If you’ve ever wandered through a boardwalk or an amusement park, you’ve probably passed a sidewalk artist offering caricatures. For a few dollars, they’ll sketch you with saucer-sized eyes, an exaggerated grin, or ears the size of dinner plates. It’s clearly you — your friends could pick you out of a lineup — but it isn’t really you. It’s a distortion. Something true stretched into something false.

Most of us are carrying around a caricature like that of God.

Not because we set out to invent one, but because we built our picture of him the same way we build most of our early pictures of the world — from the people closest to us. For many, that means an earthly father became the template for the heavenly one. If your dad was harsh, quick to anger, impossible to please, you likely read the parts of Scripture where God disciplines or judges and think, “Yes, that tracks. That’s what fathers do.” If your dad was absent, distracted, or gone before you really knew him, you may picture God the same way — technically present, functionally distant. Hard to reach. Hard to trust.

Both pictures have a kernel of truth stretched way out of proportion. God does have righteous anger. He is not a pushover, not an indulgent grandparent who waves away sin. But that’s not the whole face. It’s one feature blown up until it swallows the rest, the same way a caricature artist exaggerates your nose or your ears until the exaggeration becomes the whole impression.

So what does the real face of God look like?

There’s an ancient passage, tucked into the book of Numbers, that gives us something like a corrective photograph. God instructs Moses to give this blessing to Aaron the priest, so Aaron can speak it over the people:

The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance on you and give you peace.

Three short lines. Three glimpses past the distortion.

First: God is a good God who delights in blessing his children. The Hebrew word behind “bless” pictures someone kneeling down — the way a parent kneels to be eye-level with a small child, hand resting on their head, wanting good for them. That’s not the posture of a distant judge. It’s the posture of someone who enjoys giving good things. Any parent who has ever surprised their kids with an unplanned trip to get ice cream, or saved up all year for one big vacation, knows a fraction of that joy. God isn’t reluctantly tolerant of your happiness. He’s actively invested in it — though he defines happiness less by comfort and more by wholeness, by being rightly connected to him.

Second: God is a good God who protects his children. The word “keep” means to guard, to watch over, the way a shepherd watches a flock — alert for danger, but not sealing the sheep away from every hardship. Protection from God was never a promise of a scrape-free life. It’s a promise that he holds on when you can’t hold on to yourself. It’s the security described elsewhere in Scripture: nothing can snatch you out of his hand. That doesn’t erase difficulty. It means the difficulty doesn’t get the final word.

Third: God is a good God who shines his face toward his children. In the ancient world, having the king’s face turned toward you meant favor — you were seen, known, wanted. This is maybe the hardest one to believe when life feels dark. But it’s the picture of a father who tells a frightened child, “I’m here. My face is toward you. I can love you even through the dark.” He is not a God who turns away when things get messy, but one whose attention never leaves you.

None of this erases the parts of God that are genuinely weighty — his justice, his holiness, his hatred of what destroys us. But those features were never meant to be the whole portrait, blown up until they hide everything else.

Maybe it’s worth asking yourself honestly: when you picture God, whose face are you actually seeing? Is it him — or is it a caricature drawn by someone else’s failures, stretched over years until it felt true?

The invitation, at the end of the day, is simple: put down the sketch you inherited, and go look at the original.