A.W. Tozer famously said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” C. S. Lewis famously countered: “I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.”

Lewis was right, but let’s not miss Tozer’s point. What comes into our minds when we think of God has a profound impact on our lives, our happiness, and our hope. But what comes into many people’s minds when they think of God actually hinders them from trusting him. What comes into your mind when you think of God could be making it harder for you to experience the goodness of the life in Christ.

Let me share two competing visions of God, one from the world’s most famous contemporary atheist and the other from Jesus himself, as summarized by one of his earliest disciples. Here is what the atheist Richard Dawkins thinks when he thinks of God.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully (Richard Dawkins).

Dawkins wins the prize both for most adjectives and for most contempt in a single sentence. And he wrote it about God!

Now, here is Jesus’s view, summarized by the early disciple and apostle John: This is the message we (the apostles) have heard from him (Jesus) and declare to you: (Here it is, a much shorter sentence than Dawkins’s without a single adjective): God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

What we think of when we think of God matters. I know someone who was actively engaged in ministry and hoping to become a pastor, who began having doubts about God. I don’t know when the doubts were first planted, but I do know something about the soil in which they grew. To borrow John’s words, my friend was not walking in the light. He wasn’t being honest with himself or others. I suspect he was only reading the Bible when he was preparing to teach and only praying when he was in front of other people. He was (John’s words again) walking in darkness—and doubts grow in darkness. When he watched a YouTube video by an atheist, he was quickly drawn in.

But even before my friend began listening to Richard Dawkins and his imitators, he already had ideas about God. And some of those ideas were wrong, as are some of ours, and they hindered him from trusting God, as do ours. We may one day find ourselves in a place where our peace and maybe even our sanity depends on us being able to trust God, and those wrong ideas will keep us from doing it.

That is why we will spend the next couple of months thinking about what God is like. And we will do it through a very particular lens. We will learn about God from Jesus himself. He knows what God is like, and he came to make him known. The Apostle John wrote: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only” (he’s talking about Jesus), “who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). Jesus is the lens through which God is seen most clearly.

Bible teachers believe that John was in his late teens when he began following Jesus. For three years, he and eleven other men were with Jesus day and night. They ate meals together, worked together, and traveled together. After Jesus’s ascension, John lived for something like sixty more years. He had decades to think about what Jesus taught about the kingdom, the Law, God’s power and authority, divine punishment and love.

Imagine you were John. You were with Jesus 24 hours a day for three years. You ate with him, worked with him, traveled with him. You heard him speak publicly on hundreds of occasions and had countless private conversations with him. Went to synagogue with him. Went fishing with him. Went through life-threatening situations with him. How would you summarize Jesus’s message? Would you talk about the Kingdom of God? How about righteousness, prayer, judgment, resurrection? How could you possibly sum up all that you learned from Jesus? Tough assignment, isn’t it? Now, let’s make it even tougher: you have to do it in ten words.

That is what John did. He took all the things he ever heard Jesus say about God and, after spending decades thinking about them and talking to God about them, he summarized them in ten words (in Greek). He said: “This is the message we heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

Maybe that’s not how you would summarize Jesus’s teaching. Andrew, Peter, Matthew—they might have done it differently too; but that is how John did it. According to John, Jesus’s message to humanity was: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

Since our first parents, humans have faced the temptation to doubt that God is light. Remember the temptation in the Garden: The serpent says to Eve, “Did God really say…?” and a shadow of doubt was introduced. “God said that? Really? Hmm. That doesn’t sound right.”

Have you ever noticed the serpent didn’t say, “Eat the fruit”? It said, “God knows that if you eat this fruit, you will be like him” – and the implication is that God doesn’t want you to be like him. He doesn’t share; doesn’t want what’s best for you. The temptation was never simply, “Disobey God.” It was, “Doubt God.” The idea the serpent introduced into Eve’s mind – and implanted in humanity – is that there is darkness in God.

I’ve found the thing that frequently turns people away from God – sometimes to atheism but usually to some form of selfism – is the idea that God is not all good. He is not all light; there is a dark side to him. God is selfish. Proud. He doesn’t love everyone – not really: not immigrants or Communists; not LGBTQ+ people; not Republicans and certainly not Democrats. He is not all light.

And what about the nations Israel drove out of Canaan, the people they fought and killed in wars? God ordered that, didn’t he? There is darkness in him.

What about all the people who’ve never heard of Jesus? Doesn’t God send them to hell to endure eternal torment? There must be darkness in him.

What about the dozens of kids and counselors at a Christian camp who were killed in a flood? If God wanted to, he could have made things happen differently. If he did not want to, how can he be good? How can he be light? There must be some darkness in him.

Do you think those questions are new – that they weren’t being asked in the first century? Of course they were. John’s friends – his fellow apostles – were beaten and wrongly imprisoned. Every one of them died a violent death. John himself was falsely accused and exiled alone to the mountainous wasteland of Patmos.

And don’t forget that John saw his best friend, teacher, and leader die an unspeakably gruesome death at the hands of evil men – a death that God allowed. He saw the same kinds of evil in his world that we see in ours and worse, yet he could say that the message Jesus brought was that “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.” None; not a shadow. He is light all the way through. That’s how John summarized Jesus’s teaching about God.

If that really was Jesus’s message, if God is light and in him is no darkness at all, then what seems to be darkness in him – things we think the Bible teaches – are either untrue or we are not yet developed enough to see them for what they really are.

And that is certainly possible. There may be light in God that we are incapable of seeing. In the physical world, we only see light along wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers. Anything shorter, like ultraviolet light, or longer, like infra-red light, is invisible to us. Some animals see light that we can’t. And what might angels see? A dazzling spectrum of beauty that we’ve never imagined.

So, if some thought about God seems to suggest he is dark, it is either not true or you simply are not developed enough to see the light in it. For Jesus knew that “God is light; in him is no darkness at all.”

Since the Garden, satan has been whispering that there is darkness in God, and humans have believed it. If you believe the idea that there is darkness in God, your path to joyful, purposeful living will be blocked. You may detour around a false idea of God for a while, but you will keep running into roadblocks. A false belief about God will keep you from experiencing spiritual transformation and joy.

When Jesus was on earth, many people believed and taught things about God that admitted darkness into his very nature. But the message of Jesus, the One who knows God and makes him known, is that there is no darkness at all in God.

Here are some examples of what people thought about God when Jesus was on earth. Many (both Jews and Gentiles) considered God stingy. He’s not going to do anything without being coaxed. He doesn’t care if you’re in need. He doesn’t want to help. That is not light; that is darkness.

Some people thought they could bribe this stingy God. They could bring offerings or give money to the priest to leverage God into doing what they wanted. It was a religious version of Archimedes’ law: “Give me an offering big enough, and an altar on which to set it, and I’ll move God.”

Any God that can be leveraged – or needs to be leveraged – is not the God Jesus made known. He is nothing like that! Jesus taught us and showed us that his God and Father is generous. He is a giver – “How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11). Jesus not only told us this; he demonstrated it by giving his life.

Yet to this day, many people – including so-called “Bible-believing Christians” – think of God this way. They make vows to him. They promise him things. They give to the church or to charity in the hopes of working a deal. But the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is not stingy. He gives, as brother James learned from Jesus, “generously to all without nitpicking” (my paraphrase of James 1:5). He is not stingy. He is light all the way through.

Here’s another distortion. When Jesus was on earth, many Jewish people believed that God was cliquish. If you met certain religious and social standards, God would take you in; otherwise, you would always be an outsider. People who were already in (or thought they were) appreciated a God who keeps the riff-raff out. The us-against-them God has been one of history’s more popular deities, but he is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You see this kind of thing in the Gospels. The Pharisees, the religious scholars, and the wealthy thought of themselves as being on the inside and thought of the irreligious, the poor, and the uneducated as being on the outside—which is where they wanted them. They were busy remaking God in their own image rather than being conformed to his.

When Jesus came, he opened the door to people on the outside and invited them in, which really upset the religious leaders. Jesus liked the wrong people and had the nerve to suggest that God did too. His opponents thought Jesus’s approach was reckless and his message about God dangerous. He accepted sinners and implied that God accepted them too. But if sinners believe that God loves them, why would they ever change?

When these religious leaders looked at God, they saw darkness, but the God and Father of Jesus is light; in him is no darkness at all. Both Jesus’s teaching and his life reveal a God who is light, a God who loves the world. Jesus taught that all heaven erupts in joyous celebration every time a person leaves his or her sin and comes to God (Luke 15:10). He not only taught this, he lived it. He ate with people (which, in that culture, was a sign of acceptance) who were considered outsiders by the religious community. He demonstrated that his Father God wants everyone on the inside. Anyone can come in; they just have to leave the darkness to do so.

Here’s another distortion Jesus encountered. Many of his contemporaries believed that God is a kind of cosmic accountant, a religious bean-counter, where the beans are good deeds, especially religious deeds. They knew that God watches over people, but they thought it was so he could track their religious performance. It never occurred to them that he watches over people because he loves them. They thought that God made people to follow the rules that he loves, not that he made the rules so that the people he loves could thrive.

John himself almost certainly grew up believing some of these things – dark things – about God. From Jesus, John learned that God is light all the way through. He is light when he heals and light when he does not. He is light when he judges and light when he rescues. He is light when he hates sin. He is light when he loves sinners. What John came to understand is that the true God is just like Jesus—and that is great news.

That truth was so liberating, so joyous and good, John never got over it. Sixty years later, he still marveled at it. Sixty years later, the best way he could find to summarize the message of Jesus was to say that “God is light.”

How should knowing that God is light impact us? First, when something is said about God that seems dark, we should be careful about accepting it, even if it comes from someone we admire. It’s possible that it is light but that there is so much darkness in us that we can’t see it. If we can’t see it, the safest thing we can do is say, “I don’t see it, but I know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is light.”

But for us to know the God who is light – this is the very point John was making – we must come into the light ourselves. We cannot live in darkness and know the God who is light. This is verse 6: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” To the degree there is darkness in us, we will not know God. To the degree we do not know him, we will not trust him; to the degree we do not trust him, we will not live the joyful, loving, beautiful lives we could.

“God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” In the aftermath of the Texas floods – in the aftermath of your life – that may be hard for you to believe. Will you ask God to reveal himself to you over the course of this series? Ask him to shine light on any false ideas that you hold (and don’t even know you hold) and replace them with truth. Knowing God, according to Jesus, is eternal life. Knowing him is the key that unlocks the door to joy and leads to glory. So, in the words of Hosea, “Let us press on to know him” (Hosea 6:3).

I close with a story. The psychologist Larry Crabb had a friend who grew up in an angry family – lots of yelling, insults, and threats. Mealtimes were the worst, either silent or sarcastic. Just down the street was an old house with a big porch where a happy family lived. When Crabb’s friend was about ten, he would ask to be excused from the dinner table as soon as he could without being yelled at, walk to the old house and, if he arrived during dinnertime, crawl under the porch and just sit there, listening to the sounds of laughter.

Larry asked him to imagine what it would have been like if the dad in that house somehow knew he was hiding under the porch and sent his son to invite him in. He told him to envision what it would mean to accept the invitation, to sit at the table, to accidentally spill his glass of water, and hear the father roar with delight, “Get him more water! And a dry shirt! I want him to enjoy the meal!”[1]

I share that story for two reasons: 1) to introduce what we’ll be looking at next week (a very important message): God our Father; and, 2) to get you to reflect on how you think about God. What you think of when you think of God is fundamentally important to your experience of life. It will either propel you toward or hold you back from the strong, joyful, purposeful life God has for you.

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[1] Larry Crabb, Connecting (Word, 1997)