One of the fundamentals of my faith is that God is much bigger than any of us can imagine. By thinking of God as unimaginably huge, I discover a healthy humility about myself, a sense of the impermanence for our earthly journey, and a justification for an immense faith in God.
I have come to this belief by considering and discarding alternative ways of defining God. We know from history that many societies worshiped multiple gods that interacted in similar ways to humans. Multi-theism feels to me like human attempts to make deities easier for us to control. If the deities have flaws like our flaws, we can manipulate the deities the way we do other people. If the deities have limitations like we do, we can make deals with deities by promising what they lack. The end result blurs the difference between humans and deities, and that doesn’t match with my experiences with God.
Another alternative I considered was that our souls are ascending to a god-like state, that we will merge into the Divine Being. This approach does match with my comprehension of my current need for humility, although my humility seems to be in comparison to who I will be later. However, this model doesn’t seem to match my experience. I think there is One that I can turn to in my struggles who answers for me questions that I haven’t thought to ask yet. Maybe we are to become one with God in the afterlife, but I’m having enough troubles in this life to give up my faith in a separate Entity bigger than I am.
The last alternative deity model I’ll cover here is the weak God mindset, and I find this one to be the most dangerous. Yes, there is only one God, and yes, that God is greater than we are, but the upsetting twist to this mindset is that the weak God “needs” us. If we have something God needs, we are enticed to negotiate with God to get what we want. We can still willingly admit we are not “equal” to God, but we are tempted to believe we’re close to deity status and can act from that position of strength.
In my experience, I have often struggled against what God wants for me, and that struggle only ends when I give it up. Once I do, God has always been faithful to provide me with the strength, insight, opportunities, resources, or friends that I truly needed but could not see until I surrendered my stubborn approach. To turn it around, every time I provided what I thought God needed, it turns out that God was doing fine without it — it was I who needed to follow through on what God called me to do.
I’ll also let you in on the most prevalent sin in my life: it’s in the form of a prayer I offer after God has pulled me out of the ditch again, saying “Thank you, God, for your mercy and blessings! I can handle it from here.”
So just how big is God? I don’t know, and I strongly doubt I could understand it if God explained it to me. Is the same God who I worship the same God that intelligent beings on a distant planet worship? I don’t know, and that answer wouldn’t change anything in what I believe anyway.
What I believe comes from insights I learned in an “Information Theory” class in college. The principle we learned using theoretical computing models was that a given model cannot reliably predict the performance of a subject model unless the predicting model is significantly bigger than the subject model.
I wholeheartedly believe this principle applies to the spiritual realm as well as the information theory realm. God knows me because God is far bigger than I am. I am incapable of completely knowing God because I am not big enough or complex enough. I can’t know how God engages with you because I’m not big or complex enough. (This might be similar to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:3, saying, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?”)
God is immeasurably bigger than I am, and for that I am profoundly grateful!
JM
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