Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?

I have a worry about theology. Most of my Christian mates believe that it doesn't really exist - theology that is, not God. Theology is the discussion of God or the nature of God and they would say that because, if God is essentially unknowable, then how can we discuss the nature of God.

I think differently. I think that we can deduce quite a lot about God from personal experience, from the cumulative experiences of those who wrote about God through the scriptures and from the consistent and persistent revelation and inspiration we have received and continue to receive.

Let's start at the beginning - Genesis 1:27 - we were made in God's own image. That is a good place to start. I know all the stuff that follows about "fall" and "sin" etc but, at the very start we were made in God's image. The question we need to ask is "Can we reverse engineer this - Are we able to find about anything about the true nature of God by looking into ourselves?"

It seems to me that Jesus said that we were able to do this. In Luke 11 (Lord's Prayer, Ask, Seek , Knock etc) Jesus goes on to speak about our own (a parent's) normal love and respect for a child.

He asks the question of whether we would trick our children by trying to feed them a rock if they asked for food. The obvious answer being that no normal parent would do this.

We need to stretch this a bit further. As parents can we imagine what a child of ours would have to do for us to give up on them, to throw them out and have nothing more to do with them; to punish them for the rest of their lives with isolation from us? I don't know what our kids would have to do to warrant that, but it would have to be pretty bad. Most parents seem to find it very easy to forgive their own children, to give second chances and to welcome reconciliation. I know this is not universal - there will always be those weird exceptions which make the news and make the rest of us wonder exactly what is wrong in the world. But, the norm seems to be that a parent would walk over nails, broken glass and fire to save their child; that forgiveness and love is something which is born in us to give to our children.

I believe it is that way because we are made in God's image. We are like that because God is like that. God finds it easy to love and forgive us, not hard. However loving and forgiving we are towards our children, God is much more so towards us.

I don't know if you can accept this as a given, but stick with it. It has some interesting follow through ramifications when we get to sacrifice, blood, forgiveness, revelation etc