How Big Is Your God?
A God-forsaken place. Like you, I’ve heard that phrase a number of times over the years. For that matter, it has come from my lips on occasion.
I’m not sure whether the prophet Ezekiel and his fellow Israelites described their internment by the Kebar River in Babylon using those exact words, but their limited understanding of God would have led them to think that way.
While there are passages of Scripture from the Old Testament that speak of God as unconfined by the physical structure of a temple or a particular parcel of land, this does not reflect the theology of most Israelites in that day.
It was Solomon, who, upon the completion of the temple in Jerusalem, declared, but will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built?1
And yet, by the time of Babylon’s ever-growing threat to the nation, most Israelites based their theology of national security on God’s continuing presence, as evidenced by the temple in Jerusalem.
The prophet Jeremiah publicly rebuked this misplaced understanding of God. Do not say, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, he warned the people while urging them to base their faith not on a God defined by a particular place, but rather on a God defined by compassion, justice, and an infinite love for humanity.2
So, for Ezekiel and his compadres, God was nowhere to be found. They really were in a God-forsaken place.
What a surprise then when Ezekiel’s God comes to Babylon riding on his chariot throne! Wheels within wheels, rims full of eyes, strange living creatures with faces on four sides, and a huge expanse or platform where there stood one “like a son of man.”*
As his prophecy unfolds, Ezekiel describes God, on his chariot throne leaving the temple, leaving the city of Jerusalem, and leaving the borders of Judah. The message is unmistakable. God’s purposes are shifting. The remnant living by the Kebar River are now where his presence will be found, where his promises will be fulfilled.
The fact is as devastating as Israel’s exile was, God sought to teach his people a life-changing lesson through it. Jesus enunciated that lesson when he told the woman by the well in Samaria that the worship of God was not defined by where we are but who we are and how we live. Spirit and truth, heart to heart, no pretense, no fig leaves, standing naked and unashamed before God.
May I suggest that this is the acid test of our relationship and understanding of God? When all the trappings of our faith are removed, when we find ourselves in undesirable and uncomfortable places, when our belief in the God we claim to know is tested to the limits, only then can we begin to understand just how big our God really is.
My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.3
It wasn’t until after his dark night of the soul that Job’s faith was anchored not on what he had heard about God but what he had personally learned about God through his experiences of pain and abandonment.
On the cross, Jesus’s final words were not My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? but Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.
As you encounter your own personal dark night may you come out on the other side of the pain and heartache with a renewed vision of just how big your God really is.
In Christ,
Dan
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2 Chronicles 6:18.
Here’s a fuller reading of Jeremiah’s temple sermon -
Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!” If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. (Jeremiah 7:4-8)
Job 42:5.