God is good, all the time, and all the time God is good. Read about His goodness to me at http://www.xulonpress.com/bookstore/bookdetail.php?PB_ISBN=9781498421973

Many years ago the Holy Spirit asked me, “Whom do you worship?” A strange question, I thought; but it made me examine what I believed about the identity of the God I claim to worship. It was obviously similar to the “Who do you say that I am” question recorded in Matthew 16. There Yeshua (Jesus) had directed it to his disciples, and Simon Peter was the one who piped up with an answer. He was not yet the apostolic pace-setter who’d eventually write some New Testament scripture, but still the rough-cut diamond of a fisherman who’d need direct revelation in order to rightly answer this question. Yet we read in verses 16-17:

“Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.’                Yeshua said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven!’ ”

That was revealed over 2,000 years ago, and recorded to ADD TO the revelation of Himself that the God of the Bible had been sharing with mankind since creation. Yeshua was standing in a human body right there before Peter’s eyes, so His question was about Himself in flesh, about ‘Immanuel’ (God with us); but even in approving Peter’s answer, Yeshua referred to the God whose form the disciples still could not see, His Father in heaven.

When the Spirit of God posed the similar question to me, I could neither see Yeshua nor could I see the Father in heaven. I could only hear the voice of the Holy Spirit (‘God in Spirit’). And I knew He was asking me a broader question than could be fully answered with Peter’s words, or with ancient writings that predated the Incarnation, or even with later words that offered a ‘new’ revelation without reference to how God had Self-identified in ages past.

So I was at a loss for a glib answer. Only a carefully worded answer would do to explain to anyone or to demonstrate to God (who was asking) that I was absolutely conscious of Whom I was worshiping. And those words could raise more questions than answers, regardless of how they were phrased. But that is not a bad thing, because each Christian needs to do what I had to do- to search for God’s revelation of Himself in the scriptures and find the answer to that question for himself/herself.

I could confidently answer the question now in the simplest way possible: “I worship the God of the Bible.” However, for clear communication (which is what God was after in posing the question) I would expand on that: “I worship the God of the entire Bible, Whose story of past, present and future interaction with mankind is recorded from Genesis to Revelation; Who revealed His attributes, demonstrated His power and influenced the whole world for good through the Israelites; Who offered redemption to the fallen human race through the life and sacrifice of His Incarnation, the Jew Yeshua HaMasiach (Jesus the Christ/the Messiah); Whose Spirit still indwells Yeshua’s disciples, empowering us to pursue the Divine ministry of reconciliation which Yeshua enabled and His Apostles enacted; and Whose prophetic revelations provide His Body (His indwelt ones) with guidance and necessary vision going forward toward the end of this age.

What do you think of that mouthful?