“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” (Job 19:25, ESV)
Ten seasons ago, Camilo Villegas landed on golf’s front pages by winning twice late in the year, including the Tour Championship. Vijay Singh took home the FedExCup that season, but what Villegas did as a player should have been enough to capture our attention. It wasn’t.
Where Villegas’ legacy lies is in his green-reading posture. You might recall he earned the nickname “Spiderman” for his fingertips-outstretched, knee-tucked, leg-extended, ground-scraping contortions. He may have been the game’s first regular horizontal reader of greens.
We can certainly make a case for Villegas’ chosen method. We might even credit him for the inspiring the “worm cam”—though it may be tough to find definitive evidence on that one. What we can say is that in a game played vertically, Villegas brought us a new angle with which to look at putting.
Villegas comes to mind for me this week, because I have been lately thinking about my view with God. Do I see him horizontally or vertically?
I’ll explain.
It has occurred to me of late that so much of what I know of God is based on the horizontal lines on the pages of my Bible. Words across a page. No apologies: these words mean everything to me. They are the printed breath of God, as it were, for they record his inspiration to us. Indeed, the Scriptures are the container of what God has revealed to us about himself. Without them, many of us would say, we have no reference point for who God is and what he wants us to know about himself, ourselves, and our relationship with him.
But here is the curious thing: So many of the people we find in Scripture—those men and women who had enviable relationships with God—had no such reference point. They did not hold a Bible in their hand as we do. Or if they did, it was only bits and pieces compared to our “full canon.” So how did they know God, especially if they were Old Testament people, unaware of the identity and saving work of the Messiah, Jesus Christ?
The answer is that they knew God vertically. They knew him as one who might stand before them, though it be in a burning bush or as “the angel of the Lord” or, as Job proclaimed, the Redeemer whose unbending form will be there at the end of all our earthly living.
This is the God I want to know. Those lines on the pages of Scripture are a picture of him that tells us much. But they are only an introduction. May he leap off those pages and stand before our own eyes, that we like the ancients may fall on our knees in amazed worship, knowing the Creator not only in our readers’ minds but with every stitch in our being.
—
Jeff Hopper
January 2, 2018
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.