shall we get high on truth?

sábado, abril 02, 2005

GOD

"What is God?" A simple question, but a simple answer? Being unseen and unknown, it is very hard to understand what God is. In fact, God is the hardest thing to understand in the world because we can't understand Him. If you think you can understand God enough to explain Him, you actually understand God the least. Get ready hear somethings you aren't used to hearing!

As ironic as it may sound, the best way to describe God is to say that He is undescribable. Whatever He is, and all He is, is simply explained as beyond our explanation. Even the wisest person's comprehention of God is knowing that God cannot be comprehended.

Yes, God's Word reveals to us a little of what God is, but it is nowhere near giving us the whole picture because God can't be pictured. James McDonald said during Lafayette's counseling conference, "Sometimes we ask God, 'Why don't you tell all about you?' And God answers, 'Because I would have had to make your head as big as the world!'" Romans 11:33 says, "...How unsearchable His judgments and His paths beyond tracing out!"

Because man thinks with images, we try to imagin God. We try to paint an image of God so we can understand Him better. What's wrong with that? It's like painting a picture of a mountain range and saying that that's the whole universe. In A.W. Tozer's book The Knowledge of the Holy he says, "Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control."

When we try to explain things about God that He has not explained to us, it's like trying to put an all-powerful, all-knowing God in a box that we can store and unpack as we want. Until we understand that we will never understand, we will never be very useful for God.

Isn't this so hard for us to grasp? That's because we can't grasp it! God is so different than everything He has made which is everything we see and know. To put this into perspective, let's look at what is so unperceivable about God:

1. God is has no maker. Everything can be traced back to its origin except God. God always has and always will be the ultimate authority. Everything we see around us has an origin which makes it so impossible to imagine something that has no begining.

2. God is not trapped in time. To think that God can see everything that happens in the whole universes history in one quick glance makes the mind hurt. To think that God's "quick glance" is infinetly quicker than we can imagine because God is not limitied to the passing of time gives an even greater headache. Everything we do in our life is captivated by time. No matter what you do, our world's time line keeps rolling making it mind boggleing to think that time is just another invention of God!

3. God is three in one. We will never understand that God is three persons, each with specific roles, and yet they are one. They are not a them but a Him. We can't imagine ourselves being three in one because we have always just been one, individual person.

4. God is in total control. This is very hard to grasp when you consider the fact that God has given us the ability to make our own choices. In our mind, we figure that if we have control over our desicions then God would have to give up some control -- but wouldn't that make Him less a God? And God cannot become less! So we can't say that whatever we do is God's choice and yet we can't say that we are on our own!

This list could go on for a very long time but I too am trapped in this time line and I other important things to do with my life. But knowing that God is everything we cannot know should affect what I do today. I wish that I always lived as if God is so amaizing! I do not live as if God is the all-mighty, most holy, completely perfect, ultimate authority who not only allows us to communicate to Him, but wants us, who are low, dirty beggars, to get close to Him and become His children! Do you realize who God is?

Even in my short life I've read, heard, and seen many people say, "I just can't believe in your god because I can't understand him." After reading some in The Knoledge of the Holy I now know how to answer them: "I can't believe in your god because I can understand him." The Maker of all things, and the Savior of all people has to be non-understandable! How else would He be God?