Growing Through Challenge - Is Your God Too Small?

                               A GOD TOO SMALL?

Many years ago this arresting question was addressed by the late renowned theologian and Bible translator J.B. Phillips in his thought-provoking book, Your God Is Too Small. The idea should at least give us pause.

                          ANSWERS OR QUESTIONS

I know that answers are a lot more comforting and appealing than questions... but just for a few moments would you be willing to mentally suspend judgment and step out of the security of all that you believe you know about God? Would you join me in a quest where we wrestle with perplexing issues and grapple with complex questions? The hope of a little better understanding of the Almighty Creator of all things should be worth the effort.

                           FINITE VERSUS INFINITE

Think about it... our very limited human minds trying to encompass all of a limitless Creator... the finite trying to understand the Infinite! The person who believes they have this one pretty much figured out must have a small God indeed.

                                REASON AND FAITH

Inherent in our finiteness is the great limitation of our comprehension. Even the furthermost stretches of our imagination cannot come close to a full understanding of the Infinite! That is why faith is so vital to any understanding of God and things eternal.

Reason can take us only so far; then faith alone can help us span the incomprehensible gulf between the finite and the Infinite. Even then, we must remember that, however great and grand our faith brings us to believe God to be, He will in reality, always be infinitely greater than any concept we have!

                                        ETERNITY

My personal belief is that we have the joyful anticipation of spending all eternity in the endless discovery of more and more of the unfathomable majesty and astounding creations of our Heavenly Father... most of which we have not yet even begun to suspect!!!

                           OUTSKIRTS AND THUNDER

The book of Job, chapter 26 provides us with a helpful analogy. After cataloging a long list of things humans think they know about God, Job concludes with this piercing statement: "These are indeed but the outskirts of His ways: and how small a whisper do we hear of Him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?"

Again we run headlong into this great expanse between the smallness of what we think we know of the Infinite God and the inconceivable vastness of all He really is!

                              ANTHROPOMORPHISM

The Bible tells us that God created man "in His image". The history of mankind ever since seems a lot like the story of man trying to make God into a human image.

Even the Biblical writers struggle with the limitations of human language, using "anthropomorphisms" (depicting God with human attributes) to help us grasp even a little glimpse of our limitless Creator.

Good people of all faiths have many disagreements in this area, but I strongly believe we must be careful about taking these lofty but limited concepts too literally. The divide between God's true infinity and eternal attributes is too wide for human language and comprehension to adequately span.

Faith must again come to our rescue here to assure us that our loftiest concepts of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness only foreshadow for us on earth, what God is really like, both now and in eternity.

                         HUMBLING CONSIDERATIONS

Even though God is more real to me than the most real thing I can imagine, I must acknowledge that we are all still talking about a God whom none of us have ever seen! We are dealing here in matters of Faith, not sight! Sincere doubters are welcome in this quest.

There are many hundreds of religions around the world... all of them with many followers who are absolutely devoted to their beliefs and willing to die for them.

Within the Christian faith alone there are hundreds of denominations, and sometimes scores of variations of the same denomination, each one sincerely believing themselves to be closest to the truth about God.

Among serious students in the same faith and denomination there exists widely differing views of what is the proper interpretation of endless scriptural passages and doctrines.

In the light of these kinds of realities... with all the widely ranging variety of deeply held beliefs among sincere disciples of the Christian faith alone... perhaps we should listen with a fresh sense of humility to Job's confession: "How small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?"

Of course we would all like to think that our own beliefs represent a personal leading from God to a certain conclusion... and hopefully that is true concerning most of our core beliefs. But what about all of our beliefs... is it really likely that only a few who see a given topic the same way we do are right, thereby leaving billions of others wrong? Shouldn't the audacity of such presumption trouble us just a little? Shouldn't the finiteness of our humanity allow for some "surprises" from the Infinite Creator?

                                      CONCLUSION

I hope that something I've written here has caused you to want to dig more deeply into your own personal faith so that you will continually grow in your personal relationship with the great and majestic God who is the center of all things!

Don't let the limitations of your humanity cause you to despair in your quest to understand your Heavenly Father. If you sincerely seek Him, know that it is because He has already sought you... and has indwelled you with His own Spirit to ever draw you closer to Him and His Eternal Realities... realities of which we now see but fragments and shadows during our fleeting time in this earthly dwelling place... ETERNITY awaits you to continue the quest!

I personally would recommend that you study the life of Jesus Christ to understand more about God the Father, because Jesus (God the Son) came into this world to shed the Father's light into our darkness. He came to reveal all of the Infinite God that could be revealed in finite human form.

A small aside...since Islam is so much in current news, did you know that even Muslims (the moderate ones) are taught that the New Testament ("The Injeel") was sent from God and that the Qur'an tells them to follow the teachings of Jesus, whom they honor as a special prophet?

As you, by faith, come to know more of Jesus Christ, you will hopefully find that you will know enough about God to take you calmly from time into eternity... an eternity where the limitless and joyful discovery of the Infinite Creator and creation awaits!