The “God Box”

To Begin at the Beginning!

All of us had a beginning. None of us have memories of the precise moment we were conceived, but it was at that moment God gave YOU life and your earthly pilgrimage began.

God breathed into you His breath of life (your human spirit) and you became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). The physical cells began to divide and you started to grow. Your spirit, soul and body were all present from those earliest moments – they are what makes you a human being.

On your ‘birth-day’ you began life separated from your mother. From babyhood you progressed through a time of being cared for as a child, and eventually you grew into adulthood. The years passed and you became the person you are today.

Although you are a unique creation in God, what you look like physically was influenced by your family’s genetic history. The person God created you to be (the person living within your body) has also been influenced by the many experiences of your life from the time of your conception and then birth.

What you have chosen to do, the way others have treated you and the way you have responded to these events have all contributed to moulding you into the person you are today. Our physical appearance bears the impression and scars of life’s events – both the good and the bad.

When I have to wait at an airport or a railway station, I look at the faces of people passing by. Some are happy, others sad, and it’s easy to see the emotional and spiritual scars that people are carrying. The face was designed by God to express our feelings and it shows the consequences of what we have been through.

The majority of people make their way through life without any knowledge of God, and how He could help and heal them. But this was not God’s original intention.

God’s Plan for the Human Race

God intended that children should learn everything about God and what it means to live a godly life from their parents. That way all children would be brought up in the nurture of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4, Proverbs 22:6). They would also learn how to live as a human being in the very best way possible.

In this way learning about the knowledge of God would be part of everyday life from day one onwards. Growing up would be a good experience and, little by little, children would learn about the nature and ways of God from Mum and Dad (Deuteronomy 6:6-7), because their parents had learned the truth about God from their parents, and so on down the generations. That was and is God’s ideal.

God’s plan was that human beings should grow up to enjoy every aspect of their humanity, in a loving relationship with the God who had made them, and in loving relationships with each other.

The Reality

But reality tells us that the world is now very different from the ideal that God originally intended. We only need to see the headlines in one issue of any national newspaper to see, for example, plenty of evidence that lives are not being lived according to God’s intentions. In many places normal family life has almost disintegrated. Something has gone seriously wrong.

We see violence, stealing, ungodly sexual relationships, war, drugs, betrayal and a thousand and one other things that God did not plan or intend for us. We are now seeing some of the evil things prophesied in the Word of God being fulfilled before our very eyes, even to the extent that evil is being called good, and good is being called evil (Isaiah 5:20).

In most countries of the world, scriptural morality is no longer an acceptable basis for law, and every flavour of occult or perverted sexual activity is acceptable for both entertainment and even personal involvement. A large percentage of the films being produced by the movie industry are about horror, demonic power and explicit sex. Tragically this is what the deceived heart of man wants to watch. All of this simply confirms that the world is in an unholy mess, and is a million miles away from what God planned or intended for us.

It will be important for us to see how the world got into its present mess and then to understand that God really does have an amazing rescue plan for humanity (Isaiah 61:1-4, John 10:10). We will then discover how He wants to heal and restore each one of us personally, so we can walk in the wonderful destiny He has planned for us all (Joel 2:25-27, Jeremiah 29:11).

God’s Jig-Saw Puzzle!

A jig-saw is a simple puzzle, made up of many different pieces, and which can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. A jig-saw usually comes in a box, with a picture on the lid, showing the completed jig-saw. The picture on each piece is a tiny part of the whole.

God has revealed Himself to mankind in the most wonderful of pictures. Within Scripture the revelation began in the Garden of Eden and is concluded with images of Heaven in the book of Revelation. From Genesis to Revelation we see an amazing picture unfolding of foundational truth about God and man.

Each truth is like a piece of an incredible jig-saw. Put them all together and you have an amazing understanding of the nature and character of God and of what God’s best is for mankind.

Our “God-Box”

The God-box is the name I have given to the ‘spiritual container’, into which we put all the bits of spiritual knowledge we acquire on life’s journey. Ever since we were conceived we have been learning new things and putting pieces of spiritual understanding into our God-box. They are like pieces of a jig-saw.

But everyone has had different parenting and different life experiences, so everyone’s God-box is filled differently. As a result, no two people can ever be in full agreement about what they think about God, if their only source of knowledge is their own life-experience! The pieces of jig-saw in their personal God-box will never be the same as anyone else’s.

That’s why, for example, there are so many different religions in the world. They are all different because each one is an expression of man’s attempt to find God, based on their own accumulated knowledge and experience, which will always be incomplete and inadequate.

As a child I loved doing jig-saws, but a puzzle with pieces missing could never be completed. It was so frustrating and disappointing not to be able to complete the picture. Lack of sufficient knowledge and spiritual understanding is a problem we all face. If we try and depend on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5-6) we will always have an inadequate knowledge of the truth about God. There will be important pieces missing from our God-box - and we will not be able to complete the picture of truth about either God or man!

But there is another problem we have to face as well!

Extra Pieces!

One day I came across a particularly difficult jig-saw that had some extra pieces. The extra pieces looked as though they were part of the picture on the lid of the box, but they didn’t actually fit anywhere in the puzzle!

They had been deliberately added by the manufacturers to make the jig-saw even more difficult! If you did put one of these extra pieces into the jig-saw it made the rest of the jig-saw impossible to do!

This illustrates the sort of difficulty we all face when trying to understand the truth about God. From the moment we were conceived we have been acquiring many different pieces of information about life and have been putting these into our God-box like pieces of a spiritual jig-saw puzzle.

Some of them have been true, but, sadly, many of those bits of spiritual understanding have been false. Because God has made us to learn from our parents, we can then grow up to believe whatever our parents believe or demonstrate to us. We instinctively believe that what they teach us is right (the truth), and because our parents are God’s intended role models to show us what He is like, we believe that everything we have put in our God-box learnt from our parents must be true!

I once prayed with a lady who had a terrible problem believing that God was a Father who loved her. I later found out that her human father had regularly beaten her. As a result she believed that all fathers are cruel – including Father God. This false belief was in her God-box.

Some people have difficulty praying. They cannot really believe that God has time for them! Many such people had fathers who were too busy with their own lives and never had time for their children. So the message in their God-box says ‘God doesn’t have time for me either.’

And then again, many people have been introduced to various occult practices, or beliefs associated with one of the many false religions. Experiences like this have the effect of sowing lies into our God-box. Young children cannot differentiate between the good and bad pieces of information they have received from significant adults in their lives. It’s all ‘truth’ to them and stored away in their God-box!

When we have believed things that were false, as if they were true from a young age, those things can still influence the way we think and what we believe today.

The Real Situation

The fact is, all of us have had truth and error, good and bad, poured into us throughout our lives and most human beings are, as a result, very confused. We can have huge gaps in our understanding of real truth. And we can have many ‘extra pieces’ of spiritual knowledge that are nothing whatsoever to do with God! Our image of God has been distorted by our experiences in life.

It’s important that we take a hard look at ourselves in this respect, and let God show up any areas of unbelief or wrong belief that might have been influencing our relationship with Him, which are standing in the way of our growth or healing (Psalm 51:6; Psalm 139:23-24).

God’s Answer

The answer to this seemingly impossible problem lies, ultimately, in Jesus. For one of the reasons that Jesus came, was to show us what Father God is really like (John 14:7-11).

It was as if the human race had been trying to make all their jig-saw pieces into a picture – but it made no sense. They couldn’t tell truth from error. They needed a picture to look at, which they could use to compare with the pieces in their God-box, so they could get rid of the ones that didn’t fit into the puzzle.

Jesus is the picture we need. We can model our lives on Him and the more we become like Him, the more effective and blessed our earthly and eternal lives will be (2 Corinthians 3:18). The progressive revelation of Scripture finds its total fulfilment in Jesus (Luke 4:21). He is the ultimate gift of God to the human race (John 3:16). It is so very important that we truly know Him as he really is – for He is the key to all healing and to finding our destiny in God (John 10:10).

As you take one step at a time, on your own personal Journey to Freedom, you will see that not only did Jesus come to save us from the consequences of sin (1 Timothy 1:15), but He also came to show us by example the nature and character of God (John 14:6-11), and to teach us how we can have a healed and restored relationship with the Father (2 Corinthians 6:18).

Then, as you walk with Jesus in the ways of God, you will experience His transforming power changing you to be more like Him – transformed by the truth that is only found in Him (John 8:32). 

Summary

Our life was a gift of God, but through the years we have all developed a distorted view of the nature and character of the God who made us. How much we must be missing out on as a result! To get back to a right understanding of God, we will need to identify and deal with those things in our beliefs that are not of God and complete the picture of truth as we look at Jesus.

Prayer

Thank you, Lord, for the privilege of being part of your creation. As I start moving forward, one step at a time, help me to appreciate all you have provided for your children, and to desire to love and serve you all my days. In Jesus' Name, Amen.