The God You Can't Imagine
The ceaseless praise of God we see in Isaiah 6, and that still exists in Psalm 51, is connected to a fundamental truth about God that often gets sidelined today. It’s that God’s reality is not diminished by our inability to comprehend him.
God is no less real because our grasp of him is elusive. He depends on nothing for his being, but instead all things are dependent upon him. That is why our praise can only be responsive and participatory, but never creative. We have not invented him. God is the God you can’t imagine.
This is very basic when it comes to God, and many of us would at least get this question right on a quiz. And yet, this is such an important truth to talk about because the world around us tells a different story.
At the societal level, as part of the air we breathe, people often try to shrink God down to a size that they can fit into their own heads. Of course, no one claims to be doing this, but that’s what is happening any time you hear someone start a sentence with “I can’t imagine a God who [fill in the blank].”
PUTTING GOD IN A BOX
I’ve heard well-intentioned Christians say things like that, and even write books based upon that premise—but what is actually happening there? What is behind that kind of statement?
Those who think and speak that way are simply confining God to the limits of their own understanding. They are thinking of God only on their terms, according to the standards they find acceptable—God can only be God if he stays within the bounds I’ve set, the logic says.
This kind of thinking is rooted in pride—the pride of making God into one’s own image, rather than submitting to the God who simply is. Not only is this wrong, it’s also dangerous. It’s the seedbed of bad theology and eventually apostasy. That’s because the Bible relentlessly challenges any figment of God that people forge with their own minds, and to be honest, the whole thing is almost too predictable.
“The Bible relentlessly challenges any figment of God that people forge with their own minds”
Eventually, if this kind of thinking persists, what the Bible says about God will not square with the limits we’ve set on him, which creates a subtle crisis. That crisis eventually leads to a game of exegetical Twister with the biblical text. We are forced to stretch and maneuver all we can to find a preferable interpretation of the text without toppling over. This sort of thing is too exhausting to be sustainable, so before long we give in. We start compromising the authority of Scripture, crediting our conscience with a voice deeper than the words of God. The more we do this over time, and sometimes sooner than later, we will just end up walking away from God completely.
This kind of apostasy is heart-breaking and misguided, and maybe the misguided part is the saddest of the whole thing. I’ve seen it before. The person thinks that walking away from God is brave and adventurous, that they’re somehow embarking upon a newfound freedom. But really, they’re not walking away from God at all; they’re just walking away from their own misunderstanding. That’s the terrible irony. People assume they’re rejecting God, but they’re actually rejecting their misconception of God. They’re not free from God, they’re enslaved to their own selves. They’re abandoning the mess they’ve made with their own imaginations after hacking up the Bible and blending it with a cultural wishlist.
Most people want a box-lunch version of God, a deity who is adequate but mobile, a deity who curbs my hunger but also fits into a small container I can carry wherever I want. But that’s not who God is. It’s doesn’t work that way. God is the God you can’t imagine.
TWO FRAMES ON OUR WORLD
It’s also worth noting that we’re more prone to think wrongly about God in our modern times than people did in centuries past. I don’t mean heresies didn’t exist in the past—of course they did—but today the mainstream way people conceive of religion is categorically different than how it used to be. It has to do with two opposing frameworks for how people understand reality. There is a moral framework and then there is a psychological framework.
When it comes to the moral framework, that’s where we draw clear lines. There is such a thing as right and wrong. There is absolute truth. Reality is reality regardless of my own thoughts. The moral framework is the story from outside, the external word. But when it comes to the psychological framework, that’s where the world is only what we’re able to compute, where everything orbits around the self and our interpretation. The psychological framework is the story from the inside, the internal word.
In the moral framework, when it comes to theology, it is completely acceptable that God rubs us the wrong way sometimes. Certainly there will be things about him that we don’t understand, or maybe even that we wouldn’t prefer—because God is God apart from us. He’s God. He is who he is. He is holy, holy, holy, as the seraphim put it, and we stand before him.
“God is God apart from us.”
But in the psychological framework at its worst, God exists only for us, and therefore we will only want the parts of God that we find personally therapeutic. This is where near-sighted empathy reigns over time-tested truth.[1] It’s where we only value the easily digestible portions of God, the box-lunch version, the kind packed with processed theology. This theology feigns being edgy and profound, but it’s as tired as the golden calf.
The real whirling adventure, as Chesterton said, is orthodoxy itself. There is nothing “so perilous and so exciting” as embracing the God who has revealed himself to us in Scripture.[2] That means holding together what he has made known and what he hasn’t, and for us to settle for anything less is like choosing splash-pad entertainment over stepping into the ocean shoreline.
STICKING TO SPLASH PADS
My wife and I are fans of splash pads. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re simply concrete slabs at parks or pavilions arranged to shoot, spray, and dump water for the amusement of kids. There are a handful of them throughout our city, and it’s always the safest way to let our brood have a little water fun in the summer. They can get wet and splash around all they want, and we don’t have to worry about them going under. It might even mean we ourselves can relax, at least for a minute.
But the ocean shoreline is nothing like that. The currents that swirl on the beach are untamed, and the more we wade into those waters, the more carefully we must step. On the shoreline it never escapes you that you’re staring into something bigger than yourself, something teeming with life you can’t see, whose bounds are completely beyond your senses.
When it comes to the transcendent, because we often want the sensation of water without the ferocity of the waves, we tend to stick to the splash pads. Make-believe fun is safer than mystifying joy, after all. The same goes for the psychological framework where the self is more real than God, where our interior feels more legitimate than the exterior of God’s reality. It is safer inside, but less true, and therefore the world of Psalm 51 will have none of it.
THE GOD YOU CAN’T IMAGINE
In the world of the Bible, the real world, God has given us a moral framework full of meaning and purpose regardless of whether we know it or not. Right now, in this very moment, even if you’ve never uttered a word of adoration to God, even if you didn’t exist, the seraphim would still be doing what they do. The chorus would still resound: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
That is happening right now.
That’s because God is the God you can’t imagine, because he is the God outside of us, and he will be praised whether we’re part of it or not.
[1] See Joe Rigney, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy,” Desiring God, www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathy (accessed: May 31, 2019)
[2] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 1 (Ignatius, 1996), pp. 305-6.
Excerpted with permission from Mercy for Today by Jonathan Parnell. Copyright 2020, B&H Publishing Group.
Jonathan Parnell is the lead pastor of Cities Church in Minneapolis-St.Paul, a church he and his team planted in 2015. He is a church-planting trainer with the Send Network and the author of Never Settle for Normal: The Proven Path to Significance and Happiness (2017). He and his wife, Melissa, live in the Twin Cities with their seven children.