We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Not the God You Were Expecting

And I Heard, As it Were, the Noise of Thunder, One of the Four Beasts Saying  Come and See, And I Saw, and Behold, a White Horse

Thomas Hawk via Compfight

Micah J. Murray posted a reflection today titled The God Who Bleeds. In contrast to Mark Driscoll’s “Pride Fighter,” this God allowed himself to get beat up and killed while all his closest friends ran and hid and denied they even knew him. What kind of a God does this?

The kind worth loving.

From Micah’s post:

You would expect a god to have a pride fighter’s tattoo carved into his leg. But Jesus’ feet were covered in dust from walking among us. You would expect a god to wield a sword in his hand, distributing vengeance on all his enemies. But Jesus’ hands healed his enemies who’d been wounded by the sword. For a moment it had seemed like he would be the god we had always imagined – overthrowing the Empire, leading a victory parade through the city streets, planting his flag in Jerusalem. Instead, He was betrayed with a kiss, arrested without a fight, and prosecuted without cause.

Related Reading

Cruciform Theology in Four Steps

The culmination of the biblical narrative of the cross reframes everything about who God is, what it means to have faith in God, and how we read the Bible! The entire Old Testament leading up to the crucified Christ must be interpreted with a view toward discerning how it anticipates and points toward this definitive…

Imaging God Rightly: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 3

In the previous two blogs I noted that the vision of God in our minds is the single most important vision in our lives, for it completely determines whether we’ll have a relationship with God and what kind of relationship this will be. A. W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we…

Can You Believe It?

The origin of human sin and the world’s oppression goes back to a deceptive, untruthful picture of God given to Eve by Satan. Jesus came, in part, to finally reveal the absolute truth about God. He is the way and the truth (alethia) and the life (Jn 14:6). The word “truth,” literally means “uncovered.” And…

God Became a Zygote

Has the Christmas story become so familiar that you’ve lost any sense of how spectacular it is? The great creator of the universe became a microscopic zygote. The all-powerful being who spoke the stars into existence came in a very small and vulnerable way. He crossed an infinite distance to become one of us. You can watch…

Reflections on the Supremacy of Christ (Part 1)

In my previous post I argued that the Bible tells a story in which the culminating event – the coming of Christ – reframes everything that preceded it. Though it is all inspired, not everything in it should carry equal weight for us. Rather, everything leading up to Christ, including the portraits of God, must…

What Makes the Good News So Good

While God was revealed in various ways and to various degrees through the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, in Jesus we finally have the one who is “the exact representation of God’s being” or essence (hypostasis, Heb. 1:1-13). This is the heart of the Good News that reverberates throughout the New Testament.…