Through the eyes of a six year old

BOX SCORE
Element	Current	Std. Range
Hemoglobin	12.1	13-17
Platelets	137	140-375
ANC	840	1800-8300

 

Our dear friend, who has two little children, texted me yesterday asking for wisdom about explaining God to her six year old daughter, who has a hard time understanding Who God is. Wow! How do you answer that? I think we all have trouble from time to time answering that question. Jill and I put our heads together and came up with this: 

"Regarding the concept of God, this is difficult for any of us to understand, because we can’t see God. One way to approach that might be this: You can’t see the wind, but you can see what the wind does, and we can’t see God, but we can see what He does. For example, He made everything, and we can know what He is like by seeing the amazing things He has made. (See Romans 1) I think it might be helpful to get a children’s book of Bible stories. Let her see what Jesus is like. The Bible says he is the physical manifestation of God, so if she can relate to Jesus, she can know what God is like, even if she can’t see Him."

Jesus said he came for two reasons. In John 18:37 the Apostle quotes Him as saying, "For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth." In the previous chapter, Jesus was praying to His heavenly Father for Himself, for the twelve Apostles, and for everyone who would one day come to trust Him, "Sanctify them [set them aside for Yourself] in the truth; your word is truth." So, one of Jesus' missions was to show the world truth as it is revealed through God's own words, recorded in the Bible. 

The other part of His mission was to rescue the world from the corruption that mankind has fallen into because of our stubborn tendency to ignore God's truth. Perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible is John 3:16 - 

“For God so loved the world [or, This is how God loved the world], that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

 Verse 17 is often overlooked, but I think it completes the thought of verse 16 -

"For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." 

As you can see, the two parts of Jesus' mission are intertwined. He came to bear witness to the truth, which is God's word, and to direct us back to that word, not by condemnation but by love; "the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God," as a popular Christian praise song says. 

We can know God because He has revealed Himself first in His creation and then through His word, the Scriptures, and finally by sending His Son in the form of a human being, with whom we can relate, because he went through every bad thing that we go through. 

For our friend and her daughter, I think getting to know Jesus through the word of God is the key to helping the child grow in her understanding of Who God is. For me this approach has been foundational. Now that I have come to know Jesus, I can more clearly see how God is working in my life; even through a couple of bouts of leukemia and my previous colon cancer. 

Knowing that God is present with me through all of this has helped me to appreciate how much He truly loves me. Some might say, as Job's wife did, "Curse God and die," but as Job replied, "Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”   Now I don't believe that God created evil, but there is evil in the world. It is the result of ignoring God's word, just as darkness is not an entity of itself, but the absence of light. The curse that was brought on the world when Adam and Eve defied God has been gradually grinding down the whole universe. "But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. ¹⁶ Only let us hold true to what we have attained." (Philippians 3:13-16) "...[I]n Christ God was reconciling the world to himself..." (2 Corinthians 5:19) 

For me it is thrilling to watch as God reconciles the world to Himself. I have seen it in my own life, as He has freed me from a life of recklessly shaking my fist in His face. I have seen it in others as He has freed them from everything from addictions to physical disease to broken relationships, which He has restored. These things are hard to explain to a six year old. But even a six year old can see what people do, so she can understand stories that tell of things that people do, even if she is not an eyewitness. And Jesus was as completely human as you and I are, although unlike you and me, he is and was also completely God. So, even though a six year old may not be able to conceptualize God, she can follow stories of what people do or did, including the things that Jesus did when He walked the earth as a man centuries ago. But in order to understand what persons do, we need to get to know them. "[S]o if she can [get to know] Jesus, she can know what God is like, even if she can’t see Him." 

 And may I add, He is well worth knowing.