WHEN GOD TOLD US WHO HE IS

A reflection on today’s sermon

If someone asked you to describe God, whose voice would you hear first?

Perhaps a preacher’s. Perhaps a parent’s. Perhaps your own, shaped by years of answered prayers and prayers that seemed to go unanswered. We collect impressions of God from the people who speak about Him, and sometimes from the people who claim to speak for Him. But even within one family, four children can know the same parents and tell remarkably different stories about what they are like. Our experiences matter, yet none of us sees the whole person from one encounter.

So today’s sermon brought us to a more searching question: What happens when we let God describe Himself?

On Mount Sinai, Moses was told to bring two new stone tablets after the first had been broken. The setting could hardly have been more serious. Israel had already made the golden calf. If there were ever a moment to expect God to introduce Himself chiefly through His anger, this was it. Instead, as He passed before Moses, He spoke of His compassion, grace, patience, steadfast love, faithfulness and forgiveness. He also said that guilt would not simply be treated as though it did not matter. This is the God of Exodus 34:6–7: merciful without being indifferent, truthful without being cold.

We can repeat those words and still quietly imagine that the real God must be less approachable than the One who said them. That is why the sermon did not leave us on the mountain. It took us to Jesus. John says that the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and Jesus told Philip that seeing Him was seeing the Father. If we want to know whether God’s self-description holds up in the ordinary confusion of human life, we have to watch what Jesus does when someone interrupts His day.

In Mark 5, Jairus begs Jesus to come to his dying daughter. The urgency is unbearable. Jesus goes with him, but on the way a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years reaches through the crowd and touches His garment. She has spent what she had seeking help and has grown worse. In a story already racing toward one child’s bedside, her need brings everything to a stop.

Jesus could have continued walking. She already knew something had changed in her body. Yet He turns, looks for her, hears her story and calls her “Daughter.” The healing mattered, but so did that pause. In front of a crowd, a woman who had tried to remain unnoticed was addressed as someone belonging, even while another father waited for his own daughter. God’s compassion is not merely a pleasant quality listed on a mountain. Here it interrupts the schedule.

Then Mark leads us somewhere less comfortable. In Jesus’ hometown, people hear His teaching but cannot get past the familiar carpenter they think they know. They have information about His family and upbringing, yet their familiarity becomes a reason to dismiss what is in front of them. Knowing details about a person is not the same as being willing to see them. How easily we can do the same with God, mistaking a settled picture of Him for an open heart toward Him.

The religious leaders present another difficulty. They question Jesus about His disciples’ unwashed hands and the traditions surrounding them. Jesus answers by exposing the distance between outward devotion and a heart far from God. It is possible to become so practiced at guarding the appearance of holiness that we lose sight of the people holiness was meant to teach us to love. Truth, as Jesus shows it, does not flatter our religious habits when those habits hide what is happening within us.

And then comes the encounter in Tyre that refuses an easy explanation. A Gentile mother begs Jesus to free her daughter. His answer about the children’s bread and the dogs under the table sounds jarring to modern ears. We should not smooth over the discomfort or pretend to know every thought behind the exchange. But we can attend to what Mark lets us see: she answers with persistence and wit, Jesus receives her reply, and her daughter is freed. A woman others might have considered outside the circle is not left outside the reach of mercy.

That sequence made me think differently about the word remember. Psalm 103 tells us not to forget God’s benefits and then returns to the language He used before Moses: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger and abundant in steadfast love. The psalmist remembers forgiveness and restoration, but also something astonishing about God’s way of seeing us: He knows how we are made; He remembers that we are dust. We forget His character so readily, while He does not forget our frailty.

Perhaps that is why remembering is more than reciting a list of blessings when life is going well. It is returning to God’s own words when pain, disappointment or someone else’s harsh portrait of Him has begun to sound more convincing. It is looking again at Jesus when we are tempted to believe that a person must first become impressive, acceptable or easy to help before God will notice them.

Today’s sermon left me with a question I cannot answer only by saying that God is compassionate and truthful. What would a life look like if I believed He meant it? Would I stop long enough for the person who has quietly suffered for years? Would I listen when someone familiar surprises me? Would I examine the traditions I defend more closely than the heart from which I defend them? Would I make room at the table for the mother who keeps asking on behalf of her child?

After church, we gathered for fellowship and wonderful food. Looking around at the people talking, serving and sharing a table, I kept thinking about the sermon. We had spent the morning asking what God is like, and here was a small, ordinary place to practice the answer: making room for one another, paying attention and offering what we had. The food was lovely, but the gift of eating it together stayed with me even longer.

Moses heard God name His character. The people around Jesus watched that character move among them. We have been given both testimonies, and the invitation is to let them change the way we see Him and the way others encounter Him through us.

God has told us who He is. Jesus has shown us. The question that remains is whether anyone who meets us will recognize the family resemblance.