from nature that God is powerful, ever-present, spaceless, timeless, infinite, and immaterial.
We could infer from our conscience that God is personal, righteous, blameless, perfectly just, and perfectly good.
But that’s it.
There’ nothing more that the natural world can show me about God’s nature. There’s nothing more my conscience can reveal about God’s nature.
And if the only revelation we had was nature and conscience, Guess Who? with God ends there.
We’d be left with no comfort that this God loves me and cares about me. We would be left without any assurance this God will work for my eternal good.
We’d be left with fear, wondering and worrying what this God will say to me when I must stand before him – because I know that I’m a sinner – in thought, word, and deed – and he is righteous, holy, and blameless.
I’d be left wondering if I need to do something to save myself.
And I’d be left dreadfully terrified, wondering if I have ever done enough.
Why “Immanuel” is a Game-Changer
Whether you’re playing Guess Who? with your sibling or Guess Who? with God, you ultimately don’t advance due to the questions you ask: you advance entirely on the truthfulness of the opposite player.
He is the one who answers “yes” and “no”.
He is the one who leads you along.
He is the one who ultimately reveals his character profile to you.
We could seek and search all we want but we would never find God – nor would we know with any confidence or certainty that God has been found. We needed God to lead us to himself – just as we needed God to show us himself.
We needed God to reveal himself – his character profile – in another way.
A better way.
An unmistakable way.
We needed the invisible God to reveal himself to us so we could tangibly see who our God is in all his fulness.
When the religions of this world demand you need to get at the level of God – God graciously flips the script, reverses our expectations, and meets us where we are – literally.
Our God pitched his tent at the level of his people – to visibly walk among the people he created. He, Immanuel, visibly dwelt among us.
In the past, God spoke through his prophets and revealed who he was through his Word – be it through promises made, or promises kept. But one promise stood out from the rest: the promise to redeem and ransom our fallen, broken, messed up world.
How would God do that? God would dwell among us.
God, in Christ, Throws ‘Guess Who?’ Out the Window
God the Father loved us so much he would send his one and only Son, Jesus, so we could see who our God is.
Veiled in humility and masked in suffering, God, in Christ, gives dimension to his love that we might see the very shape and contours of God’s undying compassion for fallen humanity.
And your God assures you that those who look to Jesus not only see who God is but see what God has done personally for them! Jesus died for you!
See God’s tenderness as he is born for you in Bethlehem!
See his compassion as he heals the sick and helpless.
See his compassion as he patiently reaches out to the lost and straying.
See your God’s love for you as he carried your sins to Calvary to die for you.
See your God’s promises fulfilled as Jesus rises from the dead.
That Christ is risen vindicates and verifies who he is and what he had accomplished: he is God in the flesh, and he has overcome sin, death, and hell.
This Christmas, we have true words of comfort: God doesn’t make you play Guess Who? with him.
In fact, God throws such a ridiculous game out the window and shows you exactly who he is.
He points you to the character card of Jesus.
Your Savior is not Diet God or God Zero or God Lite. There, born in Bethlehem, is the real deal – the exact representation of God’s being, the very image of the invisible God, the radiance of his glory, all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form.
Jesus is the very visible expression of who our God actually is.
There, wrapped in rags, is the God of Heaven and Earth. There, laid in a bed of straw, is the King of kings and Lord of lords – who is enthroned in splendor. There, sleeping to the lullaby of bleating sheep is the Almighty God whom angels worship and adore. There, in real space and time, is our Savior – who has always been – even before space and time even began. The infinite, majesty of our God now condescends to lowly humility – that he would be born in poverty – not to be cute in a crib, but crucified on a cross. There is your God!
See your God’s love as he dies for you. See your God’s love as he is born for you.
You want to know truly who your God is? Look to Jesus.