Rich
Alldritt
YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!
One of the annoying things about being human is our tendency to
limit God according to our creaturely understanding. Instinctively,
our starting point for thinking about God is ourselves; we reduce
God to the status of a maxi-human: ‘God is a bit like me but a bit
bigger and a bit better’. Take a godly well-respected Christian figure,
a good quality bicycle pump, inflate him or her a few times, and
basically you’ve got God … or so we think!
Not only is such thinking idolatrous (thinking of God as if he were
a created thing), but also woefully inadequate. If God is little more
than an extrapolation — a steroid-pumped version of me — is he
really worthy of my trust or worship? Is he powerful enough to
implement his loving plans? Or is the new creation merely an
optimistic prediction? A kind of best case scenario? Is he really a
solid rock in the midst of grief and sorrow?
So when Moses meets God at the burning bush and asks him his
name, God’s answer is: ‘I I ’ (Exodus 3:14). It’s a denial
of comparison with other things, a refusal to be slotted into preG: ?
existing categories. ‘Sorry for a bit of a mind-bending answer Moses,’
God seems to be saying, ‘but the fact is, I can’t tell you who I am and what I’m “like” because I’m not like anything or
anyone else. The only person in the universe that comes even close to me is … well, me.’ Isaiah 40:25 puts it this way:
‘To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal? says the Holy One.’ God is unlike anything in his creation. It’s one
of the most important things for a Christian to grasp — God is not like you!
That takes us to the key biblical truth of God’s simplicity — something we’ve been
I’
learning about at student lunch this term. Although one of the most ironically
named Christian doctrines ever (it actually isn’t very ‘simple’ to understand at all!),
simplicity, perhaps more than anything else, challenges our tame view of God. To
say that God is simple is to say that there are no divisions and parts to him. So
whereas you and I, and indeed every creaturely being, have attributes that are
C
non-essential, there is nothing about God that is unnecessary. I have brown hair
— that is one of my attributes - but if you were to shave my hair off, I would still — G
be me. There are things I can be without and still be me. But God is not like you!
!
You can’t take anything away from him and still have God. His love, for example,
is not something that God could still be himself without. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that God does not have
attributes, he is his attributes. God doesn’t have love, neither is he loving — he is love (1 John 4:16). God does not have a
certain amount of wisdom, he does not even have an infinite amount of wisdom. He is wisdom. So there isn’t a ruler
somewhere out there in space that you can take and hold up against God to see if he measures up. What simplicity says
is that God himself is the ruler. He is the standard, the definition. It is his character by which wisdom is measured. He
is simple. He just is everything he is all the time. His love, his power, his goodness, his eternity are all just different ways
of conceiving the one whole reality of who God is.
“
”
If your head is starting to hurt, there is a simple (apologies for the pun!) explanation: all of our experience, and everything
we know, is tied up with things that are creaturely. It takes a certain degree of mental effort to think of a being who just
is ‘other’. The distinction between Creator and creature is not just a matter of scale, but a totally different order and
category — an entirely different mode of existence.
Take God’s knowledge for example. If it weren’t for God’s simplicity, we might merely think of God as a ‘zooped up’
version of Stephen Fry — the ultimate pub quiz champ. He peers down from heaven, sees what’s going on in the world
below, and in so doing possesses a full grasp of the facts. Full marks in every round. Simplicity reminds us, however,
that it isn’t just what God knows, but how he knows it. He doesn’t know things by sense — after all, he doesn’t have ears,
or eyes, or a nose; he doesn’t receive information from his creation. He doesn’t move through time accumulating
knowledge. He knows by his essence (who he is). I only know things because they exist, but for God, things exist because
he knows about them. He creates by his knowledge, by speaking, by thinking (Genesis 1:3). I know my wife Claire because
she was created; God knows Claire and therefore he creates her (Psalm 139:15-16). He knows in reverse order to human
knowledge. His knowledge is intrinsic to his being. In other words it is simple!
-2-