SHOULD WE BE AMAZED?
Believers are eager to exalt God in every way. This is
a profoundly good thing and it’s appropriate! There’s something irksome in the
cozy faith of many public preaching figures that leads them to speak of God in
terms that suggest he’s their “buddy” or their “chum”. They offer us a
ceaseless stream of conversations they say they’ve had with God in which they
say to him, “You what?” or “You must be joking!” or speech of that nature. It
would be [perhaps] tolerable if the settings for these conversations were of
extreme anguish or profound complexity—the kind of thing we find in the
prophets and the psalms. But no, they happen in the shower, the tone is jocular
and the audience responds with laughter at the expected places. We expect
unbridled speech from desperate men and women in desperate situations but…
God is God and not “our pal upstairs”!
Reverent scholars are now reviewing the NT use and
meaning of the word “Abba”—and they should. Light-hearted coziness is not
becoming in our relationship with God. Little children may pull on the dress of
a queen or drag the spectacles off a king but we expect more of them as they
mature. Even parents are to be treated with due respect.
Balance isn’t easy to define and perhaps more
difficult to find.
Still, in our eagerness to honor God we need to have
balanced views of him. His glory and power is beyond our imagining and so we
should rejoice with trembling [Psalm 2:11]; but we do have reason to rejoice
because we have learned that God’s unimaginable power is in the service of his
unfathomable love [see Ephesians 3:19]!
No one “out-powers” God, “out-thinks” him,
“out-suffers” or “out-loves” him! Because he is so far above and beyond us we
should be astonished that he cares for us and comes to us in faithfulness to
redeem us—and yet, because he out-loves us we should not be surprised that he
did just that in keeping with his eternal purpose to glorify the human family
with eternal life.
A mother tries to fight off the firemen so she can run
into the burning building to rescue her babies! We aren’t astonished! A father
without hesitation leaps into a raging river to rescue his child! We aren’t
astonished! Good friends risk all to deliver their friends and even strangers
give their lives for people they don’t know. You heard the stories! You’ll
recall Moses and Paul sharing the same feeling about their people [see Exodus
32:31-32 and Romans 9:1-3]. In the face of some of these cases we shake our
heads in admiration but before many of them we feel no surprise for we too know
what love for our beloved ones is. Love doesn’t want to be unscathed,
completely free of hurt or loss. Love gives for the beloved. There is an
expected response from lovers [see Isaiah 49:15; Matthew 7:9-11; Luke 15].
If human lovers give and give and give and search and
search and search should we be astonished that God came looking for us?
It’s a bit late for us to grovel before him begging
him to love us and seek our redemption.
Sauntering into God’s presence in that breezy way is
out of order. So is groveling! One's an insult and the other's tragic
ignorance.
No one out-loves the sovereign God!