Wilkin None Like Him

10 Ways God Is Different from Us (and Why That's a Good Thing)
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4986-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Human beings were created to reflect the image of God-but only to a limited extent. Although we share important attributes with God (love, mercy, compassion, etc.), there are other qualities that only God possesses, such as unlimited power, knowledge, and authority. At the root of all sin is our rebellious desire to be like God in such ways-a desire that first manifested itself in the garden of Eden. In None Like Him, Jen Wilkin leads us on a journey to discover ten ways God is different from us-and why that's a good thing. In the process, she highlights the joy of seeing our limited selves in relation to a limitless God, and how such a realization frees us from striving to be more than we were created to be.

Jen Wilkin is a Bible teacher from Dallas, Texas. As an advocate for biblical literacy, she has organized and led studies for women in homes, churches, and parachurch contexts, and authored multiple books, including the best seller Women of the Word. You can find her at JenWilkin.net.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilkin, Jen

Leseproben

2

Incomprehensible

The God of Infinite Mystery

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised,

    and his greatness is unsearchable.

Psalm 145:3

Anyone who grew up in a small town can identify with the truism that “familiarity breeds contempt.” My hometown, while not terribly small, fits the model—we are fairly stunned when any of us makes good. I call it Small Town Syndrome. When you know a boy’s mama and daddy, the church he went to, and the house he grew up in, and when you attend school with him from kindergarten through twelfth grade, you feel able to quantify the limits of his potential with a fair level of accuracy. You know who will probably never amount to much, and when someone breaks out of your expectation, the shock is enough to fuel local gossip for years to come.

A friend of mine grew up in the same small town as a now-famous Hollywood actor. When I asked if there were any early indications of greatness, my friend said she recalled little about him other than that he was handsome and widely regarded by the local girls as a “terrible kisser.” (Now every time I see him kiss a woman on the silver screen, the romance of the moment is ruined as I search for any signs of revulsion on the face of his “kissee.”)

I suspect that all successful people have those in their past who regard their success with a vague sense of contempt, having “known them when.” And we can all relate in some measure to the experience of being discredited or undervalued by the people closest to us. Consider another target of Small Town Syndrome:

[Jesus] went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.” (Mark 6:1–4)

The people of Nazareth thought they knew Jesus. And in their familiarity, they held his teaching in contempt. They could not allow that he was anything more than they knew him to be. They believed their knowledge of who he was to be complete and accurate, and therefore found him easy to dismiss. They saw him as only a man, one whose measure they could take.

Knowing in Part

In the previous chapter we considered that God cannot be measured. Because we intend to learn more about God in this book, we must address how his limitlessness affects his knowability. Knowing who God is matters to us. It changes not only the way we think about him, but the way we think about ourselves. The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand. In fact, there is no true knowledge of self apart from the knowledge of God. We cannot understand our human limitedness rightly until we see it compared to the limitlessness of God. By learning truth about him, we learn truth about ourselves. But how much do we know of him? Because he is limitless, the knowledge of who he is stretches to infinity.

God is incomprehensible. This does not mean that he is unknowable, but that he is unable to be fully known. It is the joyful duty, the delightful task of his children to spend their lives, both this one and the next, discovering who he is. According to Jesus, knowing God is the fundamental aim of life: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). We take pleasure in working to grow in our knowledge of him.

The truth of who God is surrounds us. Romans 1 tells us that all people have some knowledge of God just by looking around at creation. The Grand Canyon paints the contours of his character in broad brush strokes; majesty, eternity, omnipotence all announce themselves to the naked eye. But the believer, indwelt with the Holy Spirit, receives even deeper knowledge of God, found within the pages of the Bible. The Scriptures sketch his character with a fine-tipped pen for those who have eyes to see, elaborating across sixty-six books the story of who he is, what he has done, and what he will yet do.

But even with these declarations, God cannot be fully known by humans. Christians have meditated on the nature and character of God for thousands of years. Volumes have been written about God, but their sum does not contain the fullness of his attributes. The human mind in its finiteness cannot fully comprehend or express an infinite God. Even the most intellectually gifted theologian will barely scratch the surface of understanding who God is. He is fully known only to himself.

Put another way, the only expert on God is God.

Sufficient Knowledge

But fear not: though God is not able to be fully known, he is able to be sufficiently known. What we can know about him from creation and the Bible is sufficient for our salvation and our sanctification. Not only that, but it is more than sufficient in quantity to keep us in regular contemplation and reflection until we see him face-to-face. Were we able to know him completely, we would dismiss him. Because he is not able to be fully known, familiarity can never breed contempt.

During this life, we will not reach the end of our contemplation of God. Though we know him in part, we love him deeply. What we cannot know about him would only serve to increase our love for him were he to reveal it to us. No doubt we will spend eternity enjoying an ever-increasing revelation of the things we do not yet know about God. Because he is infinitely good, the things that we do not know about God are only good things.

We cannot say the same thing of each other. If you were able to learn everything you don’t know about me, you would learn both good and bad. We all have skeletons in our closets. In a sense, God has a closet filled with infinite secrets about himself, but it contains only priceless treasures, no skeletons. The secret attributes of God, should we come to learn them, would bring us nothing but pleasure and assurance. The infinite unknown of God holds no faith-shattering duplicity, just a multiplicity of perfections waiting to be discovered across eternity.

Here again we see the vast difference between God and his creatures. Because God is infinite, he is incomprehensible, unable to be fully known. Because humans are finite, we are able to be fully known. And the implications of our knowability should change the way we live.

Toppling the Myth of Human Incomprehensibility

The first time I took a personality test was in college. It was the Myers-Briggs, a well-researched measuring tool that groups respondents into sixteen personality types based on their answers to ninety-four questions. I couldn’t wait to get the results, and if you’ve ever taken a personality test I’m guessing you felt the same way. We love those tests because they tell us about our favorite subject: ourselves.

The results of my test were clear, placing me in a category that probably would not have surprised anyone who knew me. How I felt about the results was less clear. On the one hand, I loved gaining insight into how my preferences and judgments shaped my responses to the world around me. On the other hand, I was a little deflated to learn how predictable I was. How could a set of unremarkable questions so easily sort me into the correct bin? And why were there so few bins? Come to think of it, why were there bins at all? My perception of my own uniqueness, my “specialness,” felt a little dented. Not only that, but the test assessed not just my strengths but also my weaknesses. I felt exposed. If the test could diagnose my shortcomings that readily, it seemed likely that everyone I knew could as well.

The premise of the Myers-Briggs, and of all other personality tests, is that behaviors and preferences can be generalized. They find order in what we perceive to be random combinations of preferences and judgments. And they challenge our treasured belief that we are complex creatures. I believe they also point out how unlike God we are in a way we find unsettling: We humans want to think we are incomprehensible—unable to be fully understood—but we’re not.

We are knowable. Completely.

But not by a personality test or by another person. Other people can gain insight into our strengths and weaknesses, our virtues and vices, by means of observation or by a tool like the Myers-Briggs, but they can’t know us fully. One reason this is true is because we are masters at concealment, even from those we love and trust. We excel at showing our finer qualities while carefully tucking away our shortcomings. And because other people have a limited interest in plumbing the depths of our character, we can get away with it. “Man looks on the outward appearance,” and is content to do so, being so typically intent on his own hidden issues that he has little time to concern himself with the hidden issues of his neighbor.

No, our neighbor cannot fully know us, but far more concerning is that we do not and cannot fully know ourselves. One of the most frightening truths the Bible implores us to acknowledge is that we do not know our own hearts. Reflecting on this, the psalmist asks,...