God's Ultimate Purpose Part 2

I get so excited reading about Jacob in the Bible.  The best part of the account occurs where I left off in my last article.  Jacob has just met God at Bethel.  God promises to bless him, provide for him, and guide him; but Jacob responds with fear.  What was Jacob so afraid of?  I believe he feared God’s control of his life.  He feared the submission that faith in God’s Word demands.  Most noticeably, he had a horrible view of God.  Jacob could not help but view God through the lens of his own experience and nature.  This is so true of us today. Oh, how often we assume that God must be just like us.  The Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and other pagan cultures had gods who were no better than glorified humans.  If you made Poseidon angry, you had better not go near the ocean.  If Zeus was having a bad day, steer clear of lightning bolts.  I have noticed that preachers will sometimes “speak for God” in light of their own personality.  I quiet, timid man could present God as calmness and serenity.  While a belligerent, outspoken individual might portray God as rowdy and loud.  Now, I know that those are the two extremes, and I merely use them for illustrative purposes.  The bottom line is that we think that if God took a body (again) and walked this earth today, he would look, act, and talk very much like me.  Reality strikes when we truly grasp that our God transcends time, culture, nature, and our little idiosyncrasies.  We must be diligent to try to understand God as Scripture reveals Him for there is no other way to grasp our Divine Potentate.  Christianity, at its very core, is not a religion of people who are trying to live right and please God (It is too bad that a lot of Christians think this way).  Christianity is a religion that seeks to understand who God really is and exalt Him in the process.  True Christianity is a life lived in pursuit of God-His character, nature, promises, Word, and glory.  True followers of Christ will lay everything aside with an ardent burning to know God more and more each day as the inspired Word of God reveals Him.  Jacob was brought into this world with the purpose of knowing God, loving God, and following God; but he only wanted to get what he could from God to satisfy himself.  Later, Jacob would return to Bethel and meet God again, but the outcome would be completely different.