To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with Him? (Isaiah 40:18)
O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder,Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,Thy power throughout the universe displayed,Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,How great Thou art, How great Thou art!(Stuart K. Hine)
The man who wrote that gospel song stretched his mind and expanded his vision until he had at least some conception of the majesty of God. He used words like "awesome wonder ... all the worlds ... [and] rolling thunder." In the end, all he could say was, "How great Thou art, How great Thou art!"
The prophet Isaiah spoke in much the same spirit to the people of Israel. He, too, stretched his imagination to the limit to try and put into words the incomparable, everlasting mystery of God which goes beyond all words:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,and marked off the heavens a span,enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure,and weighed the mountains in scales ...Whom did He consult for His enlightenment,and who taught Him the path of justice ...Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket,and are accounted as dust on the scales; He takes up the islands like fine dust ...All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by Him as less than nothing and emptiness.
Theodore Roosevelt also contemplated the "awesome wonder," but he found that wonder in the stars. It is said that whenever a certain friend came to visit him, they would go out at night and look up at the heavens. They would find a certain light in the sky, and then one or the other of the two men would say:
This is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda.It is as large as our Milky Way.It is one of a hundred million galaxies.It is 750,000 light-years away.It consists of one hundred billion suns each larger than our sun.
After this was said, "Roosevelt would always turn to his friend and say, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed!"1 The gospel song, the ancient prophet's words and Roosevelt's study of the heavens all speak the same message to us. They all testify to our insignificance, our smallness, our unimportance. If whole worlds are accounted as dust upon the scales of God, what are we but the tiniest sub-particles of existence? What are we, if "all the nations are as nothing before God, [if] they are accounted by Him as less than nothing and emptiness?"
It takes a certain kind of spiritual courage to stare into the face of our smallness, as Theodore Roosevelt did. We need a special kind of existential fortitude to use words like "less than nothing and emptiness," as Isaiah did. It takes spiritual courage to say, "How great Thou art," because the other side of that statement is, "How small I am." When we say of God, "How exalted Thou art! ", we are also saying, "How lowly I am!" Dare to contemplate the Infinite Majesty of God and we come face to face with our own insignificance, our own relative unimportance.
Not many preachers today will tell people how insignificant they are compared to the vast mysteries of God and His creation. Preaching about our own unimportance isn't the pleasing thing to do! It goes against the spirit of the age.
Look at the Saturday church ads in your local newspaper, especially the ads for the fast-growing, most "successful" churches. What do you see but week after week, the focus of worship has been subtly shifted from God to ourselves: our wants, our needs, our fulfillment, our self-esteem. This is the age of the individual. We are proud of who we are; we proudly proclaim that each individual is unique and infinitely important.
A comedian recently gave a pretty good summary of where our culture is going; and of course, popular religion is following along in step. He was talking about magazines to make his point.
In the 1940s and 50s, he said, we had a magazine called Life. Now, that's a big enough subject to be concerned about, Life.
In the 1960s, we got a magazine called People. That's a somewhat smaller subject, but still, it's broad enough, People.
In the 1970s, a new magazine came out called Us. Of course, that's an even smaller focus than People, since now we're only talking about a sub-group of people - "Us" as opposed to "Them."
In the 1980s, we got a magazine called Self. Think about it: from Life to Self! How much narrower can our vision be and how much more self-important can we be? In our culture and even in too much of our popular religion, we are making ourselves the center of our worship, attention and concern.
Now, let me be clear about this: celebrating the individual is not all bad, especially in the modern world, where people can be mere cogs in society's great machinery. In communist countries, which deify the state, or in capitalist countries, which deify wealth, people can certainly feel alienated an insignificant. But there is another side to this glorification of ourselves: we "de-glorify" God. Just as some people can only feel important by putting others down, so too, can we glorify and elevate ourselves as men and women by lowering God.
In ancient days, people were afraid even to say the name of God out loud! Today, people talk as if they know God inside and out. Today, people think they are so familiar with God that they carry Him in their hip pocket, like a good luck charm.
Isaiah asked, "To whom will you liken God, or what likeness compare with Him?" Today, people are eager to answer that question. They jump up and say, "Me! God is like me! 'He walks with me and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own.' I know God and I want what God wants! God owes me His promises and He wants to give me blessings!"
Listen to our preachers today, especially some of our better-known popular preachers. You don't have to stretch your imagination or expand your mind to contemplate the God they present to you! All you have to know is yourself and what makes you feel good. All you need do is imagine what you would like in a friend or an intimate companion - then you will know all of the God this vainglorious age is content to worship.
In this day and age, we shun the God of awesome wonder, the God of Scripture so infinite that He holds the waters of the earth in the hollow of His hand. We think the ancients were a bit superstitious, or at least unenlightened, when they praised a God whom they admitted was beyond their comprehension.
Many people today would not understand or accept what Thackeray wrote, when he complained about the state of religion and the de-glorification of God which went on in his day:
O awful, awful name of God; Light unbearable! Mystery unfathomable! Vastness immeasurable! Who are these people who come forward to explain the mystery and gaze unblinkingly into the depths of the light and measure the immeasurable vastness to a hair? O Name, that God's people of old did fear to utter! 0 Light, that God's prophet would have perished had he seen! Who are these people that are now so familiar with it?"2
Who are they, indeed. Thackeray was right: contemporary people are too familiar with a God the ancients feared to see. Where is the reverence for God today, and the mystery of His name? Why is it important not to lose a faraway God, a God whom we can love and worship and praise - but never be totally familiar with?
If you have a sister who lives thousands of miles away, her homecoming would mean something to you. Her visit would be a special event and you would prepare for it eagerly. You would find that because her world is so distant and different from yours, you don't know her as intimately as you should know a sister, but you cherish every minute you spend with her because she lives so far away.
But if your sister lives just down the street, her visits would be more routine. You would still love her and enjoy seeing her, but what would be so special about being with that sister?
This is why it is important not to lose what the ancients knew: a faraway, unfathomable, incomprehensible God. God can't mean very much to those who fancy themselves so familiar with Him. God can't be much of a God if He always serves at our beck and call. The nearness of such a God is empty and shallow. This kind of God is little more than a Cosmic Good Buddy who tells us all His secrets, much as some vacuous Hollywood star tells all his secrets on a television talk show.
But when you seek a God whose distant and awesome wonder you cannot begin to imagine, the nearness of that God becomes filled with meaning! You cherish Him because you don't take His nearness for granted. You don't need to glorify yourself or claim God for yourself in order to find your own significance. You find your significance in Him, that this God, so full of unsearchable grace, would deign to come and be near to you.
We should remember that the Bible presents God in both these lights. God is both infinitely distant and intimately close. The same ancient mind which heard Isaiah speak of God's majesty also heard this in Deuteronomy: "But the word [of God] is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it" (30:14).
All of this is important if you would understand the meaning of Jesus Christ. Jesus came from that same unfathomable, exalted God Isaiah spoke about. Isaiah asked, "To whom would you liken God, or what likeness would you compare Him with?" and Jesus rose up to say, "Those who have seen Me have seen the Father" (John 14:9). Or, as Paul said in Philippians: even though Christ was "in the form of God, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness" (2:6). Christians can give thanks that God has come so near to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
But we miss the full essence of Jesus if we de-glorify the God who sent Him. If our God is de-glorified, so, too, is Jesus de-glorified, since God and Jesus Christ are of one.
We like to say to ourselves, "What a friend we have in Jesus," and so He is our Friend. But even within Jesus Himself, there is both a nearness and a distance. He lived with us and He suffered with us - in that sense, He was near to us. But He was not like us. He wasn't born as we are born; He did not live as we live (full of sin); He did not die as we will die. If you would see this Savior, Jesus, in all His fullness, you will hold His likeness to us and His likeness to God in a single thought.
Is God near to us and is He concerned with each of us as individuals? Of course He is! God even numbers the hairs on our heads (Matthew 10:30). He deals with each of us as if we are all that matter in the world. Especially when we are troubled and tossed about, we need to know that we can count on God to pay attention to our problem and see us through.
But do not be deceived by the culture and religion of the times. Do not be misled by the purveyors of popular piety, who have re-made God in human image and lost the God of majesty and awesome wonder, who have trivialized God and reduced Him to a mere good luck charm in the hip pocket of worldly faith.
Keep a faithful balance in your understanding of God - do not make God too close or too distant. Let God be God, both familiar and unfathomable! Come before Him with glad yet humble hearts and sense the nearness of a faraway God! Amen
Pastoral Prayer
Eternal and Ever-faithful God, to whom a thousand years are as but a day, how can we confess the fullness and majesty of Your name! You call the worlds into being. You stand at the end of time with Your grace. You bathe us in the light of Your wonderful ways, a light so bright that we bow our heads before it.
To You, O majestic and exalted God, we make bold with our flickering spirits to ask Your blessings now. Bless those who are struggling for health. Bless those who are struggling for faith and those whose struggle is simply to make ends meet in this callous world. Be near as only You can be to those in need, O God. Brighten their minds and deepen their spirits with the fullness of Your presence.
And Most Righteous God, who need not consult anyone for Your enlightenment, or learn from anyone the knowledge of justice, answer our prayers for the world today. We live in a darkness which is darker than the night. The moans of the hungry and the cries of the oppressed fall upon deaf ears in a world infatuated with transient frivolities. Speak throughout the earth in Your awesome wonder and rolling thunder, O Lord our God. Let justice come down like a mighty river. We are watching and waiting, working and praying for the redemption of this unhappy world, O God; we witness to Your new creation in Your church and in our lives. All praise and honor and glory be Yours, Great Lord, and accept us now as Your faithful people. In Jesus' name. Amen
1. Charles Wilson Beebe, The Book of Naturalists, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), p. 234
2. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Parish Sketch Book, "Madame Sand and the New Apocalypse."