God Isn’t Like Us…by Lisa Harmon

While waiting in a lab for my blood to be drawn, I spotted a magazine with a cover that said “The 10 Ideas That Are Changing The World”. There was no resisting that title, having a bent for the philosophical (or am I just bent?). I was flipping through thinking how entirely saturated each idea was with what’s called “humanism”.

Shortly put, humanism is the glorification of humans; our ability to create technology, to reshape our world, to remake our lives, to change our habits, etc. Take the global warming debate for example. Proponents of changing our habits are actually convinced that puny and dunderheaded humans are fully capable of controlling the entire planet.

Honestly… we don’t even understand the climate, let alone know how to ”save” it from it’s natural processes.

One of the 10 humanistic ideas was strikingly foolish, and strikingly prevelant. It’s called “amortality”, or the denial and resistance to certain aging and death. Botox, cryogenics, disease research all have at least some of the “amortality” concept within them.

Research to cure cancer or manage chronic pain is a great idea, and more power to ‘em. But truly believing that we can cure every illness on the planet, that no one should ever be sick and never have to grow old is unrealistic at best. We don’t want to look old, feel old, or be old because we worship youth these days. Maybe we always have, at least some. Peter Pan was written awhile back! 

Cryogenics, or deep freezing the body to be revived later, is a really out there level of amortal thinking, but consider the weekend warrior: they try to play sports at 50 as hard and well as they did at 20, and complain that they’ve wrecked their knees or need back surgery. How predictable was that?

Now before this turns into a “dump on the culture” post, there was one section that stood in powerfully sharp contrast: the resurgence of Calvinistic theology in American Christianity. Calvinism shifts all power to God and entirely away from us without exception.

There’s parts to Calvinism I don’t agree with. The idea of predistination, which states that God chooses who will be saved and who won’t, free will not able to alter our destiny. That I disagree with because God has clearly offered salvation to all the world. My belief is that since He is omniscient, He knows who will and won’t, but I cannot accept that He would deny anyone salvation.

Yet the God of Calvin is truly massive and unfathomable. A died in the wool Calvinist would never complain that the Lord allowed this suffering or that hardship, and certainly not bug Him about a post they wanted to write, because their God is not to be questioned about His decisions.

A Calvinistic response to suffering is much along the lines of this scripture “Though He slay me, yet will I follow Him”. He and He alone is all-powerful, and all-knowing. Only the Lord controls the strings of our lives and in fact all life, as is His divine right.

As Ps 95 says “For the LORD is the great God, and the great King above all gods. In His hand are the deep places of the earth, the heights of the hills are His also, and the sea is His for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land.” He is to be approached with awe and submission.

If any one theology has absorbed God as absolute Master of heaven, earth, and all things it is Calvinism. It’s making a bit of a comeback because of the economy and social disorder of late. A person who believed that the Lord never intends a true Christian to see their 401K implode is now quite confused.

People who might have gone too far into the theory of the Lord not allowing them hardship have been forced to go searching for a different understanding of God and their relationship with Him. A Calvinistic understanding is far different than the informal, friendly Jesus most of us have.

I’ve long wondered if many, like me, have lost our visceral grasp of the fact that God is not like us. I know that I’ve over-humanized God. Yes, Jesus was fully human, but He was also fully God.  Making God too human, too casually approachable may well be a culprit for my horrific habit of getting angry at him when He’s allowed something I didn’t like.

Jesus being too like me in my beliefs puts me on equal footing with Him, which I most definitely am NOT. I’ve had that repugnant habit most of my life, and only recently have been trying to tear it down. A Calvinist would ask me who the heck did I think I was! 

The hidden danger to a kinder/gentler God is we can lose the sense of who has the right to decide things. We can naturally try to use Him as a “feel good” in a world that doesn’t. Or expect Him to do our bidding and make things more comfortable for us. We must be ever careful not to make God human, in our image.

I never want to lose the truth that the goal of God’s heart is intimacy; if anything I’d like to fall deeper into it. But until my (our) native self-serving is destroyed by the Holy Spirit, the notion of a gift-giving human God is a dangerous trap. I got scars on my ankles, how ’bout you?

One of my interests is astronomy (no not astrology and horoscopes). The Hubble space telescope being repaired right now showed us the most unimaginably beautiful and violent universe. Filled with breathtaking star nurseries, galaxies being born and dying with astonishing power, black holes eating up light itself…

Who would ever have had the mind to conceive of such magnificence! God dreams pretty don’t He?

The Hubble also blew the minds of astronomers, physicists, and scientists who thought they knew what was what. Because of the Hubble, “dark matter” was discovered, an invisible and unmeasurable matter making up some 90% of the universe, that no one understands. It also was responsible for discovering that the universe is held together by a “dark energy”.

Dark energy is not subject to the rules of gravity, light, or anything else we understand. It keeps some galaxies from crashing into each other when they should, and causes others to when they shouldn’t. It is expanding the universe well beyond what physics would allow for. It is an impenetrable mystery to the brightest minds on earth.

I say all this because it blows my mind, and what’s left of my mind melts down when I consider that God not only understands these things perfectly, He came up with them. From His imagination the rules of astrophysics came into being, which can melt almost anyone’s grey matter. He also is exempt from them.

Astronomy programs on TV returns some wonder to my oft dim mind, pulling me out of the sticky tar pit of the daily grind. It makes God much, much bigger to my little thoughts. Dark energy reinforces to me that God alone is capable of being all powerful, and all things are squarely seated in His hands. Then it reinstates that fact that such is His right, not mine.

A Calvinistic world view is marked by an extraordinary reverence for God and positioning of man well below Him in every way, about all things. Our lives are not our own. We haven’t a right to them anymore, once situating ourselves as the handmaidens and bond-servants of the Almighty.

We haven’t the right to complain, avoid, or expend our energies on what we want for ourselves. An almighty view of the Almighty is paired with and usually causes a much humbled opinion of ourselves. Awe produces submission.

Smith Wigglesworth would approve, though I don’t think he was a Calvinist per se. He called our human desires a hinderance and a curse to us, as they insist upon vaulting themselves above our rank. Oswald Chambers would assent to our pay grade being several tax brackets down from God’s too. Isaiah couldn’t even stay on his feet when he saw the LORD.

It seems the “greatest” men and women of faith had a brain melting grasp of the magnificence and glory of God paired with tremendous humility about the nature of humanity. The contribution of Calvinism these days is to blast to bits the secret arrogances we have that would consider God a vending machine for health, wealth, or ease.

I was strangely refreshed by that section of the article, directly stripping all trappings of  power from the clutches of mankind. The “big God” people are still around, because as one quote worded it “People have friends, what they need is a God”. I was also taken to task, layers of a “vending machine” God made plain in my own thoughts.

Then the same night I watched a program about the Hubble telescope. Right after I was taken down a few notches, God took Himself up a few notches in my thoughts. The grandest scale we humans can view, the universe, is barely a stretch for the thoughts of God. What else could He be thinking of?

What will His new heavens and new earth look like? Will I be able to swim through a star nebula or fly through a spiral galaxy in my new body? Will I understand God the way He understands me someday? Will the sky be pink and the grass lilac? Will space be black as it is now, or brighter than a thousand suns yet not injure the eyes?

What is God dreaming up for us, you and I? Won’t it be lovely to find out…

Tags: acceptance, anxiety, blessing, Calvinism, expectations, faith, feelings, God, health and wealth gospel, humanism, John Calvin, Oswald Chambers, selfishness, smith wigglesworth, surrender