I am not the neatest person in the world, but I am orderly.
No, I’m not one of those people who looks at the stacks of stuff on my desk and will claim I know where everything is. The truth is my life would be simpler if I did know where everything was, but then I wouldn’t have stacks. (I’ve read that a cluttered desk is one sign of genius—I’ll take that as my excuse.)
But, I am orderly. When I get home, the first thing I do is a take my shoes off. I don’t go to my closet and take my shoes off; I walk in the door and my shoes are off within a minute’s time. When I first got married, I would spend precious minutes looking in vain for my shoes. They weren’t where I left them. Inevitably, I’d ask my wife if she knew where my shoes were. “Check your closet,” would always be her reply. Sure enough, there they would be, not where I put them but where she put them. She disrupted my orderly chaos.
I like to know where things are, even if it appears on the surface that my life is cluttered. I like to know that the pantry is ordered enough that I will know exactly where to look for the enchilada sauce or for the potatoes (never eaten together). I want the remote to be where I last left it. I want my shoes where I put them.
In short, I feel comfortable in a world where I am in control and things fit my expectations.
Many of us—most of us?—have that same attitude when it comes to our relationship with God. We learn about Him as we are growing up, and we come to have expectations about Him from those Bible stories. As we grow older, we recognize that God is more than just what we learned as children in Sunday School, but we are willing to accept a God who makes us comfortable. After all, isn’t God supposed to be a great comfort in a world of turmoil and uncertainty?
The problem we have is we want to put God in a box, a box of our own making. That box clearly defines and expresses our understanding of God and how He fits into our individual worldviews. Placing God in our box allows us to be “know” Him, because, in a very real sense, we subconsciously want to be able to control Him.
But God doesn’t fit a box, nor can He be limited to certain specific labels. He doesn’t fit my expectations, even though He often exceeds those expectations far beyond anything I could or would imagine. By trying to stuff Him into the box, we miss out on so much, and we fail to realize the fullest potential of our faith and His majesty.
Why Do We “Box” God?
The primary reason we often try to place God in a box is that we want to be comfortable with Him. We want to believe He’s on our side, that He’s in agreement with us and that He is more than happy to do stuff for us. We want to believe that the way we do church, the way we live out our faith and the way we relate to Him is just right. The box gives us comfort and it gives us control. We set the boundaries, plan the church activities and “do things for God.” We box Him in because we forget what Jesus said in Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.”
Originally, I was going to title this piece, “Is God a Capitalist?” The answer is, “Of course not! He’s no more a capitalist than He is a socialist or a Marxist. He’s no more a Republican than He is a Democrat or a Libertarian. Is God American? Is He Russian? Is He Canadian or Mexican? None of the above. God doesn’t care about laisse faire any more than He does about strict government regulation.
The reason I know this is because God is God; God is holy, He is Other. God’s interests do not lie in the economic, political or social philosophies or theories of humanity. Such things are so beneath Him.
What does God care about? He cares about us and the way we relate to Him and to each other and to ourselves. Christ didn’t come to teach us how to put away a nest egg using sound investment strategies based on the latest economic fad or trend. He came to bring us into a right relationship with the Father.
One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament is found in the book of Joshua. Joshua was the anointed successor to Moses. While Moses had been God’s chosen servant to lead His people to the Promised Land, Joshua was God’s chosen servant to lead them into that same Promised Land and make Canaan into Israel.
The first major hurdle in that process of conquering the Promised Land was the walled city of Jericho. The people of Israel were neither trained or experienced soldiers, and yet they had the task of overcoming the formidable walls of Jericho. One day, “[W]hen Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to the man and asked, ‘Are you for us or against us?’ ‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come’” (Joshua 5:13-14a).
The reason I like this passage is because it reminds so much of the way we look at God. We assume that since what we’re doing is church-y, He must be for us. But God doesn’t see the world in that way. The way God views the world is: Are we with Him or not?
Joshua’s response was to “fall facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked, ‘What message does my Lord have for His servant?’” (v. 14b). God’s response to Joshua? It was the same He told to Moses at the burning bush: Take of your sandals because the place where you’re standing is holy ground (v. 15).
The point is, we spend so much time putting God in our comfy little box, that we all too often fail to ask ourselves if we are fitting in His box. Are we where God want us to be? Are we walking in His ways?
Seeing Beyond the Box
So how do we see beyond the box? First of all, we need to realize that Paul is right. “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Our knowledge of God is so finite that even the most spiritual of us has only scratched the surface of who and what God is.
In Job, God tells Satan that Job is a righteous man: “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (Job 1:8). Satan counters that Job is only that way because God has blessed Job in so many ways. God allows Satan to test Job. In short order, Job has lost everything—his children, his wealth, and finally his health. Things are so bad that Job’s wife, anguished at his sufferings, urges Job to curse God and die.
Job’s response to his wife is: Shall we accept good from God and not trouble? (Job 2:10). I have no doubt that as his troubles mounted, Job must have gone down the checklist of things he may have done to offend the Lord or to bring about this catastrophe. Having come to the conclusion that there was nothing else to confess or repent of, Job then sets out to gain understanding and is frustrated that God will not speak to him.
Job is visited by three friends (a fourth person is there, too, but he doesn’t speak until towards the end). Job’s friends are so taken aback by his appearance that they sit with him in silence for a week. When they finally speak, they urge Job to repent. Job’s response is there’s nothing to repent of and he wants an audience with God. “He is not a man like me that I might answer Him, that we might confront each other in court. If only there were someone to arbitrate between us, to lay his hand upon us both. Someone to remove God’s rod from me, so that His terror would frighten me no more. Then I would speak to Him without fear of Him, but as it now stands with me, I cannot” (Job 9:32-35).
Finally, after the friends have exhausted themselves and their arguments, the fourth one, Elihu, speaks. After Elihu has spoken, God finally answers Job. In Chapters 38-41, God doesn’t tell Job why He allowed the testing to take place. Instead, God asks Job a series of questions. God asks questions about the creation, about the universe, nature and all the wildness in the world. Basically, God reminds Job that he really has no concept of who and what God really is.
After God has spoken, Job responds with words that end with, “My ears had heard of You but now my eyes have seen You. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5). When we begin to realize the vastness of God’s majesty and power, then we can begin to see beyond our box.
Consider also God’s words in Isaiah 40. These are words designed to comfort Isaiah’s listeners, and it speaks of God’s might and grandeur with a series of questions that ask, “Have you not heard? Do you not know?” These words let us know that God is so much more than we can ever fathom. It is when we recognize this that we begin to see beyond our box and allow ourselves to see God’s possibilities.
A Series of Questions
Years ago, I did a series of sermons based on the phrase, “God is . . .” What I did is I went to my Bible’s concordance and looked for the phrase “God is . . .” throughout the New Testament. Here are the verses I found that fit that criteria, and I preached a different sermon from each of these verses:
- 1 Corinthians 10:13 – No temptation has ceased you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.
- 1 Corinthians 14:33 – For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.
- Hebrews 3:4 – For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything.
- Hebrews 12:29 – for our “God is a consuming fire.”
- 1 John 1:5 – This is the message that we have heard from Him and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.
- 1 John 3:20 – For God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything.
- 1 John 4:16 – God is love.
If we want to see God outside our little boxes, we would do well to ponder who and what He is as described in His word and in these verses. Please note, look at each of these verses in their passage contexts. It is not a wise thing to take a verse, or a portion of a verse and try to extrapolate it to your life without the proper context and setting. If we will look at these verses, just one declaration a day, and ponder that statement, I think it will give us a greater understanding and awareness. Mull the idea over in our heads, holding it up to the light, turning it, considering it. Prayerfully ask Him to show us what He means for us at this moment in our lives, at this time.
Even if we embrace these revelations of God, we have only taken a spoonful of dirt from the mining of God’s grandeur. We can go to the Old Testament and look at verses that say, “The LORD is . . .” and another spoonful will be dug out. We will gain in our awareness of Who and what God is, but we will only be at the beginning.
We can explore the activities of God in our Bible. The Creation, the Flood, giving the Law to Moses and on through the book of Acts. These things tell us of God and Who and what He is. We can look at the way God relates to people, from Adam and Eve through Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David and on through Jesus and the apostles, Paul and finally John on the isle of Patmos. We need to remember always that God is the God of relationships, and we gain such insight into Him as we look at the relationships He had not just with the Patriarchs, but also with the kings of Israel and Judah.
Look at the teachings of Jesus. I always find it interesting that Christians get so caught up in the End Times and never realize that that issue was more an afterthought of Jesus. Count the verses relating to that subject and compare it to the others things Jesus taught and it will quickly become evident where Jesus’ emphasis lie. Focus on the things Jesus focuses on, letting His Spirit lead as we consider Jesus, His ministry and His teachings.
Conclusion
There is so much to God, and we are foolish to think that He could ever fit into a box of our making. We have the benefit of seeing God’s actions through the Bible, and we also have the benefit of seeing how God has been dealing with our world for almost 2000 years since the cross. We have a rich history of seeing God and learning about God not just from the Scripture but from the testimonies of His saints throughout the centuries to the present. It’s time to look upward. Destroy the box and ask God daily to show you something new about Him.
Joshua went up to the man and asked, ‘Are you for us or against us?’ ‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’ Isn’t it time we decide who’s side we’re on?
(c) 2017 Glynn Beaty