A Great, Small God

"Mommy, is God so big that he can hold the whole world in his pinkie?"

That's one of the questions my boys love to ask me.  They are fascinated with a God who is so big, because to them big = powerful.  (See aforementioned monster truck fascination.)  And they are right.  It's an amazing thing that all the seas of the earth fit in the hollow of his hand, that he can measure the sky with the span of his fingers. (Isaiah 40:12)

But even more amazing is that this great big, powerful God can be so small, too.  He reaches down and gently eases a flower out of the ground. (Luke 12: 27,28)  Or, more importantly, he reaches into my womb and pushes back the hematoma threatening our baby, and tells each tiny cell where to go and what to become (an ear, an eyelash, a fingernail...). (Psalm 139:13)

You see, I've understood from a very young age the greatness of my God.  I knew that He is sovereign, infallible, omnipotent, omniscient...  Take a look at this quote:  (Read it aloud in an appropriately academic voice, preferably with a British accent.)

"J.I. Packer explains justification as:  'God’s act of

remitting the sins of, and reckoning righteousness to, ungodly sinners freely, by His grace,

through faith in Christ, on the ground, not of their own works, but of the

representative righteousness and redemptive, propitiationary,

substitutionary blood-shedding of Jesus Christ on their behalf.'”

I actually memorized that quote when I was 14 years old.  I wanted to win the competition at church camp.  But what did it have to do with me?  I didn't know.  I knew God was great; I knew I believed in him; and at that time in my life, that was enough.

When I got to college, though, I began to see a different understanding of God.  My new friends would talk about God's love for them and they'd cry...and love Him back.  It was as though that knowledge had moved from their heads to their hearts in way I'd never understood before. They knew a God who was intimate, personal, loving.  They knew a God who was small.

Why do we insist on pushing God away?  We keep trying to lift him up, to keep him high, to keep him separate.  But He gave up his Son's life to come close to us, to be intimate with us, to be small for us.

"Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him,

for he shields him all day long, and the one

the Lord loves rests between his shoulders."

Deut. 33:12