Skip to main content

God is...

God is God. There are no words to describe or define him adequately. There is no way our minds can comprehend him, no way our natural minds can grasp him. His ways are not our ways. He exists outside the cosmos, i.e., he is transcendent, as the cosmos is merely his creation. He exists in a sense that we cannot understand; it is not any sort of existence that we can understand. For instance, his existence and essence are infinite, and he is self-existent. We can only grasp whatever exists in a temporal sense - that which begins at some point, is created, and ceases to exist (only the human soul does not cease).

But God justs exists. Infinitely. We cannot wrap our minds around that. We can sort of imagine our souls not ceasing to exist, living forever into the future, because we haven't died yet. But can you imagine existing without having ever been born, without ever having a beginning? Of course not; it blows your mind. But that's how God is. We cannot grasp his existence or essence, which are infinite, perfect, holy, entirely beyond our understanding.

For us to claim to really understand God would be like an ant claiming to understand Einstein or quantum mechanics, or a roach claiming to understand chaos theory or Kant. We can only stand in awe and fear before this God who is nothing like us or anything in the cosmos.

We cannot know God by our natural minds. He is so far beyond us, beyond our knowledge and understanding. Thus, God should by nature seem irrelevant to us, just as an ant would find a Bach concerto or a quantum physics text irrelevant. And in our natural, unsaved state, we mostly do dismiss him as irrelevant. The only way that we finite creatures could know God would be if God made himself relevant to us, if he revealed himself to us. He made himself relevant, in that he made each of us with a "God shaped vacuum" inside, which only he can fill. And the Unknowable God made himself known to us, revealed himself to us, thru his Word, thru Christ who became one of us, and thru his Spirit, which draws us to Christ. Only by these means can we come to know him, in the sense of having a personal relationship with us. We can thus know him personally, and experience his presence and love, though we can never know him fully, as we are finite and he is infinite. We must recognize how limited we are as humans and as sinners, and can only stand before God in awe, wonder, and fear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evangelicalism's gradual demise

The term "evangelical" was popularized by Martin Luther ("evangelisch" in German), which meant a follower of the gospel. The term was originally a very good and useful term, as it referred to someone who believed in a religion based on faith and following the teachings of Christ, rather than man-made religious rules. It was meaningful enough but also broad enough to encompass a general theological orientation and religious lifestyle. It could include and accommodate somewhat different views or interpretations of Christian belief, including those who focused more on the grace, spirituality and lifestyle of Christ. As such, it was not the exclusive property of one religious group or theological orientation. The meaning has been generally positive in modern church history. However, in recent decades the term has been hijacked by fundamentalists who insist on a narrow interpretation of the term, insisting on a set of specific theological beliefs, while ignoring the C...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portraits of Christ: John’s Gospel, part 2

In John’s Gospel we have an emphasis on Jesus that is unique compared to the other gospels. John not only emphasizes his deity, but his mysteriousness. The reader is left with an impression of Jesus as a mystical teacher, in the sense that his words and actions are not only those of a profound religious teacher, but of one who is other-worldly. So often in this gospel we read of Jesus making statements that the crowds, the religious teachers, and even his own disciples sometimes could not fathom. For starters, there are the “I am” statements (e.g., I am the bread of life; I am the living water; I am the good shepherd; I am the way, the truth, and the life), which were clearly claims to divinity, for these statements in the Jewish context referred to God’s title “I am,” given when Moses inquired of his name at the burning bush. Jesus makes much use of mystical metaphors like these and others, like all the ‘day’ and ‘night’ references in this book, which portrays him as mystical or my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portraits of Christ: Luke’s Gospel

Particularly in Luke, we see a Jesus born and raised in the backwaters of insignificant Jewish towns - born in Bethlehem, and growing up in the small farm village of Nazareth. You would think that if God mainly cared for or wanted to influence the powerful and mighty of the world, then Jesus should have been born in Rome, or Athens, or Alexandria, or at least Jerusalem. Instead he is born to a peasant girl named Mary in the middle of nowhere, at a time when the province of Judea suffered under poverty and oppression. Incredibly, her peasant son changed the world. But he never did it by allying himself with the rich and powerful or even seeking them out in order to implement his program. Usually if you want to start an influential movement, even as a grassroots movement, you would still recruit some wealthy donors and celebrities or leaders to promote your movement. Jesus did it totally opposite. He did not even focus on winning over the religious establishment; in fact, he often chall...
Post a Comment
Read more