An Inhuman God

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These things you have done, and I have been silent;
you thought that I was one like yourself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.
Mark this, then, you who forget God,
lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver!
The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me;
to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!

(Psa. 50:21-23)

Sometimes when we find ourselves contemplating the mysteries of life, we find ourselves feeling a tension between what is and what we think should be. We find ourselves wondering how God can allow, and even enable, certain things when our estimation of them is that they are inconsistent.

There are actually a lot of examples of this. The most common one is probably the question of suffering in the world. Many presume that God's goodness means that suffering should be an impossibility. Similarly many contemplate the priority of God in bringing himself glory and can't help but view it as narcissistic and self important. Some find the enormity of God's abhorrence for sinners and sin, and his consequent wrathfulness, incompatible with his description as love and loving. And others consider the sending and sacrifice of his Son to be an act of abuse that is well beyond the possibilities of a Father who loves.

While these things appear logically sound, the mistake here is one of conflation. Sometimes we take the attributes of God and consider them against those same attributes as they are expressed in people, and then expect that they are fully alike. The mistake here is to make God like a human. It's to make God's goodness, God's love, his Fatherhood and his self-glorification exactly the same way as we would our experience of goodness, our love, our understanding of Fatherhood and our experience of the self-glorifying. Now this is not to say that there is no similarity or correlation between God's attributes and our experience of those same things. Only that God and his attributes should not be viewed and understood in identical terms to how we might do that with each other.

In 1887, the historian and writer, Lord Acton, penned a letter which contained a most profound and provocative statement. He stated that, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Since then, this piece of insight has been used to critique and justify many things, one of which has been the goodness of God relative to his power. The argument goes that if God has absolute power and authority, then it stands to reason that he is absolutely corrupted and unable to do good as Christians claim.

The deficiency of this reasoning is clear. What applies to humanity, which itself wasn't proven but simply stated, does not necessarily apply or apply in the same manner as it does to God. It is pure foolishness to think that the weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity are vulnerabilities that also apply to the creator God.

Psalm 50 is emphatic in this regard. It is in foolishness and presumption that people consider God in the terms of a shared humanity. And so God responds to such, that as humanity forgets his identity and worth, he displays his distinction through his judgement and salvation. It will be shown, that God is unlike every other being. He is God. And as people who serve him, we do well when we recognise the difference.

God is in an entirely different category of existence to people. And so it is a mistake to apply the rules and principles of humanity to God, as if he is bound by the same constraints. It would be like looking for feathers on a chimp and a thumb on a bird simply because there is some similarity in that they are both animals.

Though we come to appreciate certain things about God in our experience of attributes that we also have, and though our understanding of God can be profoundly enriched by this, we should not and cannot come to the conclusion that we have fully understood God's possession of them. They are simply not entirely the same. We cannot make God so small that he is limited by the sorts of pettiness and weakness that we are. Indeed we must do the opposite. As we are exposed to God's revelation of himself in Christ and the Scriptures, we should be awed at his magnificence, even when there is mystery as to how it works out.

If our human frailties are to teach us anything, it should be that we need help. It should be that they teach us to seek God's strength and to trust his perfection, rather than to doubt his existence or his reliability. Essentially what this means is that we need to be careful as we read God's word, that we are not reading our experience, and therefore our imperfection, into it, but that it speaks into us and shapes our experience and understanding of God and the world.

In the course of the next few months, on this blog we'll be exploring some theology which can pose this very temptation. And as we do that we need to make sure we're in the right place. We need to recognise firstly that God is greater and different to us, and is capable of things that are beyond our experience. Secondly we have to be able to see that though God reveals much about himself and the world to us in his Word, he has not revealed everything, and as Bible believing, Christ submitting Christians, we need to be okay with that.

God says in Isaiah 46:9, "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me." Let's give him the esteem that he deserves, not just in our lives but also in our theologising.

A Question to Answer
When have you found yourself wrestling with something about God because your human experience makes it seem unlikely or inconsistent?