Taft - Dimensions of God?

I want God to be bigger than I am…much bigger! We have so sanitized him and reduced his stature so that he will fit into our feelgood culture that we have lost sight of the God “whom to know is to fear.”

Scripture gives only hints of his dimension. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof…” “’The earth is my footstool,’ saith the Lord.” And more. When he descended on

Mount Sinai

in cloud and fire the mountain trembled and the people feared that the sound of his voice would bring their death.

Astronomers tell us of the incredible and explosive beginning to the creation of time and space. They tell us the size of the universe…and that it is growing. There are more galaxies than we have yet counted…billions of them…each with billions of suns in a dynamic and changing universe that is savage, violent, and beautiful with wonder.

Scripture tells us he was there…creating…at the beginning, and that he will be there at the end, when all else ends and he creates a new heaven and a new earth.

My mind boggles…and can only be empty of imagining what he is really like, for I lack the ability, the imagination, and the language to describe him. Jesus is his face, but even he is only the tiniest sliver of the completeness of God. We can only say that God is greater than we can imagine and stranger than we can ever imagine. We cannot even describe him as alive in the sense that we know life.

How can we know him? How can he possibly be concerned with the minutia of our mortal lives? How can there be an interface between his eternal, immense, creative person and our mortal, blindingly brief lives?

And yet there is. And yet God himself said,

 “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast

and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

                                                Though she may forget,

                                                            I will not forget you!”

                        See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands…”

                                                                                    Isaiah 49:15

Incredibly, though we cannot grasp him, he sees us, knows us, and speaks of the tenderness of a nursing mother to describe his feeling for us. It is more than I can understand. I can only accept it and be captured by his determination to both create and to know his creation as a mother knows the child at her breast.

Incredible.

Comments

[Eric Helmbold]

Hey Taft!
How are you? Been wondering what's up. Just a quick note to say I always think of you with affection. Blessings,
Eric Helmbold ehelmbold@dcpi.org