God wants to know us and for us to know him.  The Bible makes this point strongly; it’s captured in one of the most used phrases in the Old Testament:

“I will be their God and they will be my people.”

The next to last chapter of Revelation triumphantly announces:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look!  God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’”

Our ability to understand God is limited by a few factors.  First, God’s thoughts aren’t our thoughts.  God knows every detail about creation, but we can’t.  Our knowledge about the world he made is very limited.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV

Because we’re embedded in a sinful world, we don’t have the ability to see truth and reality clearly.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV

For reasons we aren’t told, when the time was right to begin to reveal himself to mankind, God chose Abram, a simple herdsman, who spoke Hebrew, a language that included only 8,000 words in biblical times.  Modern English dictionaries list about 170,000 words in current use; unabridged versions include well over 600,000 words.

I think this means that God would have to relate to us using more than words.  A textbook couldn’t show us the greatness of God.  The entirely new and foreign ideas God wanted to reveal would require symbols, word pictures, actions and stories.

We’re storytellers and wordsmiths by nature.  We also have an ability to think about abstract concepts.  When our thoughts are deeper than words and logic can express on their own, we use pictures and symbols. Pictures and symbols can move us from concrete thoughts about events or objects into abstract thoughts about concepts and ideas.

In his commentary on the gospel of Matthew, N.T. Wright says that “symbols are the most powerful form of communication”.  Dorothy Sayers would have agreed.  In The Mind of the Maker she says:

“To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures.”

So naturally, God has communicated with us through stories, pictures, and symbols.