IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT GOD

The Philips family live in Oregon, Mack and Nan and their five children. Some years ago Mack took his youngest three children on a camping vacation. Nan was at a continuing education class in Seattle and the two oldest boys were enrolled at college. During this vacation their youngest child, a daughter named Missy was abducted from under Mack’s nose. Evidence later discovered in a remote cabin, a shack really, pointed to the conclusion that Missie had been brutally murdered. Each year after that dragged on through inexplicable sorrow with no new facts, no closure. One day Mack received a letter in the mail which said, “It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.” And it was signed ‘Papa’. A peculiar note and signature to say the least.

William P. Young wrote a book in 2007 that became a best seller and made the author a famous man for a brief window in time. In that novel which is entitled ‘The Shack,’ Young tells that story to which I have just alluded. The Book’s cover contained the sentence of praise from famed Christian writer Eugene Peterson. “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!”

The Shack generated conflicting opinions among Christians.
Some shared Peterson’s optimistic assessment and others panned the book, wrote it off, and disparaged it, even calling it heresy. Some local preachers I know advised their congregations not to read it. Why? Because the portrayals of God and the Trinity, and the Father, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are to say the least, fanciful, far-fetched, and whimsical. That, of course is because the characters of the book are imaginary and invented. That is what a novel is after all, fictional literature. It is pretend and make-believe.

William Young wrote the story for his children rather than as a systematic theology resource text. I kept the literary genre clearly in my mind as I read it a couple of years ago and I enjoyed it. Mack went to the shack that weekend thinking that the note might be from the killer but during those weekend hours Mack met God. Well, actually he met Papa, the father figure who surprisingly is portrayed as a large African American woman. Then there is another person, a wisp of a woman, small Asian in appearance upon whom Mack could not quite focus but rather he had an impression of her and he could almost look through her. She represented the Holy Spirit. And then there was a man, Middle Eastern in appearance, Arab looking but really a Hebrew called Yeshua or Jesus and sometime Joshua and Jesse. And when the three persons were asked, “which one of you is God?” all three responded, “I am.” Oh and there is much more in the book that differs from the orthodox Christian definition of the Trinity and the relationship between these three persons which make people upset.

And yes, the book is creatively weird. It’s a yarn. No one needs to get their shorts in a knot if they keep the genre clearly in mind. And then oddly enough a person can realize that a relationship with God is not a relationship with a masculine male figure but rather with a complex deity whose characteristics embody all that is excellent, wholesome and positive and is represented in both the male and the female of the human species which God has created and loved.

Nevertheless, if you really want to know about God, then you don’t go to the Shack but you consider what God tells you about himself. You go to the appropriate text. Here we are most fortunate. God wants you and me to know him. That’s why he inspired the writing of the Bible. It is his self-revelation, his autobiography, his story as told to others.