Don't Put God In Your Box Of Convenience!

"... 'I live in a high and holy place, and with the oppressed and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed'" (Is. 57:14, HCSB). 
".., 'Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it' ... 'This is the gate of heaven'" (Gen. 28:16, HCSB).   

We all tend to limit God naturally because we are limited in our perspective of reality.  But God cannot fit into our boxes or definitions. He is beyond analysis and description!  To define God to your specs is to make Him one-dimensional and that cannot be, for He is infinite and that means we cannot fathom His limits.  No adequate definition of God has ever been penned, we cannot define Him nor describe Him fully or exhaustively, but we can know Him truly!  The first Greek ancient philosopher, Thales, the father of Western philosophy, was asked to describe God and he couldn't.   The Bible doesn't attempt to describe God either, but to make Him known.

The ancients could only conclude that God must be eternal, infinite, and immutable as well as immaterial to be God at all!  The Latins said that the finite cannot contain or fathom the infinite! God doesn't measure up to your personal specs in your calculus!  But the infinite can penetrate the finite and that's what happened, so we can know Him; this is why the Bible never attempts to fully describe God, but only to make Him known and knowable.  '

There are many ways we put God in boxes:  when we just see God as our Savior, or our Lord, simply as our Father without being our Provider,  or without Him being our Judge or Maker to be accountable to.  People who know little doctrine may see Him as the "man upstairs" or "the Great Spirit in the sky" or even the "Sentimental Grandfather, or Father Time."  Seeing Him as our Santa Claus or Genie is also going down the wrong road, and many prayer warriors make this mistake in their prayers (the purpose of prayer is prayer and getting God's will done, not in making petitions like giving God a wish list--it changes us, not God.

God is the Creator of the time-space continuum, which means He is outside His creation and has all-mighty power over it as the Creator, not an enslaved creature like us as part of creation! With Him, time is not of the essence and is no factor.   God's immensity refers to the fact that He cannot be limited by space--He is fully everywhere all the time, which is interpreted as necessitating that He is just as much in one part of the cosmos as another and not any less so--as Christians, we believe in the God who is there and also the God who is in us!  What a wonderful truth:  as big as God is, He can come to live in our hearts so that we can experience His eternal, divine, unconditional love!

God is also eternal and outside the time limits that we find ourselves limited and defined by.  He doesn't think in terms of time like we do because it's always "now" with God--eternity past and eternity future are the same--but He is able to act and function in time for our benefit so that we can know Him. Jesus made the leap into the time-space continuum with His incarnation and became limited with our constraints in His humiliation and kenosis or the emptying of the independent usage of His Deity. Yes, God is "not far from any one of us" (per Acts 17:27) and He also dwells in the heavens and "inhabits eternity" (cf. Isaiah 57:15)!  He is there, and He is not silent, according to Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer!  

We must never ask ourselves or others, "Where's God?" but "Where isn't God?"  And more appropriately:  "Where's the church?" We must always tell ourselves that God did something about evil--He made us!  It was wisely said, "What's wrong with the world?  I am.  Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton."  God chooses to live through us as He inhabits our hearts: His heart to love others through, His voice to spread the good news; His ears to listen to those in need; His hands to lend a helping hand to the needy and destitute--anyone in our orbit who needs our aid is our neighbor and we are to be Good Samaritans.  "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," it has been wisely said by Edmund Burke.

We must attribute three seminal traits to God for our salvation though: His love that cared about our plight and condition; His holiness that necessitated Him to accomplish it; and His justice that had to be satisfied in Christ on our behalf--all three must act in accord and unison for our redemption. 

God is big!  In fact, so big He holds the universe in His hands as the hymn goes:  "He's got the whole world in His hands..."  He is able to roll up the heavens like a curtain and to create a new heaven and earth at will!  God is so big, in fact, that everything, by contrast, is small and trivial; all our petitions and requests are as nothing to His infinity and magnitude.  Caveat:  It's not how big our faith is but how big our God is--faith must be aimed high!  Let's not just attempt great things for God, but expect them!  (cf. Willliam Carey's sermon).

Luther accused Erasmus of having thoughts of God that are too human!   We tend to see things from man's perspective:  How big is your church? Or, how big is your ministry?  God sees potential even in the small matters!  We never worry that our concerns are too trivial when we realize how big God is because it's all the same to Him!   Nothing too big for His omnipotence; nothing too trivial for His love to escape His concern for us.   Soli Deo Gloria!