God in a Box
This last week I was talking with a friend, and several paradoxes about God came up. We hit on free will and God’s sovereignty. We conversed on how Christians are free from the law, but still told to be holy. These questions lead us to wonder if there are nice systematic answers at all. To this, I pointed to the doctrine of the trinity (the concept that God is three persons, each person is fully God, and that there is only one God). Although these statements may not be contradictory, we have to admit that our finite human minds cannot fully understand them. Another friend wondered if God exists in three persons just to make us realize we cannot fully know God. That reminded me- we cannot fully know God, otherwise he ceases to be God.
Check out what God says to Isaiah:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
God is wholly other than we are. We cannot know everything about him. I think I have fallen into this trap as a theology student. I want to be able to come down definitively on one side of any given issue, or if I cannot come down on one side, have a definitive statement that explains everything. In reality the nature of God mandates that not everything about him can be expressed in finite human language. Above that, my thoughts cannot even sync totally with God. God’s attributes are far greater than mine. I cannot know everything about God, and it is foolish to think I can.
Of course, some knowledge of God is possible. Whatever God tells us, we should believe. He seems to have shown us that there is some degree of order in the world through nature, so we should believe God is an orderly God. God tells us in the Bible that he loved mankind so much he sent his son to die (John 3:16), and we should believe this.
However there are some issues I really wish could be resolved with 100% certainty. Those paradoxes mentioned above are top on my list. However, I think this desire arises out of my upbringing in a western culture more than a real desire to know God. “We live in an “on or off” universe” as our western culture says. It either is, or is not. There can be no middle ground. Of course most of the writers of the Bible were Jews, and did not share this mindset at all. Maybe we should take this into account when asking questions of God’s nature.
If we think about what God would be like if we could understand everything about Him, he ceases to be God. Sadly, I think many Christians live with a “God in a Box.” We put parameters on God that do not really hold true. By doing this, we create our own notion of God instead of believe God as he reveals himself to us. We have made a God that is explainable, bound up by the human mind and only as powerful as we will let him be.
My challenge is to accept the mysteries of God as just that- mysteries. We must try and understand the mystery as best we can, and we can know what has been made plain to us. But let’s let God be God. Let’s not put human boundaries on Him.
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