God wants us to know him, but our ability to understand God is limited.  Then our thinking is clouded even more because we’re embedded in a sinful world. 

“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

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

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.