Close your eyes. Think... God.
What comes to mind?
For some reason (probably some cheesy Christian cartoon from when I was a kid is to blame), growing up I always thought of a torso of light with arms and legs and a head made of light. He was always sitting on a throne, but you could still see the throne through the illuminated translucent membrane of God's "body." After all, the Bible talks about God's arms, hands, back, feet, and garments - what was I supposed to think, especially with the help of Hanna-Barbera? I guess it's that and Morgan Freeman in a white suit...?
My thinking here is somewhat natural, I'd like to think, but still somehow wrong. As I've grown up from watching the Bible story cartoons to reading the Bible for myself, I've run across many verses that take God out of the box I'd defined Him in and into a vastly intricate & indefinable space. But still in a space, the space has just grown a lot. So much that when I read Solomon's prayer, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built (1 Kings 8:27)," I just expanded God's being to somehow so incredibly large that even heaven, even if it just meant the hugeness of the physical universe, wasn't big enough.
However, I think Solomon's point might have been that when we try to define God by size or location we are missing it all together. What did Jesus use to "define" God? Jesus' answer to the woman at the well in John 4:24 was that "God is spirit." And even though that's completely undefinable, it makes perfect sense! There is no size or shape even applicable to God, and that amazes me. Existing apart from time, without a space to exist but existing everywhere all at once, yet more real than the world we live in, which we must remember is a product of his breath.
And it is THAT God, who is so far away from our understanding of existence, that has acted within time and space - becoming so involved that he took on a physical human body with hunger pains and emotions and puberty and siblings and everything else that helps us remember how human we are. Hebrews 2:14-16 says "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death - that is, the devil - and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." He became like us. And he invites us to be like him, so he makes our spirits alive and connects with us that way - not on a mere intellectual or emotional level, but a living and pure spiritual level, including the emotions and intellect.
What an utterly amazing God. Yet for all this, I'm not against anthropomorphisms at all. I just won't be trying define God by size, space, or time - I've seen a new side of the greatness of God.
O tell of his might, O sing of his grace,
Whose robe is the light, whose canopy space
His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form,
And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.
Your bountiful care what tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air; it shines in the light;
It streams from the hills; it descends to the plain;
And sweetly distills in the dew and the rain.
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In you do we trust, nor find you to fail;
Your mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our maker, defender, redeemer, and friend!
7 years ago
