Christianity - Their God

You could always walk away from (or indeed lose, destroy or sell) your table ~ but God, so Christians (and others) believe, is always there! Christians put their faith in Him as being eternal, omnipresent (always everywhere) and omniscient (all-knowing) ... how could any God worth His salt be any less?

For Christians, the Scriptures (though directly inspired by God) are not in themselves a part of the Godhead ( ... while in Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib has a very special status alongside the deities).

He might perhaps have tried answer 4, but the first two were probably rather after his time. They had not invented cricket, nor discovered the formula for water, 1,500-odd years ago! A more local visual aid became his emblem, whose botanical Latin name clearly references the 'trefoil' ('three-leaves').

His first action was to say 'Let there be light'. There are many later stories in which He manifests His presence by means of lights or flames: see our following question.

It was Noah, rather than Abraham, who had survived the Flood. Apart from that 'deliberate mistake', the symbolism holds; we now know that there needs to be a balanced presence of both rain and sunlight to achieve this 'sign', but Noah would not have appreciated the finer optics of this phenomenon!

'Nativity' = 'birth'; then in due course came the Passion (Jesus' sufferings during what we now refer to as Holy Week, including His betrayal, arrest and illegal overnight trials), Crucifixion (when He was publicly tortured to death) and Resurrection (triumphant return from death on Easter morning).

If God represents (among much else) the principle of perfect 'righteousness', He cannot ignore the mistakes that we humans make ~ since we are inevitably less perfect than He is. Thus we would be 'doomed to fail' by a supposedly loving Creator ... something doesn't quite seem right with that! But in the New Testament He sends His own Son among us to model what life can be and offer, right to the point of 'taking the sins of the world upon Himself', in order to re-clear the way for love and hope between ourselves and God. The penalty for our imperfections is borne by Jesus, so God is indeed 'just' yet also 'loving'. (See John 3:16)

Answer 4 is, rather, a slight paraphrase from the Revelation to St John the Divine, in which he is almost lost for words as he experiences 'the new heaven and earth'. Meanwhile Jesus Himself offers no fewer than 14 'takes' on the Kingdom of Heaven (see Kingdom of Heaven)

Yes: if you have a mind's-eye image of some (probably Victorian) milky watercolour of a suspiciously Northern-European looking Jesus ~ in a suspiciously clean white smock, smiling benignly over a flock of clean white fluffy sheep, under a sunny sky with occasional fluffy clouds to match ~ in some idyllically verdant and not very Holy Land-y landscape ... perhaps glimpsed on the wall of a church or Sunday-school ... then that's a very far cultural diagonal from what King David (psalmist and former shepherd-boy) would originally have had in his own mind ~ if, indeed, this or any other of the Psalms were in fact his work. Jesus' first visitors (at the original Christmas) were shepherds and He is sometimes referred to as the Good Shepherd; this is partly why bishops, in such churches as have them, traditionally carry a 'crook' as an emblem of their responsibility to direct and protect their flock. But the metaphor of a shepherd is definitely conceived as direct, bold and practical, rather than simply soppy!

The material in Answer 3 should come last among these excerpts, because answer 4 refers to Jesus (and His Second Coming) rather than to the Spirit or the three Persons of God as a whole.