The Things that God is Not

Photo Credit: Alan Wolf 2004

I like to encourage people that God has a divine sense of humor.  To that end, I often site the platypus.  How do you survey your work on that first platypus with a straight face?  I can almost see God at Creation, "Okay fellas, classify THIS."

These kind of candid images of our Almighty Creator come easy for me.  I'm very comfortable with casting God in the role of my Heavenly Father.  I have a good relationship with my own father.  Humor is commonplace in our conversations, and we often jibe each other harmlessly.  My personal view of God is shaped by this, so I'm keen to ways that God uses humor.

Sometimes I think this familiarity comes at a cost.  God is still unique and divine.  He is worthy of worship and awe.  While it's an incredible blessing to feel comfortable with God the Father, I have to work to understand the "fear of the Lord".  Like most aspects of Christianity, it seems we have to keep some tension between the ways we understand God.

It raises some questions about the roles that God plays in each of our lives.  What predispositions do we have when considering the role of Almighty?  To have this question answered I conducted a scientific survey of a highly varied sample population:  I asked my Facebook friends.

Responses were as follows:

A source of unconditional love
An idea of hope
The solution
A coping mechanism
The redeemer
The ransom

A variety of answers to be sure.  And no real consensus to be found among them.  I may have to dig deeper to learn more about the roles of God.  In fact, perhaps it's time to get it straight from "the horse's mouth".  The Bible says a great deal about the character and role of God in the earth.  Here's a sampling of verses containing "God is...":

Numbers 23:19 - God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.  Does he speak and then not act?  Does he promise and not fulfill?

Deuteronomy 4:24 - For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.

Deuteronomy 10:17 - For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.

Psalm 7:11 - God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day.

Psalm 47:7 - For God is King of all the earth; sing to him a psalm of praise.

Psalm 54:4 - Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me.

Psalm 62:7- My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge.

Psalm 84:11 - For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.

Matthew 22:32 - ".. 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?  He is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

John 4:24 - God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.

1 Corinthians 14:33 - For God is not a God of disorder but of peace--as in all the congregations of the Lord's people.

1 John 1:5 - This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you:  God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.

1 John 3:20 - If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

1 John 4:16 - And we know and rely on the love God has for us.  God is love.  Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

1 John 5:20 - We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true.  And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ.  He is the true God and eternal life.

The Bible attributes a considerable number of characteristics to God.  It's not always easy for us to reconcile the varied images of God that the Bible presents.  God as righteous judge pouring out wrath seems to contradict "God is love".

I didn't write this post to infer anything about the various aspects of God.  Instead, I hoped to leave you with an explicit statement about God's nature:

God is all of these things, but He is none of them.

Far to often we want to create an image of God in our head's that we are comfortable with.  We want to be able to cast Him as Judge, or Father, or Spirit, or Shield, or King and then build our Christian principles around that.  The problem with that thinking is that God is all of those things and many, many more.  We can't wrap our heads around the immensity and perfection and divinity of our Creator, but we can strive to understand Him further through all His various aspects.

I sign out with the words of Rob Bell, "The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God."