Reliable

"I'll call you tomorrow."

"I'll meet you at 6:30."

"We'll go do______."

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Reliable. That's a word I'm not used to. I have been let down so many times by so many people in so many settings that it makes it hard to trust that people will really do what they say they will. Actually, that's not true. Typically I'll trust people to do what they say they are going to do, but when it comes to God, I tend to doubt him, a lot.

I don't know about you, but I consider myself an idealist in many ways. When somebody says they're going to do something, I believe they are going to do it. When somebody says something in sarcasm, it's sometimes difficult for me to discern right off whether they are joking or not. As you can see, I tend to take people seriously most of the time. So joke or no joke, when someone says they are going to do something, I usually take that word at face value.

And more often than not, I fall on my face.

This develops a pattern of distrust. How can anyone be reliable, much less a God who makes crazy claims about himself and what he wants to do in my life and in others' lives? If I can't trust people, who I can see, how can I trust in a God, a triune-God at that, who is somehow three persons yet one entity, and completely unseen?

Funny enough, my experience has been that this unseen God has proven himself more reliable to me than the ever-changing people in my line of sight. How can an intangible God be so tangible? How can Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, be so very close and real? And how can I trust them, him, God, more?

This is helping: Man is like God, but God is not always like man. Humans may reflect God, but we are just that...a reflection, and incomplete. So while we can learn a whole lot about our Creator through the characteristics he placed in us (as Genesis 1:27 says, we were made in his image), there's still so much we can't see. We tell the truth, and we lie. We say one thing, and do it, then we say the same thing again the next time, and fail to follow through.

If only man could reflect God completely. If only God would reflect man completely. What does he really look like? What are we supposed to look like? Can't someone just SHOW us?

He did. And he does. :-) Colossians 1:15 says of Jesus, God the Son, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation."

Read that again. "He is the image of the invisible God the firstborn over all creation."

Jesus, the image. Imagination. Imagine if we could see God. Jesus is the result. Ah...But he's not the result of our imagination. Another part of the Bible tells us that Jesus was with God the Father from the very beginning of everything. Jesus shows us what God is like, and he also shows us the embodiment of God's imagination for us human beings. Imagine what humans might look like at their peak, flawless. Jesus shows us this. Somewhere in the Bible, we are told that Jesus was the second Adam, that this God the Son came to earth to re-do what the original human being messed up. He came to reclaim the image. And in reclaiming the image of human beings, he was reclaiming the image of God. Or, put another way, in restoring the image of God, showing us what God really looks like, he was and is reclaiming what we are to look like, since we were originally made in God's imaT

So, the word reliable, how does that figure into all of this? Jesus shows us the Father. The Holy Spirit shows us Jesus and the Father. Jesus is reliable because the Father is reliable. Some of the religious people of Jesus' day couldn't wrap their minds around this whole thing.

"Who are you?" they asked.
"Just what I have been claiming all along," Jesus replied. "I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is reliable, and what I have heard from him I tell the world." They did not understand that he was telling them about his Father.
(John 7:25-27)

The account of Jesus' physical life on earth show us that many of the people around him couldn't get what he was saying because they kept trying to put him on a human grid, making everything fit into their pre-conceived notions of what a God-sent man should look like and act like. I do that myself sometimes. But I'm learning that Jesus is the answer, Jesus is the grid, and he is the culmination of the Godhead's imagination for us. As we see him, we see God the Father, and in seeing and connecting to the Father, we can start to see and become our true selves, increasingly reliable.

"I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." -Jesus, as recorded in John 14:12-14.