One of the great paradoxes of most faiths (Christianity included) is that they attempt to describe something that is infinite. As humans, limited to this world and to our relatively short life spans, we search for the right words to describe God (or "the gods", depending on your faith), God's actions and God's purposes, while at the same time wrestling with our inability to really understand any of these things. As an exercise in trying to understand this ultimate reality, the Bible is therefore full of images and metaphors used to describe aspects of God, God's power and God's personality which are sometimes complementary, and sometimes conflicting.

A lot of the terms used to describe various interpretations of God begin with 'omni', meaning 'all'. Tradition claims that God is omnipresent (all-present, or 'everywhere'), omniscienct (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful) or even omnibenevolent (all-loving). A quick web search reveals a number of Bible verses quoted at various sites which definitively "prove" these aspects of God.

One key difficulty that a thinking person will encounter when reckoning with all of these claims about God, however, is that sometimes they can seem contradictory. People who are critical of religious belief quite rightly point out that these conclusions which people draw about God are often in tension, or even open conflict with one another. For example:

• If God is All-Knowing, then God knows a person is suffering with cancer.
• And if God is All-Powerful, then God can do something about that cancer.
• Logically, if God is then All-Loving, God would do something about that cancer.
• So when cancer is not healed, does this mean God is not loving? Or powerful? Or does God's love require that that person gets that cancer? What kind of love is that?
• Further, if the cancer is healed, why is that person healed while another person is not?

This is where the Christian community looks to other terms to describe and define God: defining God as righteous (makes right and good decisions) and just (judges and evaluates appropriately to a situation) and unfathomable (can't ever be properly explained or understood). Again, various appeals to scriptural references are used to define these attributes. Underpinning most of these assertions is the fundamental idea that God is sovereign, meaning completely in command of all that takes place.

The difficulty in our understanding is that not all outcomes are good, and claiming that they are ultimately diminishes the suffering of the people that such claims try to address. If God loves us as limited beings with limited understanding, and God made us as limited beings with limited understanding, then surely God can show love in a way that we as limited beings can actually comprehend, rather than having hidden definitions of God's love and goodness which hide behind the suffering and confusion that exists in the world!

A difficult Biblical text in this regard is the book of Job, where a man who is faithful to God can't explain or understand why he suffers. His friends all suggest that his struggles are the consequences of his own sin, while Job feels that an injustice has been done to him. God ends up stating at the end of the book that due to God's infinite position as creator of existence, Job has no standing to question or challenge. Job then concedes:

It is through particular interpretations of these kind of texts that Christians have generally conceded the unfathomably of God, and develop a faith process that goes something along these lines:

1. Because God is God, and more powerful, knowing and loving than us, God sees a bigger picture than we can see.
2. Fortunately, God is righteous and makes good judgements, so whatever outcome happens is the correct outcome determined by God.
3. As God is unfathomable and sees a bigger picture than us, when things seem unfair, or unjust, its just that we don't 'get' that it is somehow ultimately for the best.
4. The answer, then, is simply to trust that God and accept that all outcomes are effectively good.
5. Also, there is sin in the world, which is humanity's fault. Anything that's really bad, (like cancer existing in the first place), exists because humans broke the world by eating forbidden fruit.

The second century leader Marcion (85-160 CE) was just one of a number of people who noticed and wrestled with the differences between the projection of God in the Hebrew Scriptures and in many of the teachings of Jesus. However, he was excommunicated by the Church in Rome because of his solution to the problem. For him, the God of the Hebrew Bible was evil and violent and made bad things happen, while 'God the Father' in the New Testament was good, and sent Jesus to defeat the Hebrew God. Marcion supported his beliefs with an edited version of the New Testament, limited to his own versions of the Gospel of Luke and the Apostle Paul's letters.

The church’s concern with Marcion was that he aimed to sculpt a comfortable image of God by simply ignoring the bits of the Bible that made him uncomfortable or dissatisfied. And as we write this article, we are well aware of falling into Marcion’s trap. So our challenge is this: How do we acknowledge, grapple with and resolve the tensions presented by the vision of Jesus against the Hebrew Text, without just single-handedly discarding anything we don't like or that makes us feel uncomfortable? How do we come to a Christian understanding of God that rejects the violence that appears in some parts of the Hebrew Bible, yet takes the Hebrew Scriptures seriously?