Saturday, June 24, 2017

Our Vast and Immense God



This morning, as I sat before God, his massive reality came over me: His power, His manifest regeneration of my life thus far, and his constant and never-failing presence that superintends every aspect of this material and immaterial world.

I found myself smiling, during this all too rare moment of 20/20 vision of just how robustly immense and multifaceted God is, of the memory of the very educated person who once said of faith in God,

“It’s a fairy tale, nothing but wishful thinking.”

I sat back in awe that there can even exist people on this globe who would portend to truly have worked that infantile idea out, and that there are others who prefer to accept a god of their own creation rather than the Biblical Christ—those who ordain to glorify man over God.

I smile out of incredulity, because these notions are nonsensical; a silly farce in the face of an obvious genuine. It is ludicrous.

But then, I was there once too: proud of my university attendance, bookish identity and feminist scruples through which I audaciously propped myself up as All-Knowing.

Which only confirms the state of awe in God that encircled me this morning as the sun, His sun, rose out my Eastern window.

God has taken me, and many others, from that scourge of a place, that terribly prideful, delusional, self-aggrandizing state of being to here, this place of peace and contentment brought about through Godly, not human, wisdom.

And rather than take Him solely as a personal God, I refuse such an insult.

God is boundless to any of us, yet it is true He knows every hair on our head (Luke 12:7), our comings and goings (Psalm 121:8, Psalm 139) and our every thought (Psalm 139). He is at the same time immeasurable and vast, mighty and all-encompassing (Isaiah 40, 55; Psalm 147; Deuteronomy 10).

When I can’t go to sorrow, He can. When I am limited in my influence and what I can say, He is not. When I am ignorant of pain and suffering, He is aware of it. When He demands something of me, and He does, He tells me in His Word and through His Spirit’s conviction upon me. And when I have been haughty, He admonishes me by pointing out that I spoke of things too wonderful for me to know, or that I do not yet know (Job 42:3).

This morning, it all came home to me afresh: It is here, in the Triune God of Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I reside: in the expansive, permanent, capacity of God to always and forever be God.

copyright Barb Harwood



“Then Job replied to the LORD:

I know that you can do all things;
no plan of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
My ears had heard of you
But now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
Job 42:1-6


"O LORD, our Lord,
How majestic is your name in all the earth!” Psalm 8:9





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