Who is God??

I was surprised, this evening, to see on a television news programme, a young lady supporter at a football (soccer!) match, waving above her head a large placard that proclaimed to one and all that “Coyle is God”!!! The gentleman to whom such divine reference was being made is currently, as far as I can make out, the manager of Burnley Football Club – and has apparently been very successful in his job. This, I gather, has made him one of the front runners to take over from Gordon Strachan who resigned as manager of Glasgow Celtic Football Club after their failure to capture the Scottish Premier League Cup on Sunday.

Now those who know me personally will find it difficult to believe that I wrote all of that myself. My interest in that particular sport is similar to my interest in testing a guillotine – at the sharp end!! But that placard …!!!

My mind went back many years to the early days of the use of computers in schools. I was at an in-service event with a number of other teachers of Religious Education – including a fellow-minister. These were the days of the DOS operating system, and we had to physically type in the commands for the computer to follow. It had been explained that we could provide the computer with a number of words/statements, and it would be able to put them together in a sentence. I watched with something akin to horror as my colleague typed in three words – “Ainslie”, “is”, and “God”. He then pressed the appropriate button on the keyboard that should have provided the (to me, blasphemous) sentence he sought. And nothing happened!!

My colleague kept trying, but the computer refused to obey his command. “That computer, Ainslie,” I remember saying, “has more theological acumen than you have!” Later on, as I learned a bit more about computers, I worked out what Ainslie had been doing wrong (!) – but I hope that he learned an important lesson.

Owen Cole may well be a humble, God-fearing, man; and he cannot be held responsible for the claims that a team supporter makes about him. But he is certainly not God. He is, like the rest of us, a sinner who needs to be saved, by the grace of the only true God – the Creator and Sustainer of all that is; the One Who is holiness, power, wisdom, love, and much else besides.

Writing to the followers of the Lord Jesus in 1st century Ephesus, Paul has this to say: “We are all one body, we have the same Spirit, and we have all been called to the same glorious future. There is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and there is only one God and Father, who is over us all and in us all and living through us all.” (4:5-7)

May all who visit this blog, likewise, be followers/disciples of that same Lord Jesus – God the Son Who, alone, is the Way to the Father, and Who has revealed the Father to us. (see Jn.14:8ff)