Your God Is Too Small

You may recognize the title of this post as borrowed from the title of a book published by J.B. Phillips, a British scholar, back in 1953 (and updated in 2004). I first read the book as a college student in the early 1970s and often think about its premise: we are tempted to make God fit into our own categories – categories that we can understand with great certainty and with which we are able to better “manage” the God who created the world and all that is in it, as if He could, somehow, be managed.

In 1978, N.T. Wright wrote a book titled Small Faith – Great God. It was updated in a second edition published in 2010. A part of Wright’s premise in the book is, “Life is not without its messiness and difficulties, when hard times come and the unexpected knocks us down. . .  it is not great faith we need: it is faith in a great God.” (You do remember that mustard seed story Jesus tells? Matthew 17:20; Luke 17:6)

The kind of certainty that I can have with my own, personally created God is dangerous. Honestly, if there is no mystery associated with the One I believe to be God, the one in whom I trust my very life, then I wonder what need do I have of Him? One of the primary words the Bible associates with God is glory – and a primary meaning of that word is something like “beyond finite reality.” Unless I’m simply missing the entire point of the Bible’s testimony about God and my own experience with God, then He sometimes (often?) behaves in ways that I don’t understand.

Stop reading me for a moment and read John 5:1-18. This is the wonderful story of healing that happened at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. The pool had five porticoes, and around them “lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered.” (15:3) I remember in a sermon I preached on this text one time describing the scene as “the Grady Hospital Emergency Room.” (Grady Hospital is a huge public hospital in Atlanta where many people with no insurance, no funds to pay for medical care, etc., end up.) You can’t read that story and not think that Jesus had to step over people to get to the one person He chose to heal that day. How can we read that story and not ask, “Why that one, and not the rest?”

I have heard some sermons, heard some conversations and testimonies, and read a commentary or two where people have a kind of God that gives them a sense of certainty to answer that question. To me, that “God” is too small, to borrow from Phillips, or “not great enough,” to borrow from Wright. 

But it isn’t just about healing stories, both in the Bible and the ones we hear about today. Despite Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 4:5 that we should exercise great care in not judging those whose sins are different than ours, it isn’t hard to hear that happening in casual conversations and fire-laden sermons on a regular basis, and lots of other ways, as well. Paul’s reasoning for this warning is that we should “wait until the Lord comes.” He is competent to judge because of two primary abilities: [a] He knows the whole story (He “brings to light the things hidden in the darkness”) and He knows motives (He can “disclose the motives of men’s hearts”). Ironically, Paul’s final clause in verse five is not “so He can send them all to hell,” but rather, “then each man’s praise will come to him from God.” If my God – the self-created-in-my-own-image God we often worship – is so small that I can understand the whole story and motives about my own behavior and the behavior of others as well as He does, then “my God is too small.” Is it possible that what I, along with my too-small God, might condemn, the God beyond me, who understands the whole story and motives, will send praise?

The Bible itself tells some stories about God that are filled with mystery. Can you really make “easy sense” out of the Job story? Or what about some of the Psalms, where the psalmist is utterly comfortable suggesting that God doesn’t always act in ways that we think He should. Have you ever read the opening lines of Psalm 22 – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? . . . O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest” and compared them to Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”? Have you had an experience or two in life that made you feel like Psalm 22 was more true than Psalm 23? Did Jesus have such an experience? Take a look at Matthew 27:45, 46.

Or what if you were asked to give the devotion at a Sunday morning soup line for unhoused people in one of our major urban areas and were assigned the text from the Sermon on the Mount that says, “look at the birds of the air . . . yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” (Matthew 6:26) Or had a similar experience with a clothing mission and your text was “not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.” (Matthew 6:27-29) Would there be a chorus of wonderers trying to join their voices with the “multitude of sick, blind, lame, and withered” at the Bethesda pool on the day Jesus healed just one person? 

I think, at least in part, the answer to my questions about God are found in a better understanding of the Abraham and Sarah story in Genesis. In Genesis 15:5, God shows Abraham the multitude of stars in the heavens and tells him, “So shall your seed be.” In Genesis 17:5, God says, “I have made you the father of many nations.” This is the promise that Abraham (and Sarah) believed. They believed that promise “hoping against hope,” as Paul says in Romans 4:18, and despite the reality that both of them were so far beyond childbearing years that their bodies were “as good as dead” when it comes to having a child. A lot of water went over the dam between the promise to Abraham and Sarah and the birth of Isaac. But they believed the promise.

Paul will declare in Galatians 3:7-9, “be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham . . . so then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer.” That means, for each of us who have faith in Christ, the outcome of believing the promise is amazing: “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” Or in Galatians 3:31, “We are not children of a bondwoman, but of the free woman.” 

That can only mean that Christ is the fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham, and it is that promise that we trust which assures us that, in Christ, we will receive the long-ago planned outcome of God’s design to rescue and restore creation to its God-intended purpose.

It is in that promise that I can rest comfortably when I think about lots of life’s issues and challenges. The promise is not that all will be easy-going in this world. For Abraham and Sarah, a lot of time passed between the time God inaugurated the promise of a child and when the birth of that child was consummated.

Jesus declared, in Mark 1:14, 15, that “the Kingdom of God is here.” In response to that, we should “repent and believe the good news.” But Jesus also taught us to pray these words: “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10) That sounds like the kingdom is already here, but not yet consummated. Little wonder John will say, in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, we are already children of God, and it has not yet appeared what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” The technical theological phrase for that is realized eschatology, but the more easily understood way of saying that is “we are living in-between the times time” – the time of the inauguration of the kingdom and the consummation of the kingdom. Like was true for Abraham and Sarah – the time between the promise and its ultimate fulfillment will not always be easy. Jesus didn’t promise that it would be. But when we believe the promise, we will be children of Abraham, without the slightest need for biological ethnic identity; we are safe in the arms of Jesus for eternity.

The church in our day may need to adjust how we talk about life in Christ. We sometimes sound like once we accept Jesus, all is well from that moment on. We sing first-person singular worship songs that all but say exactly that. We celebrate what we see as healings because of someone’s great faith – without regard to the reality that Jesus doesn’t heal everyone around Him (re-read John 5). With our “small God,” we sometimes over-promise what we think God has said He will do in the immediate reality of life, but were we to better understand what Wright calls our “great God,” we might better communicate a truer vision of God for us all. We often feel competent pronouncing statements of serious judgment that Paul thinks we are incompetent to do. There is a huge difference in lifting up God’s ideals for human behavior and announcing judgment on those who don’t meet what we perceive to be the standard. 

I still vividly remember the late evening at Piedmont Fayette Hospital when a doctor we knew, because Vicki had been his patient before, told us, “There is a mass on her pancreas, and it’s not good.” My brain (and probably more so my heart) immediately went to, “That’s not fair.” She courageously and with great faith fought that “unfairness” for two years and eight months. It’s now been three years and seven months that I have been coming home to an empty house and sleeping in an empty bed. I eat lots of meals alone. I still find myself thinking, when I hear news that Vicki would want to know, “let me text or call her” – only to realize I can’t do that. 

In that sense, I have more in common with the hundreds of unhealed people at the Bethesda pool or the psalmist who declared, “by night I have no rest,” than you might imagine. I know I am not alone in that reality.

But like Abraham and Sarah, I haven’t come close to giving up on the promise! The promise that eternally those who, in faith, are the children of Abraham, will find peace and reunion on that day when the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven and God makes His dwelling among mortals. (Revelation 21, 22) What I don’t believe is that praying in faith means prayers will be answered as I want them to be. What I don’t understand is why, occasionally, certain people are healed while others aren’t. I’ve known no one who faithfully prayed for others like Vicki did. There were hundreds of faithful people praying for her. But she didn’t get well. That is what it is like to be living “in the in-between the times time.” 

For that to work does not require “great faith,” but rather “faith in a great God.” That means that I must avoid making my God too small and be willing to allow His mysterious nature and way of doing things to be understood in the context of “the promise.” It means that I must understand that this God made all humans in His image, and I dare not presume to be judge, jury, and executioner of anyone. I’m not big enough to handle that. It means that I trust that John was correct when he said, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and Peter was correct when he said, “God is not slow about His promise (singular), as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) His love and patience continue to give me courage to believe the promise.

God has already started to fulfill that promise – think of the birds and fields of Matthew 6 – but He is patiently waiting to consummate that promise. Like Abraham and Sarah, there will be tough moments, but hang on to the promise. It has kept me sane, and it can do the same for you. 

^{Image by Manuel from Pixabay}