Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“At once I was in the spirit, and there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and cornelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald.”
NL Daily Devotion for Tuesday, August 5, 2025
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
I’m going to lean a lot on Bruce Metzger from here on out as I dig into Revelation. His wonderful book Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation is incredibly helpful in parsing the meaning of what is a poetic and fantastical account of God in God’s heaven. About this passage he writes: “The finite languages of the earth are incapable of describing the infinite realities that John saw in heaven; hence he must use earthly analogies, but always with the understanding that the heavenly reality far surpasses the earthly symbol.” (Metzger, p.48)
I had a pastor who used to tell the story of a little girl who was drawing a picture. He asked her, “What are you drawing?” and she replied, “God.” “But,” my pastor friend said “no one knows what God looks like.” To which she immediately responded “You’re about to.”
We cannot possibly begin to understand what God “looks like” if anything at all. It’s utterly beyond our human comprehension. The old idea of the “Guy in the Sky” God that appears so often in art doesn’t come close to the reality, and has been harmful for a lot of people. But we do experience God in so many ways, large and small, in our day to day lives. We can begin to try to describe the effects God has on us, even if we can’t “see” God. One thing I do is to intentionally use female pronouns for God, not because God is female, but to try to break myself of the automatic imagining of God as male, and to lean into feminine imagery for God as mother, nurturer, confidante, and friend. I also envision God as the full expression of creation—from the delicate damsel fly that lands on my deck plants to the majesty of Niagara Falls. In our limited mortal minds we can describe the presence and being of God in far more expansive and creative ways as has been done in the past. Let this be an invitation to you to think about how to describe the indescribably in your own life.
What does God “look like” to me?
——————————————————————————————Metzger, Bruce M. Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1993.
