Caricature of Father

During Father’s Day week we received an advertisement from Netflix encouraging us to rent a movie with “lovingly evil” dads – there were four movies highlighted: Star Wars, The Birdcage, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Godfather. The inclusion of the Indiana Jones movie struck me because Indiana Jones’s father, played by Sean Connery, doesn’t strike me as evil – certainly not evil in the sense that Darth Vader or Don Vito Corleone are evil. Of course the Connery character is immoral and hardly a father in a godly sense, but compared with the fathers of Star Wars and The Godfather he doesn’t belong on an evil fathers list. Since I haven’t seen The Birdcage I won’t comment on the father in that production.

As I read the Netflix advertisement I thought, “If someone reads this who has seen Star Wars but not seen Indiana Jones they will put Jones’s father in the same class as Darth Vader. I wonder how many people associate our heavenly Father with caricatured images of him.”

I meet caricatured images of our Father both in and out of the church, from a benign God who looks the other way at all we do, to a harsh God looking for us to mess up so he can pounce on us with wrath, to an uncaring God, to an impotent God – the list seems endless. When we make God the Father one dimensional we caricature him, when we make him in our image we caricature him, when we use ourselves as the standard for God we caricature him.

One way to view the Bible is as a letter from God the Father to us in which God reveals who he is and who we are; we need God to reveal who we are because in our current condition we can’t really know who we are and who we are called to become, we can’t really know who we are anymore than we can know who God is without God’s illumination in our hearts and minds. If we don’t read God’s letter, the Bible, and if we don’t submit our understanding and our lives to his letter, we will live with a caricatured image of God.

Far from the Bible presenting a one-dimensional image of God, God portrays himself in Scripture as a person, and being a person he has many attributes and facets – unlike the facets of our personalities which are often contradictory and mixed with good and evil, God is entirely holy and just and good and without evil. While philosophies speculate about God, the Bible is God’s self-disclosure, his definitive statement about himself in both complexity and simplicity, in unity and diversity, in narrative, in propositional statement, in didactic teaching, in metaphor and analogy, and in image.

I’m reminded of God proclaiming himself to Moses in Exodus Chapter 34: Yahweh descended in the cloud and stood there with him [Moses] as he called upon the name of Yahweh. Then Yahweh passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “Yahweh, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”

Of course God’s ultimate self-disclosure is in his Son, Jesus Christ, as John writes (John 1:14, 18): And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth…No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.

When we live in relationship with our heavenly Father through our Lord Jesus Christ we will know Him as He is…and not as He may be caricatured.