God is Big
Texts: Isaiah 40:12-26; Ephesians 3:20-21
Pastor Phil Hughes American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
January 1, 2023
I don’t know what your vocation is, or where you report to work every day, but you know what I do. And I hope you feel sorry for me.
Maybe you teach, maybe you sell products, maybe you manage, maybe you are with the kids all day (harder work than many CEO’s), maybe you write software, maybe you make deliveries, or maybe you are retired and what I am saying has no relevance to you.
But my job is to talk about God. Think about the absurdity of talking about the One who made the stars and galaxies. Who, as it says in Isaiah, has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
…who with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens,
…who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, and weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance.”
I’m supposed to make him clear to you? Don’t you feel sorry for me? A little compassion please.
At least down at Costco the workers can show you what you come for. “You want the 48-roll pack of paper towels? Let me show them to you.” No mystery there.
Me? You come to hear me talk about someone we can’t see or touch, and what he has to do with our lives and this world. Or, you come to me and want to know where God is in this or that situation, and my job is to help you make sense of the Creator of the universe. It’s like an ant trying to help people get a mountain range.
Isaiah asks, “Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way?” Not me. Think of the absurdity of anyone explaining the transcendent, ultimate, power of all things: Almighty God.
You know, we are all theologians. You say, “I’m no theologian.” Oh yes you are. Every one of us. If you think about God, you are a theologian. Maybe you didn’t go to seminary, or have never read a book on theology, but whenever we think about God we are doing theology: the study of God.
And believe me, having been to theological seminary, and having read and studied and heard lots of “professional theologians,” they aren’t all that.
If when you think about God you believe that he is good, that’s a theological belief. If you think God is distant, you have come to that belief somehow and that is a theological belief. It is what you believe about God. If you think God only rewards good people but can’t stand bad people, you have developed that conviction somehow. If you pray, then you have a theology that says God is personal, he can be communicated with, and he will hear me.
I am talking to a room full of theologians because whenever we think or talk about God, we are doing theology. And really, we do this all the time without even realizing it.
And so the sermons for the next six weeks is going to be on God. We are going to hear about God for the next six weeks. “Wow, Phil. Your creativity and imagination never ceases to amaze us. How did you ever come up with that? Isn’t every sermon about God?”
In a way, every sermon is about God. But these sermons are going to be about who God is, what he is like, his attributes and his nature. You might say we are going back to square one, the basics, to remember the most fundamental thing: God.
We believe in God, worship God, have a relationship with God, rely on God, trust in God, pray to God. For most of us, God is part of our daily lives. But who is he? What is he like?
We say God is love, God is good, God is just. How do we know that? This series of sermons will take up various attributes of God.
Here is the affirmation about God I want to start with:
God is big.
Oh, yeah. He is big. Huge. Massive. Gigantic. Awesome. Majestic. Are there enough superlatives to describe the indescribable? Really there is no way to express the bigness of God. Big is really a pitiful word to use to describe him.
Isaiah says God is above all creation. The inhabitants of the earth look like grasshoppers to him. God can tell you the measure of the waters over the entire globe. He holds all the dirt in his hands. The nations are as nothing to him. The rulers of the earth come and go, but he remains.
Isaiah’s language is poetic. The images help us make sense of Someone we can’t fathom. Isaiah’s point is the immensity of God. And Isaiah didn’t know the tip of the ice berg. All we have learned about this world and the vastness and intricacies of this universe since Isaiah preached these words only make God bigger.
God is beyond time and space. Think about that. The clock and calendar are not relevant to God. He created time but exists outside of it. He made all that is seen and unseen, but he exists outside of it.
C.S. Lewis said to think of a sheet of paper which is infinitely extended in all directions. This piece of paper is huge and just goes on and on.
If you took a pencil and made a line one inch long on that paper, that would represent time. When you started pushing your pencil that would be the beginning of years. When you stopped and lifted your pencil that would be the end of all years and time. And all around that line is God.[1] (Do I need to let that sink in a bit?)
The millions and billions of years – however long this earth has been in existence – are nothing but that little line. God envelopes it. There is no beginning for God. There is no ending for God. Beginning and ending aren’t even words that apply to God.
The Bible begins, “In the beginning God…”, and spends no time trying to explain or argue for his existence. Psalm 90 says that “from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”
God is not bound by anything.
And we say this but we can’t really fathom it.
People and cultures have always had a sense for God. Many ideas have existed about who God is and what he is like.
Paul writes in Romans, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”[2]
People have seen the heavens, the mountains, the ocean, and have asked “Where did all this come from?” They have sensed that someone is behind all of this. There is a God. But what God is like has been thought about in a lot of ways.
It has sometimes led to what we call idolatry. Idolatry is making God into something that he is not. It is externalizing a false image of God.
Isaiah saw people in the eighth century B.C. making statues out of metal or wood, believing God could be contained in these figures.
We educated Americans can create gods just the same as others can and have done. You can make gods out of gold, wood or stone, or you can make a god out of your own imagination and ideas. And the god that many people worship and hold to is not the infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, boundless God, but something much less.
The fabulous preacher, A.W. Tozer, and this was sixty years ago, said that Christianity is decaying and going down into the gutter because the god of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible. Oh, we pray to God and say we believe in God, but we hold to a god who is much less than what he ought to be.[3]
We make the eternal, almighty, holy God into an idol god when we try to put him into our little boxes. We use God to support our particular cause or perspective, whether it be political or social. Surely God thinks and votes just like me, right?
We use God to support our comfort. We want him to make our lives easier, more prosperous, and more comfortable. Is that who God is?
We make God into a therapist or tool to help me with my problems. He is there when I need him. I will go to him when things get tough.
Even a picture of God as the “big man upstairs” or a grandfather sitting above the universe working all things out like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain is really a cheap view of God.
The problem with all of this is that we make God too small. Don McCullough, a pastor who was the president of Salt Lake Theological Seminary for a while when it was in existence, wrote one time,
“Any god I use to support my latest cause, or who fits comfortably within my understanding or experience, will be a god no larger than I and thus not able to save me from my sin or inspire my worship or empower my service. Any god who fits the contours of me will never really transcend me, never really be God. Any god who doesn’t kick the bars out of the prison of my perceptions will be nothing but a trivial god.”[4]
God is too big for us to download.
We can’t figure out who he is or what he is like on our own. We know only as God has revealed himself to us.
Christians, and Jews, hold that the Scriptures are how God has revealed himself. It is the story of God’s working in history, with and through people. As we track that story, we discover who God is.
Anyone who has read the Bible still finds there are plenty of questions and struggles, but that’s why we break down the Scriptures by reading, studying and learning. God tells us who he is in his Word.
And Christians believe we have seen and known the great and awesome God in Jesus Christ, his only Son. John wrote in his gospel, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”[5]
God is too big for anyone to get. But Jesus made him “small”, you might say. When God came in Jesus Christ he made himself accessible. He came in the flesh so that we could see him, hear him, and know him in a way never possible before.
What is God like? Look at Jesus Christ.
Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” He claimed to be equal with God, sent from the Father, speaking only what the Father told him. He did the things one would expect only God to be able to do. He made belief in him the crux of knowing the God of the universe.
Which leads to another facet of the bigness of God: that God is one, but that he is three. The Trinity. That God is one and there is only one God, but he exists in three different persons or faces: Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.
This is a core Christian conviction, but one that is hard to fully understand. Let me try to help us with this:
The Father is not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is not the Father or the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Son or the Father. But all share the same nature. They each have a different rule, but are one in substance. Different, but one.
There is no verse or passage in the Bible that specifically speaks of this but throughout the Bible there are traces of God being three in one.
In Genesis, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…”[6] God speaks in the plural.
Before he ascends to the Father, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”[7] Not names, but name. One name – singular – but three expressions or persons.
At the end of 2 Corinthians, Paul writes this blessing, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be will all of you.”[8] All three are put together as if in cooperation, movement and unity with one another.
Peter writes and describes Christians as “having been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ…”[9] Father, Son and Holy Spirit all in relationship and working with one another.
At Jesus’ baptism, the Father’s voice is heard that this is his Son, and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus. There they all are again.
The disciples and apostles certainly understood Jesus to be God. It says they worshipped him. And for a faith that came from Judaism, everyone knew you only worshipped God. Jesus was worshipped.
Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit and said he and the Father would send the Holy Spirit to and into anyone who believed in him. In Scripture the Holy Spirit is referred to as the Spirit of God or the Spirit of Christ.
The more people read the Scriptures – and there are many other instances we could look at - the more the work of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is seen, like three different figures dancing together, working as one yet each separate.
And if you find the belief about the Trinity mind-bending, well, can you worship a God you can totally explain, understand and put in a tidy box? We have a big God. Bigger than our minds. Bigger than our experience. Bigger than this universe and all the universes.
And because God is big, he is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…” That is what Paul writes in Ephesians.
Never underestimate God. Never underestimate the power that is behind the creation of this universe. He is no big guy upstairs. Give him his proper reverence. He is God Almighty, the Creator, who dwells in eternity and in awesome light and brilliance. Honor and worship him for who he is.
We really don’t like it when people misrepresent or don’t acknowledge us for who we are. If they say something about us that isn’t true or makes us less we are annoyed. Well, let’s not do that with God.
When you pray to God, remember how big he is. He is bigger than your problems, concerns, and afflictions.
When you think the world is coming apart, remember how big he is.
When you worship him, remember how big he is.
Let’s not limit him with our imaginations, because he is the unimaginable God who can do more than we can ask or imagine.
And God has come down to our tiny planet to show us who he is, and to enter into relationship with us. And he says he will come into our lives. The same power that was in Jesus, who rose from the dead, is at work within us.
Jesus said the Spirit of God “will be in you.”[10] Paul writes that the Spirit of God dwells in us.[11] The very Spirit of this massive God!
Long before Jesus came, the Psalmist was amazed that God was so immense and yet he has such care for humans. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them?”[12]
But that’s the beauty and wonder of the Christian story: that God is big, but he cares for and love us, even to the point of sending his Son for us, and to let us know that though he is big, we can know him intimately in our hearts and lives through Jesus.
Prayer:
Almighty God, Eternal, Creator of all things, none can compare with you. You are holy, majestic, and far above all time and space. Increase our knowledge of you, our vision of you, and our experience of you, so that we may worship you, live for you, and honor you as is fitting. Though Jesus Christ, who is the very image of God, we pray. Amen.
[1] Found in “The Attributes of God” by A.W. Tozer
[2] Romans 1:20
[3] The Attributes of God, p.7
[4] P.38
[5] John 1:18
[6] Genesis 1:26
[7] Matthew 28:19
[8] 2 Corinthians 13:13
[9] 1 Peter 1:2
[10] John 14:17
[11] Romans 8:9
[12] Psalm 8:4
