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The Reader uses a voice supplied by your browser or device.
- Rew
- Go back about 15 seconds.
- Play / Pause
- Start, continue, or pause reading.
- Fwd
- Go forward about 15 seconds.
- Mark
- Save this place in the article.
- More
- Open Mini, Speed, Pitch, Chase, Restart, Voice, Sleep, Help, and Close.
- Speaker
- Collapse the Mini Reader to a small Oxblood Speaker; select it again to reopen the bar. Reader-control touches do not turn Chase off.
- Chase
- Keep the spoken passage in view. LeMAR controls do not turn Chase off.
- Sleep
- Pause LeMAR after 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes, or at the end of the article. The Speaker turns Blue while Sleep is active.
Headset and system media controls: LeMAR requests Play and Pause control from the browser while reading. Hardware support varies by browser and device. AirPods control is being tested and should not be assumed until confirmed on your device.
Keyboard Commands
- S
- Small: open the Mini Reader while audio is active.
- I
- Icon: collapse the Mini Reader to its Speaker or reopen it.
- K
- Play or Pause.
- J / ←
- Rewind about 15 seconds.
- L / →
- Forward about 15 seconds.
- M
- Mark the current place.
- O
- Open or close More.
- C
- Turn Chase on or off.
- R
- Restart the article.
- H
- Open Help.
- Esc
- Close More or an open dialog.
S and I work from anywhere in the article while audio is active, except while typing in a field. The other commands work while focus is inside the Reader.
Button states: White means off or available. Oxblood means on or active. Gray means unavailable.
The Leadership Masterworks Article Reader speaks the article title, subtitle, and body with a voice supplied by your browser or device. It does not download a prerecorded audio file, so available voices and their behavior vary between systems.
Primary Controls
- Rewind (Rew)
- Moves backward approximately 15 seconds. The amount is estimated from the text, so it can vary slightly with the selected voice and speed.
- Play and Pause
- The right-facing triangle starts or resumes reading. The double vertical lines pause without losing your place. The Space Bar also pauses or resumes while the Reader is active, unless you are typing in a form field.
- Headset / System Play and Pause
- While LeMAR is active it requests Play and Pause control through the browser’s media system. LeMAR 0.3.50 retains a silent media carrier so Safari has an active web-media session while SpeechSynthesis supplies the audible reading. Hardware behavior still depends on the browser, operating system, and headset; AirPods support is not claimed until live testing confirms it.
- Forward (Fwd)
- Moves forward approximately 15 seconds. Forward is unavailable at the end of the article.
- Mark
- Flashes Oxblood when selected, then returns to White because Mark is an action rather than a continuing mode. It privately saves the current location in this browser. A small upper-right badge on both Mark buttons shows the number saved from 1 to 25 and disappears when none are saved. An Oxblood diamond appears at each saved location. Open a Mark to resume with a little context, add a private note, delete one Mark, or delete them all.
- More
- Opens the secondary controls. The button turns Oxblood while the panel is open. Choosing an action closes the panel; Voice and Speed remain open while you make a selection.
More Controls
- Mini Reader / Expand Reader
- The collapse symbol changes the full Reader into a small floating controller with the same five controls and no visible button labels. In the Mini Reader, the outward-corner Expand symbol is the first More choice and returns to the full Reader.
- Collapse to Speaker
- Use the small Oxblood Speaker in the Mini Reader’s upper-right corner or choose Collapse to Speaker beneath Expand Reader in More. The bar disappears without interrupting playback, changing your place, or turning Chase off. Select the Speaker again to restore the Mini Reader. When the Mini Reader is open and you do not interact with it for 5 seconds, it automatically collapses to the Speaker. Any Mini Reader interaction resets that 5-second timer. The Speaker remains Oxblood because it opens and closes the bar; it does not indicate whether playback is running or paused.
- Speed & Pitch
- Speed changes the reading rate. Pitch makes a voice slightly lower or higher without changing its speed. Pitch is remembered separately for each Voice, so you can tune Daniel differently from Tom. In the Mini Reader, completing either choice closes More and immediately collapses the Mini Reader to the Speaker.
- Chase
- When on, Chase highlights the spoken passage and keeps it comfortably in view. Using LeMAR controls—including collapsing or restoring the Mini Reader—does not turn Chase off. Manual scrolling or navigation in the article turns Chase off so the Reader does not pull you away from the place you chose to view. Select Chase again to resume following.
- Restart Article
- Returns to the beginning and immediately begins reading again. Closing the Reader also stops speech and resets the playback controls.
- Voice
- Select the displayed Voice to open the list of voices supplied by your browser or device. LM Audio Reader remembers the Voice identity across all articles on this site. In the Mini Reader, after you choose a Voice, More closes and the Mini Reader immediately collapses to the Speaker. On iPhone and iPad, Safari may load installed Voices in stages; the Reader refreshes the list and keeps your preferred Voice instead of permanently replacing it when an early list is incomplete.
- Sleep
- Choose Off, 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes, or End of Article. In the Mini Reader, completing a Sleep choice closes More and immediately collapses the Mini Reader to the Speaker. Timed Sleep counts only while LeMAR is actively playing; pausing playback pauses the Sleep countdown. When the countdown finishes, LeMAR pauses at the current place so you can resume later. End of Article lets the current article finish normally. While Sleep is active, the Mini Reader Speaker and floating Speaker turn Blue as a persistent reminder. They return to Oxblood when Sleep is turned Off or completes. LeMAR tries to stop at a speech boundary when timed Sleep reaches zero so the final word is not cut in half.
- Help
- Opens this guide. CONCISE gives quick definitions; VERBOSE provides the full explanation of controls, behavior, privacy, and troubleshooting.
- Close Reader
- Stops speech, closes the playback controls, and returns the Reader to its initial Listen state.
Automatic Reader Behavior
- Mini Reader auto-collapse
- After 5 seconds of true Mini Reader inactivity, the Mini Reader collapses to its Speaker. On desktop, mouse movement anywhere inside the Mini Reader, entering it, clicking a control, or making a selection resets the 5-second timer. Leaving the Mini Reader starts a fresh 5-second countdown. Touch interaction on phones and tablets continues to reset the timer.
- Controls stay available while you read
- On desktop, iPhone, and iPad, while audio is active, when the full Reader scrolls completely out of view, LeMAR automatically shows the floating Speaker so you do not have to scroll back to the Reader for controls. When you return to the Reader’s original location, the full Reader returns and the floating Speaker disappears. On desktop, hovering over the collapsed Speaker for about three-quarters of a second opens the Mini Reader; clicking it opens immediately. A quick mouse pass does not open it.
- Reader controls and Chase
- Opening, collapsing, expanding, or using LeMAR controls is Reader interaction and does not cancel Chase. Manual touch or wheel navigation in the article itself still turns Chase off so LeMAR yields control of the page to you.
Keyboard Commands
- S — Small
- While audio is active, switches from the complete LM Audio Reader to the floating LM Mini Reader without changing the article position or returning to the top.
- I — Icon
- While the Mini Reader is available, collapses it to the floating Speaker or restores the complete Mini Reader. Playback and the current article position remain unchanged.
- K — Play/Pause
- Pauses active reading or resumes from the current place.
- Space
- Activates the currently focused Reader button. When focus is elsewhere inside the active Reader, it pauses or resumes playback.
- J / Left Arrow
- Moves backward approximately 15 seconds.
- L / Right Arrow
- Moves forward approximately 15 seconds.
- M — Mark
- Saves the current place as a private Mark in this browser.
- O — More
- Opens or closes the secondary Reader controls.
- C — Chase
- Turns highlighted text following on or off.
- R — Restart
- Returns to the beginning and immediately begins reading again.
- H — Help
- Opens this Help dialog.
- Escape
- Closes More or the currently open Reader dialog.
S and I work from anywhere in the article while audio is active. They are ignored while you are typing in a form field. The remaining keyboard commands work while focus is inside the Reader so ordinary WordPress, browser, page, and typing commands stay untouched. Voice and Speed select fields keep their normal keyboard behavior.
Voice Diagnostics
For cross-device testing, copy the exact voice information this browser currently makes available to LeMAR.
Progress, States, and Privacy
- The progress bar shows estimated elapsed time, total time, and percentage. After at least 10 seconds, the Reader can privately remember your place and offer to continue about five seconds before it.
- Your progress shows Not started, In progress, or completion count. You may mark complete, start over, or reset the article’s private history.
- White controls are off or available. Oxblood controls are on or active. Mark, Rew, and Fwd use Oxblood only momentarily when selected. Gray controls are unavailable. A gold outline indicates keyboard focus and is not an on/off state.
- Voice, Speed, Pitch, Chase, Marks and notes, saved location, and completion history are stored only in this browser. They are not saved in the Leadership Masterworks website database or synchronized between devices.
- If speech stops unexpectedly, close the Reader and select Listen again. If the problem continues, open More, choose a different Voice, and try again.
The Article Reader speaks the title, subtitle, and article using a voice supplied by your browser or device. When an Article has an assigned LM Audio Intro or Outro, those short prerecorded segments play before or after the spoken article. This means a voice must be selected under Voice in the Reader setup controls before the Article Reader can work.
Listening and Playback
- Listen — Select the Listen button in the upper-right corner of the Reader box to begin. The controls open immediately. On most devices, reading follows after a brief one-second pause; on iPhone and iPad, it begins without that delay for reliable audio startup.
- LM Audio Reader — The complete Reader displays each primary control with its symbol above its name. Switch to the LM Mini Reader when you want a compact floating controller while the article continues.
- Continue Listening — After you have listened for at least 10 seconds, the Reader privately remembers your location in this browser. When you return, select Continue to resume about five seconds before that saved location, or Start Over to begin again.
- Progress and Completion — Your progress at the top of the Reader shows Not started, In progress, or how many times the article has been completed. Open Your progress to mark the article complete, start it over, or reset its complete private history.
- Join the Conversation — After the article narration and any assigned Outro naturally finish, the Reader may invite you to leave a comment and share a lesson, question, or story that could help someone else. The invitation appears only once for each article in this browser and does not appear after Stop, Close, or Mark Complete.
- Pause and Resume — Select Pause to temporarily stop the voice without losing your place. Select Resume to continue from that location.
- Back and Forward 15 Seconds — Move backward or forward approximately 15 seconds. Because reading time is estimated from the text, the exact movement may vary slightly by voice and device.
- Restart — Return to the beginning of the article and begin reading again.
- Stop — Stop the reading and reset its position to 0 seconds. The Reader controls remain available so you can begin again.
- Space Bar — While the Reader is active, press the Space Bar to Pause or Resume. The Reader will not intercept the Space Bar while you are typing in a form field.
- Device Voice and Reading Speed — Choose a Device Voice and Reading Speed from the Expanded Reader. Your Voice is remembered across this site by its identity rather than its position in the list. Safari may load iPhone and iPad Voices in stages, so the Reader refreshes before speaking and does not discard a temporarily missing preferred Voice.
- Mini Reader Speed Controls — Use Minus or Plus to decrease or increase the speed. Select the displayed speed itself at any time to return immediately to the normal 1× speed without losing your place.
Following the Article
- Follow Text — Keep the corresponding passage highlighted and comfortably in view while the article is being read.
- Manual Scrolling — Scrolling with a mouse, trackpad, touch screen, or navigation key turns Follow Text Off so the Reader does not pull the page away from the place you chose to view.
- Turn Follow Text On Again — Select Follow Text whenever you want the Reader to resume highlighting and following the spoken passage.
- Follow Text Is On — The complete Follow button turns solid black whenever Follow Text is active, making its current state immediately visible.
Marks
- Mark This Spot — Create and privately save a location in the current article. A small badge on both Mark buttons shows the number saved from 1 to 25; no badge appears at zero.
- Inline Marks — A small superscript Oxblood diamond appears in the article at each saved location. Select the diamond to resume from that Mark. Inline Marks are synchronized with the Marks list and are not included in the spoken article, copied text, or printed page.
- Open a Mark — Select a saved Mark to resume shortly before that location, giving you a little context before reaching the exact place you marked.
- Personal Notes — Select Add note beneath any saved Mark to write a private note about that passage. Notes save automatically in this browser, remain editable, and are removed with their Mark. They are not spoken as part of the article.
- Delete Marks — Delete an individual Mark beside its listing, or select Delete All Marks to remove every saved location for that article.
- Show or Hide Marks — Select the triangle beside Marks to open or collapse the complete list. Hiding the list does not delete any Marks.
Mini Reader and Close
- Mini Reader — Switch from the LM Audio Reader to the compact floating LM Mini Reader. The article continues while you use its essential controls.
- Expand — Return from the LM Mini Reader to the complete LM Audio Reader settings and controls.
- Close — Stop the reading, close the playback controls, and reset the Reader to 0 seconds.
Privacy and Troubleshooting
- Private Browser Storage — Your selected Voice, Speed, Follow Text preference, Marks and notes, saved listening location, completion history, and whether a completed-article invitation has appeared are stored only in your browser. They are not saved in the Leadership Masterworks website database or synchronized between devices.
- Browser and Device Differences — Available Voices and speech behavior vary by browser, operating system, and device. The same Voice may not be available everywhere.
- Unexpected Stops — If the reading stops unexpectedly, select Stop and then Listen again. If the problem continues, choose another available Device Voice and try again.
- Remember — Selecting Stop always resets the Reader to the beginning of the article at 0 seconds.
LeMAR Reader version 0.3.47
0.3.47-20260819
Thank you for listening
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LeMAR Reader
Choose A Voice
Choose a voice to narrate Leadership Masterworks articles for you. You can audition different voices and change the voice anytime. LeMAR uses voices available on your device, so the choices may be different on your computer, phone, or tablet.
How LeMAR works
LeMAR lets you listen to any Leadership Masterworks article while following along—or while doing something else. There’s even a Sleep Timer.
Play, pause, skip forward or back, adjust the reading speed, and choose the voice you prefer. If you leave before finishing, LeMAR remembers where you stopped. When you return—even from your Leadership Masterworks Dashboard—you can continue right where you left off.
Turn on Chase and the page automatically follows the spoken text as you listen, so you can easily read along.
Read when you can. Listen when you can’t. Keep growing either way.
[This is the first article of a 12 part series on the basics of the Christian God and Faith]
Perhaps you did not grow up around Christianity. Maybe you grew up in a Hindu or Buddhist family. Perhaps you grew up Muslim, Sikh, or within another religious tradition. Maybe religion was simply not an important part of your family at all. You may believe in God, many gods, some kind of spiritual reality, or none of those things. Perhaps you are not even sure what you believe.
Wherever you are beginning, you are welcome here.
You do not need to know Christian vocabulary. You do not need to know the people in the Bible. You do not need to know the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. You do not need to know who Abraham, Moses, David, John, or Paul are. You do not need to know how to find something in the Bible, how Christians pray, what happens in a church service, or what Christians mean when they use words such as grace, salvation, or sin. Most importantly, you do not need to pretend that something makes sense when it does not.
Questions are welcome.
Christianity makes some enormous claims about God, human beings, and the world in which we live, and those claims deserve thoughtful questions. In fact, if Christianity is true, few questions could matter more. So let us begin with perhaps the most basic question of all:
When Christians use the word God, whom are we talking about?
Christianity Begins With God
The first sentence of the Bible does not begin with human beings searching for God. It begins with God already there.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
—Genesis 1:1
Those few words contain an enormous claim. Before the universe existed, God already existed. Before there were human beings, stars, planets, mountains, oceans, atoms, or anything else in creation, God was already God.
God did not come from somewhere. No one made Him. He did not gradually become God, nor does He belong to a larger class of beings called “gods,” with some stronger and others weaker. He is not simply the oldest being in the universe or the most advanced spiritual being within it. He made the universe.¹
The Bible describes Him this way:
Scripture: “Before the mountains were born or You brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting You are God.”
—Psalm 90:2Explanation: Christians use the word eternal to describe this truth about God. Eternal means that God has no beginning and will have no end. There was never a time when God did not exist, and there will never be a time when He ceases to exist.
Why This Matters: Everything you have ever known has a beginning. You had a beginning. The earth had a beginning. The universe had a beginning. God did not. Before anything else was here, He was.
About two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul, an early Christian leader who first opposed Christianity and later became one of its most important missionaries and teachers, spoke to people in the ancient Greek city of Athens. They did not begin with his understanding of God, so Paul began with something foundational—the God who made everything.
Scripture: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands. Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”
—Acts 17:24–25Explanation: Christians sometimes call this God’s self-existence. It means that God does not depend upon anything outside Himself in order to exist. God does not need creation to keep Him alive. He does not need human beings to make Him complete. Everything else ultimately depends upon God; God depends upon nothing.²
Why This Matters: We do not keep God alive through our worship, prayers, offerings, rituals, or service. God is not needy. In fact, the relationship runs in exactly the opposite direction: He gives us life and breath and everything else.
That gives us one of the first great truths about the Christian understanding of God: God needs nothing in order to be God. We need God in order to be anything at all.
The Creator Is Not the Creation
Christians call God the Creator because everything other than God ultimately owes its existence to Him. The stars exist because God created them. The earth exists because God created it. Human beings exist because God created us.
The Bible says:
Scripture: “Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made.”
—John 1:3Explanation: When Christians call God Creator, we mean more than that God rearranged material that was already present. Everything that has been created ultimately owes its existence to God. He is the Creator; everything else belongs to the category of creation.³
Why This Matters: God is not one more thing inside the universe—not even the biggest or most powerful thing. The One who made the universe is fundamentally different from the universe He made.
That distinction is one of the most important ideas to understand about Christianity: there is God, and there is everything God made.
Christianity does not teach that God and the universe are the same thing. The mountains are not pieces of God. Trees are not pieces of God. Animals are not pieces of God. Human beings are not pieces of God. You are not a piece of God. You are something different—and, as we will soon see, something wonderful: you are a person created by God.
Yet God being distinct from His creation does not mean that He created the universe and then abandoned it. Quite the opposite. He sustains what He made, rules it, and is present everywhere. Every breath we take occurs in a world that continues to exist because God sustains it.
When Paul spoke to those people in Athens, he also said:
“For in Him we live and move and have our being.”
—Acts 17:28
Elsewhere the Bible says that all created things continue to hold together because of God. Christianity therefore holds two truths together: God is distinct from creation, and God is intimately involved with creation. He is not part of the universe, yet He is not absent from the universe either.⁴
Now the picture becomes much more personal.
The Creator Knows His Creation
The God of Christianity is not merely a force, energy, principle, or impersonal spiritual reality. God knows. God wills. God speaks. God loves. He communicates with human beings, makes promises and gives commands, shows mercy, judges what is right and wrong, forgives, and hears prayer. The Bible does not introduce us merely to an enormous power responsible for producing the universe; it introduces us to a personal God.
This personal God knows individual people.
King David, who ruled the ancient nation of Israel about three thousand years ago and wrote many of the songs and prayers collected in the Bible’s book of Psalms, wrote:
Scripture: “O LORD, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit and when I rise; You understand my thoughts from afar.”
—Psalm 139:1–2Explanation: Christians use the word omniscient to describe God’s complete knowledge. Omniscient means that God knows everything, perfectly and completely. Nothing is hidden from Him. Nothing surprises Him. There is nothing God must discover, investigate, or learn.⁵
Why This Matters: God’s knowledge is not merely enormous. It is personal. The God who knows every star also knows you.
A few lines later, David writes:
“Even before a word is on my tongue, You know all about it, O LORD.”
—Psalm 139:4
The Bible even says that God knows details about us as ordinary as the hairs on our heads. Consider for a moment what Christianity is claiming: the God who made galaxies knows when an individual human being sits down and when that person stands up. He knows our thoughts and our words before we speak them. His knowledge of us reaches all the way down to details that we ourselves do not know.
This is much more than a statement about how much information God possesses. It is a statement about how completely and personally God knows us. And that includes you.
God knows where you were born and the family into which you were born. He knows the language you first learned to speak, what has brought you joy, and what has wounded you. He knows the questions you have asked and the questions you have been afraid to ask. He knows the things about you that everyone knows, the things only a few people know, and the things no other human being knows.
Christianity makes a remarkable claim: you can spend your life not knowing God while never spending a single moment unknown by God.
You Were Made in the Image of God
Christianity teaches that human beings have a unique place within God’s creation. Near the beginning of the Bible we read:
Scripture: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
—Genesis 1:27Explanation: Christians describe this by saying human beings are made in the image of God. That does not mean God has a human-shaped body and that we physically resemble Him. It means human beings possess a unique God-given dignity. We were created to know God, relate to Him and to one another, represent Him within His creation, exercise meaningful responsibility, and live under His good authority.⁶
Why This Matters: Your value is not something other human beings give you, which means other human beings cannot ultimately take it away. Your Creator gave you dignity.
Christians have spent a great deal of time discussing everything contained in that little phrase image of God. We do not need to settle every part of that discussion here because the essential point is wonderfully clear: human beings matter to God.
Your value does not depend upon your nationality, intelligence, education, wealth, family, accomplishments, social position, usefulness, physical ability, or what other people think about you. Nor does another person’s value depend upon what you think about him. Every human being bears the image of the Creator.
The Bible later draws a remarkably practical conclusion from this. James, an early Christian leader and the author of the biblical letter that bears his name, condemns using our words to curse other human beings because they have been “made in God’s likeness.” In other words, what we believe about God should affect how we treat the people He made.⁷
Christians do not have permission to despise someone because he believes differently. We do not have permission to treat someone as intellectually inferior because he has never been taught what we have been taught. We do not have permission to forget someone’s dignity because we disagree with his religion, philosophy, morality, culture, or understanding of God. The person who disagrees with us still bears God’s image.
That matters here. If you are reading this and do not believe what Christians believe, you are not a project to be won or an opponent to be defeated. You are a person made in the image of God.
The God Who Made Us Is Good
If someone has unlimited power, an obvious question follows: Can He be trusted?
The Bible’s answer is yes—not because God follows some higher standard of goodness imposed upon Him, but because goodness belongs to who God is.
Scripture: “The LORD is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds.”
—Psalm 145:17Explanation: God’s goodness means that there is no evil, corruption, dishonesty, or moral defect in Him. What God is and what God does are perfectly consistent with His good and righteous character.
Why This Matters: God’s unlimited power is never separated from God’s perfect goodness. The One who has ultimate authority is not corrupt.
The apostle John, one of the earliest followers of Jesus Christ and the author of several writings contained in the Bible, makes an astonishingly simple statement:
“God is love.”
—1 John 4:8
We will soon begin explaining who Jesus Christ is. For the moment, it is enough to know that Jesus lived in Israel about two thousand years ago and is the central Person of Christianity. Christians believe that understanding who Jesus is eventually brings us to the very heart of who God is.
John does not merely say that God occasionally behaves lovingly; love belongs to God’s character. Yet love is not the only thing true about God. The same Bible tells us that God is holy.
Scripture: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; all the earth is full of His glory.”
—Isaiah 6:3Explanation: Holy means more than “religious” or even “very good.” God’s holiness describes His absolute moral purity and His complete uniqueness. There is no corruption in Him, no evil mixed with His goodness, and ultimately no one else like Him.⁸
Why This Matters: God never has to choose between being loving and being good. His love is holy love. His justice is holy justice. His mercy is holy mercy. Everything God is remains perfectly consistent with everything else God is.
God does not sometimes do good things and sometimes do evil things. He does not lie, cheat, accept bribes, or become selfish, cruel, petty, corrupt, or unjust. His love is never corrupted by selfishness. His justice is never corrupted by cruelty. His power is never corrupted by evil. His mercy is never corrupted into indifference toward what is wrong.
God is perfectly good, and God is perfectly holy. We should not pull these qualities apart, as though sometimes God acts from holiness and other times He sets holiness aside so that He can act from love. God does not have competing personalities; the holy God is loving, and the loving God is holy.
That is wonderfully comforting, yet eventually it raises a difficult question: if God is perfectly holy and we are not, what does that mean for us? Christianity has an answer, and we will get there.
God Is Sovereign
There is another Christian word worth learning: sovereign.
Scripture: “Our God is in heaven; He does as He pleases.”
—Psalm 115:3Explanation: When Christians say that God is sovereign, we mean that God possesses ultimate authority over everything He has made, and nothing can finally defeat His purposes. No person, government, spiritual power, natural force, or event can overthrow God or place Him outside His control.⁹
Why This Matters: God is not anxiously watching history unfold, hoping everything eventually works out. Nothing and no one can overthrow God.
The Bible records God saying:
“My purpose will stand, and all My good pleasure I will accomplish.”
—Isaiah 46:10
Another part of the Bible says:
“He does as He pleases with the army of heaven and the peoples of the earth. There is no one who can restrain His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’”
—Daniel 4:35
God is not struggling to maintain control of His universe. He is not one powerful spiritual force competing against other powerful spiritual forces and hoping that good eventually wins. Nothing takes God by surprise.
This does not mean everything human beings do is good, that suffering is imaginary, that cruelty does not matter, or that people cease to be responsible for what they do. The Bible is filled with accounts of betrayal, oppression, murder, injustice, grief, sickness, war, suffering, and death. Christianity does not require us to look at evil and call it good.
Yet Christianity makes an extraordinary claim even in a world where terrible things happen: God has not lost control of His creation. There is no corner of the universe in which God suddenly discovers something has happened that He did not know about, no event that causes God to say, I didn’t see that coming, and no power capable of finally defeating Him.
Christians often use another word here: providence.
Scripture: “The LORD has established His throne in heaven, and His kingdom rules over all.”
—Psalm 103:19Explanation: God’s providence is His continuing care for and governance of the creation He made. God did not create the universe, set it in motion, and walk away. He remains actively involved with His creation and directs history toward His purposes.¹⁰
Why This Matters: Your life does not take place in a universe God has abandoned. Even when you cannot understand what He is doing, God is still God.
That truth naturally raises hard questions. Then why does God allow suffering? Why does evil exist? Are human beings really responsible for what they do if God is sovereign? Those are important questions. Christians have wrestled seriously with them for centuries, and we will return to them because they deserve careful answers rather than slogans.
For now, hold onto the larger truth: the God Christians believe in is not merely trying to accomplish His purposes. He is God.
Yet This Sovereign God Comes Near
It would be easy to imagine that a God this great must also be distant, yet Christianity says otherwise.
Scripture: “The LORD is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth.”
—Psalm 145:18Explanation: Although God is greater than everything He created, He is not distant from His creation. The Bible repeatedly describes God as hearing, caring, acting, helping, comforting, and making Himself known to individual human beings.
Why This Matters: You are not too small to matter to God. The God who rules the universe is not too great to hear the cry of one human heart.
Another Psalm says:
“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.”
—Psalm 34:18
God’s greatness does not prevent Him from knowing an individual human being. His sovereignty does not prevent Him from hearing a prayer. His holiness does not make Him incapable of compassion, and His authority does not make Him indifferent. The God who rules galaxies can hear the cry of one frightened person. The God who sustains the universe can care about one grieving family. The God who needs nothing from us nevertheless chooses to make Himself known to us.
That is where Christianity becomes especially personal.
God Has Made Himself Known
Perhaps you are wondering, How could anyone possibly know these things about God? That is exactly the right question.
If God is truly God, we cannot put Him under a microscope, travel far enough into space to find Him, or simply reason our way upward until we have discovered everything about Him. If human beings are going to know God truly, God must make Himself known.
Scripture: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
—Psalm 19:1Explanation: Christians use the word revelation for God’s act of making Himself known. To reveal something simply means to make something known that was previously hidden or could not otherwise be fully known. Christians sometimes call what God makes known about Himself through the created world general revelation.¹¹
Why This Matters: Christianity does not begin by asking you to become clever enough, spiritual enough, or religious enough to discover God. It begins with God taking the initiative to make Himself known.
That changes the direction of everything. Christianity is not primarily the story of human beings climbing upward until they finally reach God; it is the story of God making Himself known to human beings.
Christians believe God reveals something about Himself through the world He created, but they also believe God has spoken. He has made Himself known through His actions in human history, through people He chose to speak His message, through His written Word, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. This is why the Bible matters so much to Christianity.
Christians also call the Bible Scripture.
Scripture: “All Scripture is God-breathed…”
—2 Timothy 3:16Explanation: Scripture is the Christian name for the sacred writings collected in the Bible and recognized as God’s written Word. Christians also use the word inspiration to describe God’s work in giving us Scripture. Here, inspiration does not merely mean that the biblical writers felt creative or spiritually moved. Christians believe God worked through real human authors—with their personalities, experiences, languages, histories, and writing styles—to communicate what He intended to make known.¹²
Why This Matters: If God has spoken, then we are not left merely comparing human opinions about what God might be like. We can listen to what God has revealed about Himself.
You will see references such as John 5:26 or Genesis 1:1 throughout these articles. If you have never used a Bible, those little numbers may look strange at first, but they are simply an address. The name tells you which book within the Bible to find, the first number tells you the chapter, and the number after the colon tells you the verse, which is a small numbered portion of that chapter. So John 5:26 simply means the book called John, chapter 5, verse 26.
That little reference lets you find the passage and read it yourself, and I hope you will.
There is much more to learn about the Bible. Why is it a collection of many books? Who wrote them? What are the Old Testament and New Testament? Why do Christians believe these writings came from God? How do we know that the words we have today accurately represent what was originally written? Those are excellent questions, and they deserve their own attention.
For now, the important idea is simpler: we do not know God merely because human beings have thought deeply about Him. We can know God because God has chosen to make Himself known.
There Is One God
What, then, has God revealed about Himself? Among the first and most important truths is that there is one God.
Scripture: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.”
—Deuteronomy 6:4Explanation: Christianity is monotheistic. Monotheism simply means belief in one God. Christians do not believe there are many gods and that Christianity happens to prefer one of them. Scripture’s claim is much larger: there is only one God.¹³
Why This Matters: If there is only one Creator, then He is not merely the God of one nation, ethnicity, language, or culture. He is the Creator of everyone.
Elsewhere God says:
“I am the LORD, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.”
—Isaiah 45:5
When Paul spoke in Athens, he explained that this one God made all the nations of humanity to inhabit the earth. The same God made people in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and every island, city, mountain community, farm, and village on earth.
Christianity therefore does not present God as belonging to one nationality or culture. God is not American, European, Asian, African, or the possession of any other people. Christianity did not create Him; He created us.
One God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Now we reach something that can sound confusing the first time you hear it. Christians believe there is one God, not three gods, yet the Bible reveals this one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Christians call this the Trinity.
Scripture: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
—Matthew 28:19Explanation: The Trinity is the Christian term for the Bible’s teaching that the one God eternally exists as three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. Yet there are not three Gods. There is one God.¹⁴
Why This Matters: You will encounter the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout Christianity. This is not an obscure idea reserved for theologians. The Trinity is part of the Christian answer to the question, “Who is God?”
The Trinity does not mean Christians secretly believe in three gods while claiming to believe in one, nor does it mean that one Person called God simply changes roles—sometimes appearing as the Father, sometimes as the Son, and sometimes as the Holy Spirit. If your immediate response is, I don’t understand how that works, that is completely reasonable.
Christians have spent centuries thinking carefully about what the Bible teaches concerning the Trinity, and Christianity does not teach that the infinite God who created everything should fit easily and completely inside the mind of one of His creatures. At the same time, Christians are not saying the Trinity is nonsense or asking anyone to believe a contradiction. There are important distinctions between what Christians mean when we say God is one and what we mean when we say He exists as three Persons.
You do not need to master those distinctions before continuing. For now, it is enough to understand the central claim: Christians worship one God, and the Bible makes Him known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We will return to the Trinity in much greater detail later because it deserves careful attention.
For the moment, however, something important is happening in our journey. We began with the God who was there before creation, then saw that He made and sustains everything, knows us personally, made us in His image, is perfectly good and holy, rules sovereignly, comes near, and has chosen to make Himself known. Now the Bible brings us toward Christianity’s most astonishing claim of all.
The God who made us did not remain distant.
God Came to Us
His name is Jesus Christ.
If you know almost nothing about Christianity, even that name deserves some explanation. Jesus Christ was a Jewish man who lived in the land of Israel about two thousand years ago and is the central Person of Christianity. Christ is not His last name; it is a title, one we will explain when we look more closely at who Jesus is and why Christians believe He came.
For now, consider the extraordinary claim Christianity makes about Him. God did not merely make Himself known by sending human beings information about Himself, nor did He merely send another wise teacher to explain spiritual truths.
God came to us.
The apostle John, one of Jesus’ twelve specially chosen disciples and one of His closest companions, begins his account of Jesus’ life with words that deliberately take us back to the beginning:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
—John 1:1
John calls Jesus “the Word,” and a few sentences later he tells us something extraordinary:
Scripture: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.”
—John 1:14Explanation: Christians call this the Incarnation. Incarnation means that God the Son took upon Himself a true human nature and entered human history as Jesus Christ. Jesus became truly human without ceasing to be truly God.¹⁵
Why This Matters: Christianity does not merely claim that Jesus can tell us something about God. It claims that in Jesus Christ, God Himself came to us.
That claim is so important that we should not hurry past it. Jesus is not simply a Christian teacher, and Christianity did not begin because He developed an interesting philosophy and persuaded people to follow it. Christians do not regard Him merely as a prophet, an unusually holy man, a moral example, or one spiritual teacher among many others throughout human history. Christians believe Jesus Christ is God the Son, who became truly human without ceasing to be truly God.
The Bible describes Him as “the image of the invisible God” and “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature.” Jesus Himself said, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” That does not mean Jesus is God the Father. Remember what we have just learned about the Trinity: the Father and the Son are distinct Persons. Rather, Christianity is making the breathtaking claim that if you want to know what God is like, you must eventually look at Jesus Christ.¹⁶
Perhaps that leaves you with an obvious question: Who is Jesus?
That is exactly where we are going next.
The God Who Made You Has Made Himself Known
We have covered a great deal, and you do not need to remember every word before moving forward. In fact, you may have more questions now than when you started. You may wonder how God can have always existed, why He created us, what it really means to be made in His image, how God can be one and yet Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, why a good and sovereign God allows suffering, how we can know the Bible really comes from God, or why God would become human.
Those are not irritating questions Christians need to get you past. Those are questions worth asking. Some will require entire articles, some will require several, and some we will answer only to return to them later because understanding grows as the pieces begin to fit together. You are not expected to understand the entire Christian faith before you are allowed to take the next step.
Perhaps the most important thing at this point is simply to see the direction in which Christianity has been pointing us. We began by asking, When Christians use the word God, whom are we talking about? The answer has not led us toward an impersonal force, a distant deity, or merely an abstract philosophical idea. It has led us toward a God who has always existed, who created everything outside Himself, who needs nothing yet gives us life and breath, who knows us completely, who made us in His image, who is perfectly good and holy, who rules His creation without being threatened by it, and who nevertheless comes near.
Even more remarkably, this God has chosen to make Himself known.
That means Christianity is not ultimately a story about people becoming clever enough to find God, religious enough to earn God, or spiritual enough to climb their way toward Him. It is the story of God taking the initiative. The Creator makes Himself known to His creatures. The God who knows us allows Himself to be known by us.
You may not yet believe all of that. You may not even be sure what you believe, and there is no need to pretend otherwise. Keep asking your questions. Keep thinking carefully. Keep reading the Scriptures for yourself. Christianity is not asking you to claim certainty you do not possess or understanding you have not yet reached.
You do not need to understand everything about Christianity before you can begin understanding something true about the God Christianity proclaims. For now, perhaps this is enough to carry with you:
The God who made you has made Himself known.
He has not merely sent us an abstract philosophy, a spiritual technique, or a list of religious instructions. Christianity says He has come nearer than that—astonishingly nearer.
He came to us in a Person.
His name is Jesus Christ.
So the next question is no longer merely another item on a list of Christian beliefs. If Christianity is telling the truth about God, it may be one of the most important questions you will ever ask:
Who is Jesus?
Summary
Christianity begins with God—not with human beings searching until they somehow discover Him. The Bible says God has always existed. He created everything outside Himself and depends upon nothing, while everything He created ultimately depends upon Him. He is distinct from His creation without being distant from it, and He is not an impersonal force or spiritual energy. He knows, speaks, wills, loves, acts, and makes Himself known.
This God knows you personally. Human beings are made in His image and therefore possess a dignity that does not depend upon nationality, intelligence, wealth, usefulness, social standing, religion, or the approval of other people. God is perfectly good and perfectly holy. He is sovereign over His creation without making human evil good or eliminating human responsibility, and His providence means that the world He made has never slipped beyond His care or authority.
Christians believe there is only one God, who eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians call this the Trinity. Christianity then makes an even more astonishing claim: God did not merely send information about Himself. God the Son came to us as Jesus Christ.
You do not need to understand all of this at once, and you should not pretend to believe or understand something that you do not. Ask questions. Examine what Christianity actually claims. Read the Scriptures for yourself. The central invitation at this point is not to master a religious system but to continue asking who this God is—and especially to begin asking the question toward which everything in this article has been moving:
Who is Jesus?
Five Questions to Ask Yourself
1. If there really is one Creator who made me and knows me completely, what would that change about the way I understand myself?
Try not to answer this merely as a religious question. If God actually made you, knows you, and gave you your dignity, then your life is not self-created and your value is not finally determined by your family, culture, achievements, failures, other people’s opinions, or even your own opinion of yourself. What would be different if that were actually true?
2. Am I willing to let God be who He is, or do I want God to be who I think He should be?
Every one of us approaches God with assumptions. Some come from our family, some from our culture, some from previous religions or philosophies, some from painful experiences, and some simply come from what we would prefer to be true. If the Creator exists independently of us, however, then reality does not change because we would prefer a different God. Am I honestly seeking to discover who God is, or am I quietly asking God to fit the picture I have already made for Him?
3. If God already knows everything about me, what am I still trying to hide—from Him, from myself, or from other people?
The thought of being completely known can be comforting, but it can also be unsettling. Christianity says there is no private room in your heart into which God cannot see. He knows your kindness and your selfishness, your courage and your fear, your wounds and the wounds you have caused, the things you are proud of and the things you hope no one ever discovers. What does the reality of being completely known awaken in you—comfort, fear, resistance, relief, curiosity, or something else? Why?
4. If God is perfectly good and perfectly holy, what happens when His goodness and holiness are turned toward my life?
It is easy to agree that cruelty, dishonesty, exploitation, hatred, betrayal, and injustice are wrong when we see them in someone else. It is harder to stand before a perfectly holy God and ask Him to tell the whole truth about us. If God’s standard is not comparison with other people but His own perfect character, what might He see in you that you would rather explain than face? Explanation can help us understand ourselves, but explanation is not exoneration. Reality, Beloved. Reality.
5. If Christianity’s claim about Jesus is true—if God really came to us—what could possibly be more important than discovering who He is?
You do not have to answer today that you believe Jesus is God the Son. You do not have to pretend certainty you do not possess. Yet intellectual honesty works in both directions: disbelief should not become an excuse for refusing to investigate an extraordinary claim. If there is even a possibility that the God who made you entered human history and can be known, what would be a reasonable response? Ignore Him? Assume you already know enough? Or keep going and ask, as honestly as you know how:
Who is Jesus?
Endnotes
- God as eternal Creator. Genesis 1:1 begins with God already existing and identifies Him as Creator of “the heavens and the earth,” a biblical expression encompassing the created order. Psalm 90:2 explicitly contrasts the beginning of creation with God’s existence “from everlasting to everlasting.” See also Isaiah 40:28; Revelation 4:11.
- God’s self-existence and independence. Acts 17:24–25 emphasizes that God is not sustained by human beings “as if He needed anything”; rather, He is the One who gives human beings “life and breath and everything else.” John 5:26 speaks of the Father as having “life in Himself.” Christian theology has traditionally described this divine independence or self-existence with terms such as aseity—from the Latin a se, meaning “from Himself.” The article uses the more immediately understandable expression self-existence.
- Creator and creation. John 1:3 draws an extraordinarily comprehensive boundary: everything that “has been made” came into existence through the divine Word. Genesis 1 repeatedly distinguishes the God who commands creation into existence from the things He creates. See also Psalm 33:6–9; Isaiah 44:24; Colossians 1:16.
- God is distinct from creation yet sustains it. Acts 17:28 describes human existence as dependent upon God, while Colossians 1:17 says that in Christ “all things hold together.” Hebrews 1:3 similarly describes the Son as “sustaining all things by His powerful word.” Christianity therefore distinguishes Creator from creation without portraying creation as independent of its Creator.
- God’s omniscience. Psalm 139:1–4 portrays God’s knowledge as both comprehensive and personal: He knows actions, thoughts, and words before they are spoken. Psalm 147:5 says God’s “understanding has no limit.” See also Hebrews 4:13 and Matthew 10:29–30.
- The image of God. Genesis 1:26–27 uniquely describes human beings as created in God’s “image” and “likeness.” The doctrine has generated extensive theological discussion concerning representation, relationship, moral responsibility, rationality, dominion, and human vocation. This article intentionally does not reduce the image of God to any single human ability. Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 show that the image of God continues to ground the dignity and moral treatment of human beings.
- The image of God and treatment of others. James 3:9 specifically condemns the inconsistency of blessing God while cursing human beings “who have been made in God’s likeness.” The theological claim therefore has immediate ethical consequences: what Christians believe about the Creator must shape how they treat His image-bearers.
- God’s goodness, love, and holiness. Psalm 145:17 describes God as righteous and kind; 1 John 4:8 says “God is love”; Isaiah 6:3 declares Him “holy, holy, holy.” Scripture does not portray these characteristics as competing parts of God. God’s love is never morally corrupt, and His holiness is never unloving. See also Exodus 34:6–7; Deuteronomy 32:4; 1 Peter 1:15–16.
- God’s sovereignty. Psalm 115:3, Isaiah 46:9–10, and Daniel 4:35 present God as accomplishing His purposes without a creature possessing the power finally to frustrate Him. Biblical teaching about divine sovereignty does not require calling human evil good or denying human responsibility. Scripture can affirm God’s sovereign purpose and genuine human responsibility within the same event; see Genesis 50:20 and Acts 2:23.
- Providence. Psalm 103:19 declares God’s rule over all, while passages such as Matthew 6:25–34 and Matthew 10:29–31 portray His care extending to ordinary details of created life. Providence is the theological term commonly used for God’s continuing preservation, care, governance, and direction of His creation.
- Revelation and general revelation. Psalm 19:1–4 describes creation as declaring God’s glory. Romans 1:19–20 similarly teaches that aspects of God’s nature are made evident through what He has made. Christian theology commonly calls God’s disclosure through creation general revelation, distinguishing it from the more specific revelation God gives through His words and redemptive acts recorded in Scripture.
- Scripture and inspiration. Second Timothy 3:16 describes Scripture as theopneustos, commonly translated “God-breathed.” Second Peter 1:20–21 describes human authors speaking from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Christian teaching on inspiration therefore affirms both divine authorship and genuine human authorship rather than treating the biblical writers as passive mechanical instruments.
- Christian monotheism. Deuteronomy 6:4—the beginning of the confession traditionally known as the Shema—declares, “The LORD our God, the LORD is One.” Isaiah 45:5 adds, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.” The New Testament continues this confession; see 1 Corinthians 8:4–6 and 1 Timothy 2:5.
- The Trinity. The word Trinity does not appear in the Bible; it is a theological term developed to summarize what Christians believe the Bible teaches. Scripture affirms one God while identifying the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit distinctly and speaking of each in ways proper to God. Matthew 28:19 places Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together under the singular “name”; 2 Corinthians 13:14 likewise joins all three. The doctrine rejects both tritheism—three separate gods—and modalism—one divine Person merely appearing in three different roles. A later article in this series will examine this doctrine much more fully.
- The Incarnation. John 1:1 identifies the Word as both “with God” and as God; John 1:14 then says this Word “became flesh.” Philippians 2:5–8 describes Christ taking the form of a servant and being made in human likeness. Colossians 2:9 says, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.” Historic Christianity therefore confesses Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human—not partly God and partly human, and not a human being who later became divine.
- Jesus as the revelation of God. Colossians 1:15 calls the Son “the image of the invisible God,” Hebrews 1:3 calls Him “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature,” and Jesus says in John 14:9, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father.” These texts do not erase the personal distinction between Father and Son; rather, they ground Christianity’s claim that God’s character is supremely revealed in Jesus Christ.