He isn't little, either.
No matter how big you think God is, that pales in comparison to the truth. God isn’t any size; He invented size.
Our inadequate view of God is what’s wrong with our worship. I don’t mean our worship service on Sunday; I mean our worship. The wrong view of God means we’re worshipping the wrong thing.
Our view of God is closer to a plastic Jesus on the dashboard of a car than the real thing. This isn’t easy to explain. So please permit me to throw a few batches of spaghetti at the wall and see if anything sticks.
We think of God as Superman and Jesus as Clark Kent. That’s wrong in many ways, but the easiest one to explain is that Superman isn’t worth worship in the first place. Superman can’t jump over buildings in a single bound; he can jump over drawings of buildings in a single drawing. Superman doesn’t move at all unless we pick up the comic book and shake it. Anything he does only happens in our mind’s eye.
I saw a beautiful example of truth on a wall in a restaurant. They had posted a child’s letter to Santa Claus. The address caught my eye.
Santa Claus
The North Pole
Earth
The Solar System
The Milky Way Galaxy
The Universe
The Mind of God
We exist “in” God the way Superman exists in our minds. God’s not big because He’s the creator of big. That’s infinitely “bigger.”
Here’s another way to think about it. One of the wonderful ways that we are created in the image of God is our creativity. We are like the creator in that we are creative. This is one of the great differences between us and the animals. No animal is one percent as creative as a child. Kids with time on their hands are explosions of creativity. That’s why restaurants give crayons to children.
This leads somewhere. Because we’re creative, we pretend things. Part of that pretending is to write plays, novels, and other things that create pretend “universes.” The universes we create are nothing compared to God’s created universe, but we still get to see the relationship between creators and their creations. I write about this in my book “Higher Purposes: The Lesson from God to Job, the Lesson from Job to Us.” Here, I want to take this concept in a different direction.
I’m not a playwright; I’m a computer programmer. Imagine for a moment that my programs were aware of their creator. What kind of questions would they ask about me?
Is he 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit?
(They might wonder if I’m as an unimaginably awesome 128-bit program.)
Does he have a graphical user interface?
Can he be ported between platforms?
Of course, all of those questions are ridiculous. They only know the concepts of a computer program. They have no idea what a human is.
That’s where we fall short in worship. We lack the appropriate “awe factor.” We think of God as awesome, but not nearly awesome enough. As a result, our worship and our prayers fall short of what they could be.
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. — John 15:7 (NIV)
Think about the word “in” here. What does it mean to be in Jesus? How literal is that? What do we need to do to reach the state where all our prayer requests would be granted?
I have no idea. That’s kind of the point. Any mental image of our relationship with God has to be laughably primitive. We must always be mindful of that and just be grateful for His love and grace towards us—which is amazing.
But someday we’ll understand.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. — 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)