GOD Under a Microscope

This last Wednesday, I had the chance to lead the community group that Kristy and I have been involved in through Pierced Chapel. Over the last several months, we’ve been going through an “attributes of God/knowing God” kind of a theme. So on Wednesday, I started out asking people to finish this sentence: “You would get to know me well if . . .” It always fascinates me how people finish that sentence and it’s usually quite revealing. One young woman said, “if you could listen in on a conversation with my best friend.” Other people talked about doing things together that also allow for conversation, like working on a car or going on a road trip.

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice immediately the spiritual parallels. Through the pages of scripture, we get to know God by listening in on conversations that he’s had with people throughout the ages. And as we live in community with others, in a sense we’re able to listen in on current conversations that God is having with them as he works in their lives. Also, as we do life with him and grow spiritually, learning to trust him, we know him better.

The sheet of paper that that I handed out to people had a list of “attributes of God” that I took from table of contents in a typical devotional/theological book on the subject. After looking over the list, we all concluded a rather obvious idea: we don’t know God by segmenting and labelling him into lists of characteristics. “Knowing God” is relational, not academic.

Words like “omnipotent” and “omniscient” in particular have never really seemed appropriate to me. The ideas behind them (omnipotent = all-powerful, omniscient = all-knowing) are true and actually quite mind-boggling, but where the heck did we get the terms themselves from? The answer is found in the very word “omniscience.”

That’s right. Thanks to the scientific method (a result of the Age of Reason, or The Enlightenment), we’ve effectively put God under a microscope, slapped some big Latin-based labels on him and dissected him out into manageable categories with every “-ology” you can think of. Okay, so we haven’t literally put him under a microscope, but sometimes it sure feels like we’ve tried or even that we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we could.

This isn’t to say that our attempts at systematic theology and dogma have been completely worthless. In fact, I told the small group Wednesday night that the book from which I got that list of attributes (Knowledge of the Holy, by A.W. Tozer) had proven to be a huge blessing in my own spiritual life.

However, it is to say that the unspoken Enlightenment-style confidence (arrogance even?) behind human reason often causes us to abuse God’s revelation of himself. If you’ve ever heard or read a raging debate about whether or not Jesus was mutable or immutable (able to sin or unable to sin) or, better yet, whether Jesus’ death was for all people or “limited” to the elect, you’ve seen a great example of this abuse. I wasted an entire Bible college class hour listening to the issues in the “immutability” debate and just shook my head as I walked out of class, thinking to myself, “Why are we so afraid of mystery and paradox?” Answer: Because we’ve taken on the philosophy that science can solve every mystery and reconcile every paradox. So we force our theology to do just that.

So after we had a brief discussion about some of these things, we took a good chunk of time just cozying up to Psalm 33 and talking about what we could learn about who God is from that text. Rather than squeezing the “application” in for a few minutes at the end, I challenged the group to always include a “therefore” as they shared their observation. “God is just and He’s passionately committed to justice (v. 5). THEREFORE, I will commit myself to doing what I can to help the poor, the fatherless, and the oppressed.”

It was a great evening. The highlight was the prayer time where we adored him for the things that we had observed about him and asked for help, not just with “applying” those things to our own lives, but with actually embodying them so as to be an agent of change in the world.

Categories: God, devotional