The Character of God Revealed

If you want to know who God is, immerse yourself in the Old Testament. Today, R.C. Sproul presents a simple yet life-changing method for growing in our understanding of the majestic character of our Creator.

I used to love to read Kierkegaard when I was in college. Kierkegaard one time was all exercised about nineteenth-century European culture, and he said: “Let others complain that this culture is wicked. My complaint is that it is paltry.” He was complaining that culture had lost its passion. He said, “When I get distressed about this,” he said, “my thoughts return again and again to the Old Testament, for there I find people who lie and steal and kill and cheat and commit adultery.” He said: “People of passion. They’re alive, and the Word of God comes alive to me through the real episodes of real people.”

Well, for Kierkegaard, the Old Testament read like a novel, indeed a steamy novel. As I was analyzing this, I said, “Yes, I like the Old Testament because it has these narratives that are rich and graphic and concrete, and people can understand them and relate to them.” But there’s something else, something far more important that draws me as a magnet to the pages of the Old Testament. It has to do with worship. It has to do with what happens on Sunday morning.

We come to church on Sunday morning and we look at our watches. Don’t we? Beloved, when the people of Israel were standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, and God approached in a dense and thick cloud, nobody looked at their watch. They were terrified. The Word of God says they trembled, and they knew they were in the presence of the holy. Which is just the opposite of what we experience in church on Sunday morning for most churches, for most people, on most Sundays.

Yet, when I read the Old Testament somehow, I get a feeling of stepping over a threshold from the secular to the sacred, and I sense the majesty of God. If you want to know who God is, you’ve got to spend time in the Old Testament, because whatever else the Old Testament is, beloved, it is the revelation of the character of God the Father. It is in the pages of the Old Testament that God reveals His character.