Is Your God Too Small?, Part 1

The year, as best I can figure it out, was about 1961, maybe 1962. I was about seven or eight years old and back then family vacations, where you have the big, blue station wagon. And it was a long trip from Ohio to Virginia. And so we folded down the back seats and we had this little pad that went all the way in the back and my parents drove all the way through the night. I never knew why, but I now know.

And there were three of us kids and mom and dad would trade off on who would drive. And I still remember, maybe until the day I die, because mom had just traded with dad, he was going to do the duty, and you had to rotate. And we left the back window open so that you could lay back in the station wagon, feel the warm air, and then you could look straight up and see the sky.

And I was laying just like this and my mom was laying right next to me. And it was one of those nights, it was absolutely pitch black, no city lights, no cars on the highway, it must have been in the wee hours of the morning.

And I had one of those times that we probably all remember, a very intimate conversation with my mom and I felt so secure and so loved and I still remember I had my hands behind my head and we were both looking at the stars.

And I did what eight-year-olds do sometimes. I said, “Wow. Wow. Who made all of that?” And my mom put her arm around me and she said, “Chip, God made all of that, and much more.” And then I asked that question that probably parent knows is coming one day, and I said, “Mom? What is God like?”

Now, I’ve got a question for you. If your eight-year-old son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter or nephew or niece – if a little eight-year-old came in a very vulnerable moment, because I’m going to tell you, whatever she was going to tell me, at eight years old, I was naïve, I was vulnerable, whatever she said, I was going to buy it. I trust my mom. So it’s going to be pretty important that what she tells me is accurate.

And what I want to ask you right now is: What would you tell an eight-year-old in one sentence if they asked you, “What is God like?” What would you say?

If you are wondering, I have put some notes that might help you because I want you to do a little work. In the next line in my notes, I asked the question: What words would have to be in this one sentence, explaining it to your eight-year-old?

Well, He’s loving, He’s holy, He’s kind, He’s compassionate, He’s infinite. Ooh, gosh, how are we going to explain that one to an eight-year-old? What concepts would be very hard or aspects, to get your arms around, how do you take this infinite, eternal, triune God and explain it to an eight-year-old in a way that, for where they are at, they could fully grasp, not exhaustively, but accurately, who God is? What would you say?

Here’s my premise: If it’s not clear to you, it is going to be very foggy to them. The clearer your understanding of who God really is, not what you think Him to be, not even what you have heard Him to be, but the clearer you are on who He actually is, the clearer it will be to those you explain it to.

And you say, “Well, what’s the big deal? Is this that important?” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and I know I might be subject to exaggeration on occasion in my life. Hyperbole, even. But I am going to make a statement and I think you can take this to the bank. Your view of God is the absolute most important thing about your life.

Nothing in all your life will impact your relationship to God, your relationship to people, your self-view, your decisions, your purpose, everything in your life, consciously or unconsciously, comes back to one thing: Who do you privately conceive God to be in your heart?

Why is that so important? Look at your notes with me. I John chapter 3. It’s a very interesting passage. The apostle writes and he says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God and we do not as yet know what we will be like, but we know that when He appears,” when Jesus returns, “we shall be like Him” – why? “for we shall see Him as He is.”

Theologians have a big word for this but the point is: The moment when you see Jesus unveiled, in all of His glory, whoo, you will be transformed and you will be like Him.

In fact, the apostle Paul, II Corinthians chapter 3, as he is trying to explain the difference between the Old and the New Covenant. It says, “But we all,” New Testament believers, “with unveiled faces beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.”

In fact, what he is saying is: Spiritual growth, transformation, becoming like Christ, sanctification, all those words, at the heart of it is when you get a glimpse, an accurate picture of exactly who God is, in your experience, and each of those glimpses produce a transformation, where your life, your heart, your attitudes, your soul becomes progressively like Christ.

Nothing is more important than seeing God, not as you perceive Him to be, but as He actually is.

A.W. Tozer, one of my favorite, tiny, little books called The Knowledge of the Holy, on page one, writes this: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.”

Listen to this, “Worship is base or pure as the worshipper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason, the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself. And the most portentous fact about any man,” and I would add, any woman, “is not what he or she, at any given time, may say or do but what he, in his deep heart, conceives God to be.”

Just hypothetically, what if he’s right? What if this is true? What if the most important thing about your life, your future, your relationships, and all that you are is whether you have a clear, accurate picture of who God is?

He goes on in this quote and he says something that fascinates me and I believe it’s absolutely true. He says, “We tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian but of the company of Christians that composes the Church.”

We are going to start a journey together and for the next eight weeks, my goal, as best we can, is with vigor and passion, we want to see God with 20/20 vision.

As much as it is possible for human beings to get an accurate, clear picture of who the Creator of the universe is, what exactly He is like, we want to encounter or see or embrace and know God as He is, because what you’re going to learn, until you know Him as He is, you will never become all that He has created you to be.

Now, if you’ll open your notes, you’re going to see that I have put, basically, a little study guide together. And if you see a lot of verses in here and feel somewhat overwhelmed, that’s good. It’s by intent.

This is a basic study guide to help you see God with 20/20 vision. I’m not going to cover all these verses, but I’m going to cover more than you ever dreamed I would try in one hour.

I want you to walk out of here with a sense of overwhelmedness, of truth pouring on your soul, where you realize God is so much bigger, so much more holy, so much more loving, so much more wise. I want you to walk out of here feeling like, I’m only getting a little thimble dip into the character and into the love of God and there are buckets available. There are vats available to know Him.

And to do that, this is purely introductory. And then in the next eight weeks, we are going to, as though we could, though we can’t, examine the character of God as though His character were a diamond and we will look at different facets called “attributes” of what He is like, and how understanding and applying them will literally transform your life, transform your prayers, transform your relationships.

But this basic study guide is going to begin with three facts that are just very basic that lead us to three questions that we need to ponder. And so if you have a pen, pull it out, because I want you to jot some notes because I will give you a homework assignment. You will never discover who God is by listening to someone else. You will discover who God is when you dig and we will discover exactly how to do it.

So three facts we need to consider if we are going to see God with 20/20 vision. Fact number one is that God is not like us. Let me just repeat. God is not like us. We are made in His image and there are similarities but God is not like us.

Now, in the next few minutes, I am going to overwhelm you with passages of Scripture. And if you feel like you are drinking out of a fire hose, it is with complete intentionality.

I’m going to ask you later in this message to look up each of these verses yourself so that God can speak to you directly. But I am just literally going to let the truth pour forth so that you have this sense of being backed up and going, Whoa. Maybe my God was too small.

And if I was trying to convince you from Scripture that God is not like you, I would start in Isaiah 40 and I would ask you to follow along as I read where God is speaking, “‘To whom will you compare Me? Or who is My equal?’ says the Holy One. Lift your eyes and look at the heavens. Who created these?” he says. “He brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and might and strength, not one of them is missing.

“Why do you say, O Jacob and complain, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord, and my cause is disregarded by my God?’ Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord, Yahweh, the I AM THAT I AM, is the everlasting,” or eternal, “God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary and His understanding no one can fathom.” He is not like us! People get tired; God never gets tired. We get weary; God never gets weary. We don’t understand. God never has a question come to His mind. He is all-powerful, He is all-knowing, He is all-wise. He is not like us.

On your own, please, check out II Samuel 7:22 and then the passage that rings my bell, if you will, about how different God is is what Paul writes as the doxology of one of the greatest books in the Bible.

After describing the free will of man and the sovereignty of God and the complexity of all of life, he steps back and says, “Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?’” Answer – no one. “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?” Answer – no one. “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever and ever! Amen.”

From Him, God is the source of everything. Through Him, He is the instrumental cause of all that exists and, ultimately, it’s to Him, for His glory. He is not like you, He is not like me. And we get that, that’s step one. We tend, unconsciously, to think that God is, we think of a Mother Teresa. She is so loving. Well, I wonder what God is like. He must be one hundred times more loving that Mother Teresa. Wrong.

As loving as Mother Teresa is or your mother or a great friend, the love of God is in a different category! It is unfathomable! The love of Mother Theresa is like a little tiny thimble and God’s love is like the oceans of all the worlds of all the planets in all the universe. He is not like us. That’s the first step to understanding Him.

The second is to consider fact number two. Left to ourselves, we tend to reduce God to manageable terms. In other words, we shrink Him. Left to ourselves, there is this great, grand, awesome, all-knowing, all-powerful, holy God and it makes us so uncomfortable we go, Zzzzip! Zzzzip! And we want to find a box and we want to tame Him and we want to see Him and we want to manage Him.

And then instead of falling down as servants before this awesome God, we try to get Him to be our servant and use Him. And you say, “Ingram, you’re getting a little strong here. I can’t believe you would say that about me. I’m mildly offended!”

Well, it’s true of all of us. Listen to Romans chapter 1 and watch the progression of the invisible, immortal, awesome God and what we, as people, do. The apostle Paul writes, “For although they knew God,” they had it clear, “they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their,” notice where the change occurs, “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools,” and watch the exchange, reductionism, “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” Do you see it?

Left to ourselves, we reduce God to manageable terms. Now, notice there is a very long passage: Job 38 to 42. I would challenge you, lovingly, gently if you want to see this process, get yourself a Diet Coke, a cup of tea, Santa Cruz Roasting, put your feet up, and read Job 38, 39, 40, 41, and 42. And you will watch a series of people grapple with how great God is and they will, one by one, put Him in different little boxes that are manageable.

The last passage here is Exodus 32:1 to 6 and this is the classic passage. This is what we all do. Do you remember the story of Moses? And there is all this power, they have seen God’s power. The Red Sea parts, okay. The cloud by day and you have the fire by night. They have manna.

Well, Moses is going up to get the Ten Commandments and while Moses is away, the cats are going to start to play.

Follow along – Exodus 32:1 through 6. And what I want you to listen for as I read is how, because of the uncertainty and the unknowing and the problem with not being in control, how this group of people, although they have seen the hand of God, miracles, and rescue, how they reduce this God that they can’t see, with all this power, who just delivered them, into something that they can control.

“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what happened to him.’” He’s AWOL.

“Aaron answered them, ‘Well, take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.’ So all the people took off their earrings and they brought them to Aaron. And he took what they handed him and he made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioned with a tool. Then they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ When Aaron saw this,” that people were starting to worship, “he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, ‘Tomorrow we will have a festival to the Lord.’ So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. And afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.”

And the revelry here is not like a worship service. It had to do with base sensuality, it had to do with casting off restraints, it was a party not unlike Animal House.

Now, did you notice what happened? “We can’t see this God, and so we are going to take something that we have and we are going to make it, and then we are going to call it god, and then we are going to worship it, and then we are going to create religion – burnt offerings to it – and then we are going to create religious exercises that we really want to do anyway in the name of religion.”

It happens all the time. Now you’re saying to yourself, Well, you know, I don’t make idols. I can’t remember the last time I went home and said, “Excuse me, honey! Go to the back bedroom, going to bow down to the statue in the kids’ bedroom forty-five times. I think it might do some good.”

Now, you don’t do that. I don’t do that. You know the idols we make? We take this God of the Bible who is all-wise and powerful and we shrink Him down. And so what we do is we make Him the self-help genie.

And instead of worshipping Him and knowing Him and us being servants, who want to understand His mission and following Him, by faith, not being able to see, and He is totally not tame and we can’t control Him, and He is awesome and powerful, and we trust.

We, little by little, work the verses around and we come to the conclusion that the real goal in life is to be happy. Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. The real goal in life is to be fulfilled.

And so we take the Bible verses and God and we mold Him around and we say, “Let’s see, if we read the Bible in the morning, if we pray a few prayers, if we give some money, if we go on a missions trip, if we read some Christian self-help books, we are going to have these unbelievable, intimate, deep marriages. All of our kids are going to turn out right. They are never going to have any problems. We are going to be upwardly mobile in our jobs. We’ll never be depressed, we’ll never be sad, bad things won’t happen to us. Life will be wonderful if we just obey.”

And ultimately what we are saying is what we worship is our own happiness. What we have said is most important is our personal fulfillment and we have created and reduced a God who is supposed to fulfill our agenda. And then when our friends get cancer and our kids don’t turn out right and we don’t have this incredible bliss in a fallen world with our marriage, then what do we do? “What’s the deal, God? I have been going to church regularly. I pray, I’m giving, I’m…”

And we have a little molten calf. I’ve got news for you. That’s not the God of the Bible. He may give you a great marriage, your kids may turn out great, but you live in a fallen world and the goal of worshipping Yahweh, the goal of knowing and understanding Jesus the Messiah is that He is all that there is. He is the way and the truth and the life and we are disciples and we follow Him and we do what? We die to ourselves daily and there is an agenda.

And His promises are: In the world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer; I am with you and I will give you peace and I will help you through the troubled marriage and I will give you grace. And this health and wealth and fulfillment gospel is idolatry. And there are a lot of people very disappointed with God because they have been taught or believed that the Bible promised a lot that it never did.

Actually, it promises a lot more. There is a lot more to life than fulfillment.

The second thing we see in our day, by way of reducing and reduction of God is what I call the new “salad bar religion.” With the pluralism that’s happened, I remember sitting on the plane with a young gal, probably late twenties. And we began to talk and I was opening my Bible and reading a little bit and she goes, “Oh! Are you spiritual?” And I said, “Well, yeah! Actually, I don’t want to get into it, but everyone is spiritual.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, we have a Spirit that resides in us and there is a vacuum in our heart and God wants to have a relationship with everyone!”

“Oh, wow! Well, we have a lot in common!” I said, “Well, tell me a little bit about you. What do you believe?” She goes, “Everything!” I said, “Well, what do you mean ‘everything’?” She goes, “Oh, everything!” And she named the group and it’s a cult and she says, “Uh, yeah. I just, you know, I like this part of Buddhism and I think that’s really cool and I feel good when I do that. And Judaism brings that. I like that. Jesus. You know, He’s got some really nice stuff. There’s some stuff I don’t care for but I like this out of that. And, actually, I dipped into Hinduism and I’m not sure, maybe I have had three or four, six former lives. I’m not quite sure but I kind of like the reincarnation. I like this over here, the heaven part I like. The hell part I don’t. The justice, I don’t think God could be like that. I think He’s always loving.”

And she created this amazing god out of the salad bar of all religions, picked what she wanted and said, “I’m spiritual!” Could I help you? Who is she worshipping? Who is she worshipping? She is worshipping herself. She has, by fiat logic, said, “I must be all-knowing, I must be all-wise, I must be all-powerful, and I must know all that there is to see the truth that is truth in all the different forms of men reaching after a god. And I am the one who will determine what that is and I am the center of the universe and I will make up all my rules so that I can ‘be happy,’ therefore, I am god.”

If you are going to see God with 20/20 vision, number one, you need to understand, He is not like you and He is not like me. And left to yourself, you will have an unconscious tendency to reduce Him into manageable terms.