Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? (Ex 15:11)
Father, You are incomprehensible. No other god, no other person can compare. You surpass the nations, and You exceed the boundaries of our knowledge. Truly, You are worthy.
Over the past months, this blog has discussed many attributes of God — love, justice, wrath, mercy, omniscience, omnipotence, Trinity, and more. After reading these descriptions, two things ought to strike us. First, God has revealed a great deal about Himself. Second, God has not revealed everything. He is far bigger and greater than what He has revealed. The past blogs briefly touch only a smattering of things God has revealed, but the hidden attributes of God may far exceed the revealed ones, and the infinite nature of the revealed ones makes them fathomless. There is much more to God than even the angels can tell.
Now, after reading about these attributes of God, you may be tempted to separate them in your mind and possibly even make them fight each other. You know, how can a loving God send someone to hell? How can God forgive and show justice? How can God be all-knowing and almighty and allow evil? These sorts of questions tend to compartmentalize God’s character, as if God’s justice and mercy were somehow separate entities. This kind of thinking is a mistake. God is not the sum of His attributes. Let me try to illustrate.
In basketball sometimes a team of five good players can beat a team of five “superstars.” The good players play well together as a team while the “superstars” all wish to remain superstars. When put together, the good players add up to more than the superstars. Coaches call this chemistry. The attributes of God have a kind of chemistry, but it is of a different sort. It is certainly true that God is greater than the sum of His attributes. But to be correct, we would have to say that there can be no such thing as the sum of His attributes, for the attributes are not, properly speaking, parts of God which can be put together. They are more like a whole that radiates from God. Of course, we cannot be perfectly precise by using natural examples, but if you think of the relationship between God and His attributes more like that of the sun and its attributes, you will be closer to the truth. The attributes of God are the spiritual characteristics that flow from God. He is not what they add up to be. Rather, they are what He is. They are simply God radiating. They are God being Himself just as light, heat and energy are nothing more than the sun being itself. And when the sun is being itself, the light, heat and energy come as a package. Scientists may talk about light, heat, and energy separately to help us understand something about them and about the sun, but in real life, they are a whole. Something like that is true of God. His attributes exist as a unity. His omnipotence is holy, His justice omnipresent, His love infinite and His infinity loving. His forgiveness never contradicts His justice; His wrath never works against His love. When God acts, He never sets aside one aspect of His character in favor of another. Each of His actions is purely God being God in a specific circumstance. All His deeds are holy, gracious, just and loving all in one. Sometimes circumstances may highlight one aspect just as summer in Alaska highlights the light above the heat of the sun, but the other attributes are still present.
Secondly, God’s attributes are not high-octane versions of ours. God is not a human taken to infinity. He is certainly quantitatively superior to us, but He is also qualitatively superior to us. God is a different sort of Being from us. Even in heaven, when we are at our best, there shall be only one God. We shall then be perfect humans, but the canyon between a perfect human and God is a colossal leap indeed. This qualitative difference does not deny that we are created in His image. We can still be like Him in limited ways. Though His love is of a different sort from ours, our love can give a faint picture of His. It is like His in some ways, yet never completely. He is still qualitatively superior and will forever be different from us. That is what holy means.
Think of it this way. The anatomy of a fruit fly and that of a human may be alike in certain respects, yet who would deny that there is a vast qualitative difference between the two. We are not bigger and better fruit flies. And yet we might actually learn something about humans by studying fruit flies. So it is with God. We might learn something about God by looking at human love or human morality, but God is not just a bigger version of us.
We are, thus, faced with a God who astounds us, a God more overwhelming than a million suns, yet with depths deeper than those in our own impenetrable hearts. We cannot probe Him. He is God. One test for knowing whether our thoughts of God may be off target is to look at whether God ever stumps us. If we allow for no mysteries because we cannot understand them, if we demand that everything about God fit into our brains, if we never allow God to surprise us, we have the wrong ideas about God. Of course, being surprised and stumped is no guarantee of truth, but if we have God in a box, we have something more like Zeus than God.
