Who is God, really? That question has echoed across centuries and cultures. Some picture a distant ruler seated in judgment. Others imagine a gentle grandfather who overlooks everything. The strange thing is, these portraits often say more about us than they say about God.
Here is the heart of it: to find the biblically accurate God, we have to move past our own projections and into the witness of Scripture, which does not hand us a pile of contradictory snapshots but one unified story that comes into focus in Jesus. If it does not look like Jesus, it is not the true God.
This is an excerpt from my book The Rorschach God. Let's walk through why so many pictures of God feel like they are at war with each other, and how the face of Christ resolves the whole thing.
Seeing Ourselves Instead Of Him
You know those inkblot tests, where two people stare at the same shape and one sees a butterfly while the other sees something menacing? What they see says more about them than about the ink. We do the exact same thing with God.
We take our experiences, our wounds, our culture, and our fears, and we read them straight into His character. For someone raised under harsh authority, God becomes a stern judge always ready to condemn. For someone worn down by disappointment, God becomes distant and indifferent. The seeming contradictions do not reveal a divided God. They reveal a divided humanity, each of us interpreting Him through a cracked lens.
"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me."
John 5:39
The danger is not only that we misunderstand God. It is that we weaponize the misunderstanding, turning our fears into doctrines and our biases into orthodoxy, until we have manufactured a God who conveniently hates everyone we hate and blesses everything we already wanted.
The Idols We Build
A God made in our own image is always too small, too fractured, too convenient. Here are four of the most common inkblots people mistake for the real thing.
A God who mostly watches for you to slip, keeping score, waiting to punish. Fear keeps people compliant, so this god is popular. He is not Jesus.
A God who wound up the universe and walked away, uninvolved and unreachable. This god cannot heal you, because he is not really here.
A God who blesses my nation, my party, my side, and opposes yours. He sanctifies our divisions and baptizes our hatreds. He is an idol.
A God who exists to hand out blessings and never asks anything of us. Sweet, harmless, and just as much a projection as the angry one.
"They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man."
Romans 1:23
Notice the swap. We were made in God's image, not the other way around. A god made in our image cannot heal us, transform us, or save us, because he is only an echo of ourselves.
The Inkblot Resolves
To see the biblically accurate God, we do not need to sort endlessly through competing ideas. We look at Jesus. He is the visible image of the invisible God, the exact representation of His being, and every other picture of God has to be measured against Him.
"Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."
John 14:9
Here the inkblot finally resolves. God is not contradictory, capricious, or cruel. He looks like the Jesus who dined with sinners, touched lepers, forgave His enemies, and welcomed the outcast. So the cross becomes the test for every theology and every sermon. Does the God being preached forgive enemies, embrace the broken, and pour Himself out in love? If a picture of God fuels fear instead of casting it out, or divides people instead of reconciling them, it may be religious and it may be popular, but it is not God.
If the God you have been handed does not look like Jesus, you are not looking at God. You are looking at a projection wearing His name.
The Hard Question
This is where people get stuck. If God looks like Jesus, what do we do with the parts of the Old Testament where He seems fierce, even violent? The answer starts with understanding that Scripture is a story of progressive revelation. God was not fully known all at once. He unveiled Himself step by step, and Israel often perceived Him through the fog of their trauma, their tribal conflicts, and their culture.
"In the past God spoke through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by His Son."
Hebrews 1:1-2
So the Old Testament holds a wide range of portraits, some radiant with mercy and some describing a warrior God of vengeance. These were genuine encounters, but filtered through limited lenses by a people still learning to discern His heart. The New Covenant does not throw the Old Testament away. It reframes it through Jesus. On the road to Emmaus, He opened the Scriptures and showed how all of it was pointing to Him. The cross becomes the interpretive center, and the God who once looked divided, merciful yet vengeful, is revealed in Christ as consistently self-giving love. If you have wrestled with this, you are in good company, and it is worth sitting with who the real God actually is and why God lets bad things happen.
What Changes
When you realize God is not the projection of your wounds but the crucified and risen Lord who forgives enemies and embraces outcasts, the weight of distortion lifts. Shame stops defining you, because the God you now know does not weaponize shame, He heals it. Division loses its grip, because this God tears down walls and makes one new humanity.
"If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed."
John 8:36
This is not about striving harder to be holy. It is about beholding Him as He truly is, and slowly becoming what you behold. The far-off deity demanding perfection turns out to be a Father who shares our humanity, sits at our tables, and calls us friends. The inkblots fade, the contradictions dissolve, and what remains is the face of love calling you deeper in. If this is stirring something and you are still working out the basics, start with what Christianity actually is, and if you love how strange and beautiful Scripture gets, see what angels really look like.
You Thought I Was Exactly Like You
This article is an excerpt. In the full book, Dr. Matthew Hester takes readers on an exploration to move beyond personal projections of God, dismantle the false images, find the God of compassion and mercy revealed in Jesus, and reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Covenant. The God you see may not be the God who is, and the God who is wants more than your knowledge. He wants intimacy.
Dr. Matthew Hester has poured over two decades into church and ministry roles. He is an author of several books, founder of Hester Ministries, and host of The Kingdom Is For Everyone podcast and television show, where he teaches on the righteousness, peace, and joy of the Kingdom of God.
We Would Be Honored
Maybe you have been carrying a distorted picture of God for a long time, and something in this cracked it open. If you want to know the God who looks like Jesus, or you are just carrying something heavy today, send it to us right here. A real person reads every one and prays over it. You can also reach our team anytime on the prayer page.
Quick Answers
It means letting the full arc of Scripture, which culminates in Jesus, define who God is, rather than isolating verses or leaning on cultural impressions. Jesus is the exact representation of God's being, so He is the measure of every picture of God.
No. Scripture is progressive revelation. God unveiled Himself step by step, and Israel often perceived Him through the fog of their culture and trauma. The New Covenant reframes those earlier pictures through Christ, who reveals God as consistently self-giving love.
It is the tendency to treat God like an inkblot, reading our own fears, wounds, and biases into His character until we worship a version of God who looks like us. The gospel confronts this by showing us God as He truly is in Jesus.
That is the central claim here. If a picture of God fuels fear instead of casting it out, or divides people instead of reconciling them, it is an idol of our imagination, not the God revealed at the cross. Jesus is the litmus test.
By beholding Jesus and letting Him reframe your vision. Through prayer, community, and immersion in the gospel, the false images fade and you are drawn into relationship, not just knowledge, with a God who calls you His beloved.