Dr. Ron Sumners
May 3, 2009
Agnosticism is the silent agony of our age. It’s not questions about God’s existence that trouble most people, but questions about what He is like and how they can know Him.
The unanswered questions about God and His nature, will and always have surfaced as an honest but very unsatisfying, “I just don’t know!” And this uncertainty troubles people both inside and outside the church.
It’s when our lives sour or the suffering of the world stabs us awake that we realize we do not really know the God in whom we profess to believe. The animated question marks of our existence stir the brewing agnosticism in our minds.
All our how’s and where’s and why’s eventually lead back to questions about God; about some aspect of His nature and relationship to His creation. The questions about unanswered prayer, why bad things happen to good people, the dark night of the soul’s doubt, how to find guidance and to live abundantly and such questions are all “agnostic” questions about God. Each is a re-articulation of the deeper question: “What is God like, and how can I know Him?” That’s why we must begin our search for answers to life’s most urgent questions by getting to know God.
Actually, I am convinced God is the author of, as well as the answer to, our aching questions. It is because He is at work in us that we even dare to question! Honest intellectual questioning is a sign of growth, not denial. God wants us to get in touch with the questions which have kept us from growing spiritually. Our questions reflect our inbred, divine desire to grow. God knows that if we dare to think, eventually our questions will lead us to Him, and into the profound relationship with Him for which we were created.
Essentially, I believe life’s biggest questions are the result of the fact that our God has been too small, our vision of Him too limited. Therefore, the only antidote to our questions is to learn to fully acknowledge God’s greatness.
Failing to recognize God’s greatness was Israel’s problem during the experience of the Babylonian exile following the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The Holy city had been destroyed and the Hebrew people were led out of their cherished Palestine into the idol-worshipping land of pagan Babylon. They were forced to realize how agnostic they had been about their God. Anguished questions surged to the surface. How could God allow this to happen? Were they not His chosen, cherished people? Why did the innocent have to suffer along with the guilty? Did God know or care about their plight and the unquenchable longing for their homeland? Did His sovereignty extend beyond Palestine to heathen places such as Babylon?
Their world had been blown to pieces, and their questions were pulling them apart.
Israel’s limited concept of God as only the Lord of Palestine was the root cause of their anxiety and fear; all their questions. And God’s own answer in Isaiah 40, particularly verses 25-31, was his answer to pull them together. The exciting thing about this passage is that it proclaims God’s greatness and His grace, His might, and His mercy; His almightiness and His availability, His power and His presence. It begins with His sovereignty and ends with the strength we experience when we truly know Him.
We begin by thinking about God’s holiness. In response to our questions about what God is like, God counters with a mind-expanding question: “To whom then will you liken Me that I should be his equal?” (Isaiah 40:25). Both the question and the name of the questioner confront us with the holiness of God. Holiness means “separate”, “distinct,” and is beyond the categories of human definition. Whatever words we use to define His nature fall short of His greatness. He is not the object of our search, but the subject of His own revelation. All we can know of the Holy God is what He tells us about Himself. We can know God only as He allows us to know Him.
With God there is always mystery. And remember that an aspect of the word mystery in Greek means, “To shut one’s mouth.” Awe and wonder, coupled with praise and adoration, is the appropriate response to the holiness of God. He is the unmoved Mover, the uncreated Creator of the universe. In Him all things congeal and are held together. As a great scientist put it, “If God stopped breathing, the universe would disintegrate.”
When we think of the holiness of God, we realize there is a veil between us and Him that only He can open. The choice is always His. We search for Him because He has chosen us and called us. It is only by His choice and by His revelation that we are able to know Him. We can never say that we decided to look for God, found Him, and know Him completely. What we can say is that He elected us and made us for Himself, that our longing to know Him is His gift.
The awareness of God’s greatness and holiness is what the Hebrew people languishing in Babylon needed to recapture. God was not one among many gods. He is God! He is greater than any image formed by human hand or any words articulated by human tongue. And that’s where we must begin. God is greater than we are, greater than the false gods of our culture, greater than the theological formulations we have written about Him or the religious customs we have developed to worship Him.
That leads to a renewed sense of wonder, and to the second attribute of God. Listen to the Prophet Isaiah’s challenge to the homesick Hebrews. In Babylon, their God was now in competition with Marduk, the Babylonian god of creation and the lesser gods of Babylonian religion. Each of these many deities were believed to dwell among the stars, and the stars were named after them.
Into this polytheistic confusion, the prophet gives the trumpet blast of praise to the Holy One, who alone is the Creator of the universe, the one who fixed the stars in their places. “Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created the stars, the One who leads forth their hosts by number, He calls them by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power not one of them is missing”. It was as if he was saying, “Look up! Lift your drooping hearts and think of God as the Creator of the universe. If He knows all the stars by name, and is greater than the Babylonian gods, He knows each of you. God will take care of you!”
The greatness of God is revealed in His creation. The vastness of His universe fills us with wonder. Think of it! If we were to drive a car at the speed limit day and night without stopping, it would take us nine years to reach the moon, 300 years to reach the sun, eighty-three hundred years to reach Neptune, seventy-five million years to reach Alpha Centauri, and seven hundred million years to reach the Pole Star.
This is the reason the psalmist, even with his limited understanding of the universe, could say, “When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou should take care of him? Yet Thou hast made him a little lower than God, and dost crown him with glory and majesty!” (Psalm 8:3-5)
When we are startled by the wonder of the created universe, in which God has boldly written His signature, we are amazed that he knows each of us and has a plan for our lives. We are astonished by His creation, but even more by our own creation.
God is all-knowing. It is awesome to think of His holiness, and astounding to contemplate His creation, but it is both alarming and assuring to reflect on His omniscience. To a people who believed that God had forgotten them, Isaiah 40:27-28 says, “Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, My way is hidden from the Lord, and the justice due me escapes the notice of God!” “Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. He knows everything.”
God knows all about us. He knows our deepest inner hopes and dreams, our fears and frustrations, our desires and disappointments. He knows us absolutely.
The prophet draws on the magnificence of God’s omniscience as a great source of comfort for his people. They could trust God for vindication and ultimately for victory. That’s what we all need to know when life falls apart or when we feel the injustice of life.
And yet, knowledge of God’s omniscience is of little comfort without an assurance of His omnipotence. It is one thing to know that God is aware of all our needs, but another to be confident He has the power to act in our behalf. He is the God who makes things happen, who is sovereign over history. His power is revealed in creation and in history. He is everlasting, without beginning or end, the One in whom all power resides, and He is greater than the gods of the Babylonians as well as their kings and rulers.
In verse 28, the names “everlasting God” and “Creator” are kept together in the personal name of God, Yahweh, because they express the fact that He is God over time and space, and yet has been constantly involved in caring for His people. He is worthy of His people waiting for Him to act with power for their deliverance. God, who is everlasting, has been infinitely patient with His people; now they are called to wait patiently for Him to act. The omnipotent, powerful Yahweh never grows weary.
That assurance leads to one of the most encouraging of the attributes of God. He gives us His strength when we are weary. The people who were completely exhausted and without strength were given a great promise: “He gives strength to the weary, and to him who lacks might He increases power” (v.29). This passage focuses on the weaknesses of Israel and on the strength of their God. It emphasizes that human strength is always inadequate and limited. But then it continues with magnificent words of assurance: “Those that wait upon the Lord will gain new strength; they will rise up with wings like eagles, they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint”.
The eagle soars when it is caught up in the stream of the wind. It does not soar on its own strength. The bird’s ability to fly is multiplied by the power of the wind, which lifts and bears it up. It is the same with us when we wait upon God. God’s Spirit has the power to illuminate our minds, recharge our depleted emotions, refocus our wayward wills, and energize our weary bodies. We were created to be inadequate until lifted and filled by His Spirit!
From the Isaiah 40 passage, what answers can we glean to the question, “What is God like?” We get a vivid picture of the magnificence of God. He is holy, hidden, but He has chosen to make Himself known. He is the Creator, the Lord of the universe. He is all-knowing and all-powerful, and He gives supporting strength to us when our strength fails.
All those words - holy, creator, omniscient, omnipotent - can be used to explain what God is like. But ultimately our language of description falls short of the mark.
What is God like? Look and listen to Jesus Christ. John helps us to articulate our wonder: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. . . And of His fullness have we all received, and grace for grace” (John 1:14, 16). The Word of God, logos, through whom everything was made, the omniscience and omnipotence of the Lord, His wisdom and light, His love and forgiveness, all of these took human form for us to behold. Now we see God as He wishes to be known. The more we know of Christ, the more we know of God.
God is the supreme Light, the source of all light. He is the Creator of the universe, the sun and moon and stars and all the light in the universe, especially the light of human understanding. Modern science has helped us to realize that we only see light when it is reflected off an object.
Light moves so fast that our eyes cannot keep pace with it. This is why we cannot see God. Our minds cannot keep pace with Him. But out of sheer love, He has incarnated His light into human form so that we could see Him in His fullness. He encounters us as a person and speaks to us face-to-face. Christ, the light of the world, is the eternal light of God slowed down for human comprehension and observation. From the fullness of God, we have received a revelation with nothing left out! In Jesus, we behold the magnificence of God and we are struck with awe and wonder.
There you have it, the light of God’s love, forgiveness, reconciliation and power in the person of Jesus Christ is what God is like. Now the question in Isaiah 40:18 can be answered: “To whom then will you liken God? Or what likeness will you compare with Him?” The answer is, Jesus Christ!
God is not distant or aloof. We can meet Him face-to-face. We can find God because He has already found us.
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