None Like Him E-Book

Jen Wilkin

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 200

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

None Like Him

10 Ways God Is Different from Us(and Why That’s a Good Thing)

Jen Wilkin

None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different from Us (and Why That’s a Good Thing)

Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Wilkin

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.

Cover design: Connie Gabbert

First printing 2016

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4983-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4986-1 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4984-7 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4985-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilkin, Jen, 1969–

None like Him : 10 ways God is different from us (and why that’s a good thing) / Jen Wilkin.

1 online resource

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4984-7 (pdf) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-4985-4 (mobi) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-4986-1 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-4335-4983-0 (TPB)

1. God (Christianity)—Attributes. 2. Christian women—Religious life. I. Title.

BT130       

231'.4—dc23

2015035003

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Contents

Cover PageTitle PageCopyrightIntroduction: On Becoming a God-Fearing Woman1InfiniteThe God of No Limits2IncomprehensibleThe God of Infinite Mystery3Self-ExistentThe God of Infinite Creativity4Self-SufficientThe God of Infinite Provision5EternalThe God of Infinite Days6ImmutableThe God of Infinite Sameness7OmnipresentThe God of Infinite Place8OmniscientThe God of Infinite Knowledge9OmnipotentThe God of Infinite Power10SovereignThe God of Infinite RuleConclusion: Fearful and WonderfulNotesScripture Index

Introduction

On Becoming a God-Fearing Woman

Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,

but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.

Proverbs 31:30

If you had told me five years ago that I would one day write a book for Christian women that led off with a quote from Proverbs 31, I probably would have punched you in the face.Arguably no chapter in Scripture is more over-referenced when it comes to addressing women, but stick with me as we teeter on the brink of cloying triteness. For the purpose of the business at hand, I think Proverbs 31:30 deserves a second look—for what it says about women, and more, for what it says about God.

In my mother’s house hang two small, oval portraits of a man and a woman dating back to the late 1700s. They are David and Nancy Coy of Homer, New York, my great-grandmother’s great-grandparents on my mother’s side. We refer to them affectionately as “the ancestors,” upstanding citizens of Congregationalist and Presbyterian stock, whose very frowns seem intent on keeping civilization from faltering. I take from their frozen expressions that life was not easy for them. Nancy, in particular, wears the look of a woman who doesn’t get the joke. One suspects that if the artist had broadened his scope to include her torso, we would find her hands death-gripping a worn copy of the KJV. Like the portraits of other women of her time period, she is the very embodiment of the image we conjure when we hear the phrase “God-fearing woman.” To call someone that today would sound archaic, maybe even tongue-in-cheek, but in Nancy’s day it would have been recognized as high praise, a direct reference to Proverbs 31:30.

Today if we wanted to praise a woman as godly we would probably say something like, “She is so in love with Jesus,” or, “She has such a deep walk with the Lord.” The stereotypical portrait of this woman would be a soft-focus stock photo involving a field, filtered sunlight, out-flung arms, and a beatific smile, a little like a still shot of Julie Andrews from that opening scene in TheSound of Music. It’s not a bad way to picture godliness, but it is quite a contrast to Nancy. And it leaves me wondering, in deference to Nancy, if there isn’t some room for us modern women to ask what has happened to our idea of being a “God-fearing woman.” I’m not suggesting Nancy knew a better version. I’m actually wondering if a more accurate conception of a God-fearing woman lives somewhere between a solemn scowl and a saccharine smile.

A somewhat less-than-shocking confession at this point: If I had to choose a verse from the Bible that has impacted me the most, it wouldn’t be found in chapter 31 of Proverbs. It would be Psalm 111:10. I came across it during my early twenties, a time during which I sensed I desperately needed to grow in wisdom but lacked a clear idea of where to start. Should I study theology? Get a mentor? Memorize Scripture? My faith at that time was primarily shaped by a feeling: my deep love of God. But I knew I needed wisdom about how to follow the God I said I loved. And one day in my reading, there was Psalm 111:10 answering my question of where to begin in a most unexpected way:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.

I had to read it several times to let it sink in. The wisdom I longed for started where? Of all the possible origin points for wisdom, fear of the Lord was not one I would have come up with on my own. This was not a verse that made me want to cue the music, fling out my arms, and twirl in a field. The God of my church upbringing was a snuggly Daddy-God, one who I pictured to be much like my gentle and deeply affectionate earthly father. The concept of fearing God was foreign to me. How could the path to wisdom have as its starting point the fear of the Lord? Scanning the verse, my eyes kept trying to replace the word fear with love. Shouldn’t the love of the Lord be the beginning of wisdom? How could the Bible say in one breath that perfect love casts out fear and then turn around and say that fear was the first step toward wisdom?

My conception of God was that he was approachable and accessible, the God that the Lord’s Prayer endearingly refers to as “Our Father.” And he is that. He is mercifully and gloriously that Father. But what the fear of the Lord acknowledges is that he is not only that. He is also “in heaven,” with a name that is hallowed above all others. He is both a God who is near to us and a God who transcends. The fear of the Lord comprehends the fact that the Father we are taught to call “ours” is also the Lord of the universe, enthroned between the cherubim, doing as he pleases among the nations.

Not all of us grew up with a snuggly earthly dad, much less a concept of an approachable Daddy-God. Despite knowing the grace of salvation, many of us still suspect that God (like Nancy) is perpetually scowling reproachfully in our direction. But the Bible paints for us a picture of a God who neither scowls nor coddles, a God who is both “Our Father” and “in heaven” in perfect balance. Finding that balance requires gaining a good working definition for how Psalm 111:10 uses the word fear. And for that, we can turn to the book of Hebrews.

The author of Hebrews takes care to distinguish between the fear of God’s consuming wrath and the fear of God’s holiness. Both may cause us to tremble, but only the second causes us to worship and repent. Because of Christ, you and I do not come cowering to fearsome, thundering Mount Sinai; instead we come expectantly to glorious, approachable Mount Zion (Heb. 12:18–24). We are exhorted to respond to this God by offering him “acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (vv. 28–29). Worshipful reverence and awe, not cowering dread, define a right fear of the Lord.

The worshipful reverence and awe of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

When we fear the Lord rightly, we do so not as those who are terrified of him. Christ, our Mediator, assures us that we may approach the throne of God with confidence. We do not tremble as the demons do; they rightly fear the wrath of God. Rather, we tremble as those who understand that God’s wrath toward us is satisfied at the cross. When we fear God rightly, we recognize him for who he truly is: a God of no limits, and therefore, utterly unlike anyone or anything we know. This is the start of becoming wise.

But consider the inverted message of Psalm 111:10. Not only is the fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom, the fear of man is the beginning of folly. This is the dual exhortation of Proverbs 31:30 that we need so desperately to understand:

Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain [the fear of man is the beginning of folly]

but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised [the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom].

When we lose sight of the majesty of God, we invariably fill the gap in our vision with the fable of the majesty of someone else. We revere a spouse or a leader. We worship our children or a friend. We even give reverence and awe to ourselves. And this is complete folly. Not only is it unwise to give our worship to someone other than God, it is the very definition of irrationality. And it’s an exhausting business.

So this is a book that hopes to reclaim the idea of the “God-fearing woman” from yellowed portraits in antique oval frames, as well as from the soft-filtered script-adorned frames of Instagram. In the pages that follow, I want us to consider the majesty of a limitless God. I want us to meditate on his perfections so that they become to us the most rational object of our reverence and awe. And along the way, I want us to stare down our tendency to ask others and even ourselves to be what only God is.

Life is too short and too precious to spend fearing the wrong things in the wrong ways. I propose we learn holy fear for a God like no other. Only then will our fear of man be put to flight, our self-adulation be laid to rest, and our hearts be turned toward worship. I want us to become God-fearing women in the truest sense of the word, to take our stand in gladness at the foot of Mount Zion, offering true worship to our Father in heaven. And in so doing, we’ll make a beginning at becoming wise.

1

Infinite

The God of No Limits

Lord, we adore thy vast designs,

Th’ obscure abyss of Providence,

Too deep to sound with mortal lines,

Too dark to view with feeble sense.

Isaac Watts

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me inscribed my birth records with a firm hand: seven pounds, eleven ounces, twenty-one inches. It was the first legally attested evidence that I was not God.

I would contribute ample proof to that effect in the ensuing years, but during the earliest moments of my life on February 4, 1969, well before I formed my first rebellious thought, uttered my first defiant syllable, or took my first disobedient step, the chasm between who God is and who I am had already been firmly established by the simple fact that I was measurable.

Any discussion of how God is not like us must begin with an acknowledgment that we are measurable and he is not. God is infinite, unbound by limits. He defies measurement of any kind. His limitlessness underlies all of his attributes; his power, knowledge, love, and mercy are not merely great, but they are infinitely so, measurelessly so. No one can place any aspect of who God is on a scale or against a yardstick.

This makes the task of writing a book about his attributes particularly daunting. One of my favorite hymns speaks to the measurelessness of just one of God’s attributes: his love. The hymnwriter reflects on the futility of trying to capture it:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.1

I’m a feeble scribe working with scant ink and a very small scroll. And my task is to share at least a few meager insights about ten of God’s attributes. Ten. I have never been more aware of my limits. But I want to do my part in this ongoing effort to describe the Indescribable. Faithful writers have done so for me. Stephen Charnock, Arthur Pink, A. W. Tozer, and R. C. Sproul have all explored the limitless character of God to my great benefit, and to lengths that I am not competent to go. But I hope in these pages to take the lofty view of God these writers have illuminated and ask a critical question: “How should the knowledge that God is ______ change the way I live?” What measurable change should occur as a result of meditating on God’s immeasurable attributes, as described in the Bible?

Why We Love to Measure

We limited humans are lovers of measurement; we number and count, quantify and track. If you were to look in your pantry, every carton would display the weight of its contents. Every food label would tell you the number of calories, fat grams, and carbs for a particular item. Your gas gauge tells you how much gas is in your tank. Your clock tells you how much time you have until dinner. Your budget tells you how much you can spend. Your social media account measures your circle of friends. We are happily surrounded on all sides by systems of measurement.

Our compulsion to measure is not a recent development. Ancient peoples tracked the movements of the heavens; their tools of measurement are still visible in canyon carvings and monolith rings. They measured tides and seasons, the passing of time. Measurement is the millennia-old obsession of the limited human, who, perceiving his own limits, seeks to transcend them by quantifying his world. That-which-we-can-measure we think we can to some degree control.

One of my favorite movies is Hoosiers (1986). It tells the story of a small-town basketball team from Hickory, Indiana, that finds greatness under the leadership of their coach, Norman Dale. The end of the movie is not hard to predict, and the ’80s synthesizer music in the score is a trial for the nerves. There’s also a scene in which Gene Hackman and Barbara Hershey earn the undisputable title of “Most Awkward On-Screen Kiss in the History of Filmmaking.” But at the 1:34 mark, the movie hits a note of brilliance.

Having reached the 1951 state finals, Coach Dale’s team of small-town farm boys gets their first look at where the championship game will be played: a giant gymnasium, easily ten times the size of the small-town high school gyms they have played in all season long. As the players’ eyes widen at the scene, Dale pulls out a tape measure. He asks a boy to measure and report the distance from the backboard to the free throw line. Fifteen feet. He asks two players to measure the distance from the floor to the net. Ten feet.

Smiling slightly, Dale notes, “I think you’ll find it’s the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.”

The scene is brilliant because it illustrates a universal truth: being able to take the measure of something is reassuring. It imparts to us a level of comfort and a sense of control.

We humans attempt to measure not just our environments but also our fellow humans. When we make a new acquaintance, or consider the viability of a political candidate, or interview someone for a job, we assess their strengths and weaknesses. We “take the measure” of their character and abilities, so to speak. We attempt to quantify their attributes, to judge how worthy they are of our trust or support and to keep our expectations realistic.

We also take the measure of self and others for the sake of comparison. Questions like, “Am I smart?” or “Am I rich?” or “Am I moral?” are answered with, “Relative to whom?” We choose our human yardsticks with care, often assuring ourselves that we will measure favorably by surrounding ourselves with people whose own shortcomings make us stand tall by comparison. We tell ourselves that compared to X, we are indeed quite smart, rich, or moral. But unless our measure of comparison is smarter, richer, and more moral than we are, we will preserve the myth of our own ascendancy. We will believe ourselves to be without rival. And that’s where a measureless God begins to upend our sense of personal awesomeness.

Our Immeasurable, Measuring God

To the human mind, preoccupied with quantifying creation and its inhabitants, seeking control by measurement and validation by comparison, the Godhead presents a conundrum. The God of the Bible is infinite—immeasurable, unquantifiable, uncontainable, unbound, utterly without limit. We cannot take the full measure of him no matter how hard we may try. We cannot confine him to a physical or mental boundary. We cannot control him, and we can never stack up favorably beside him. Job’s companion Zophar expresses our dilemma:

Can you find out the deep things of God?

Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?

It is higher than heaven—what can you do?

Deeper than Sheol—what can you know?

Its measure is longer than the earth

and broader than the sea. (Job 11:7–9)

David praises the infinitude of God’s greatness:

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised,

and his greatness is unsearchable. (Ps. 145:3)

Solomon, too, acknowledges the limitlessness of God:

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! (1 Kings 8:27)

Paradoxically, he who is immeasurable is himself the measure of all things. Note this beautiful contrast in Isaiah 40:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand

and marked off the heavens with a span,

enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure

and weighed the mountains in scales

and the hills in a balance?

Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD,

or what man shows him his counsel? (Isa. 40:12–13)

Put succinctly, who has measured everything? God has. Who has measured God? No one.

In striking paradox, God immeasurable concerns himself with measurements for arks and tabernacles, temples and cities. God unbound sets boundaries for oceans. He catalogs hairs on heads. He numbers stars and grains of sand. Our limitless God specifies the length of our limbs and the circumference of our crania. He measures our very days in handbreadths, lovingly and with intent. And all that he measures is perfect in measurement. All that he binds is perfectly boundaried. Yet he himself is infinitely detailed—limitless, measureless, unbounded.

The God of No Limits

What Zophar spoke, what David and Solomon worshiped, what Isaiah comprehended is this: God has no rivals. Not only that, but he measures and decrees the boundaries by which his creation will abide. Our whole lives as Christ-followers are to be given over to the identification and celebration of the limits God has ordained for us. He lovingly teaches them to us through his Word, through trials, through discipline. He humbles us through these means to remind us that we are not him, nor is anyone or anything else we know.

There is none like our God. The God of the Bible is incomparable, infinitely above his creation. To say that anyone or anything is like him is to try to express the unlimited in limited terms. Any comparison will fall short. Just as the authors of Scripture searched for adequate human language to apply to heavenly visions, we find ourselves ill equipped to express God’s perfections. But we must still endeavor to try. Like the Israelites with their sandals still damp from the sand of the Red Sea shoreline, we feel the weight of the question that hangs in midair:

Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness,

awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? (Ex. 15:11)

The psalmist, too, marvels:

Who is like the LORD our God,

who is seated on high,

who looks far down

on the heavens and the earth? (Ps. 113:5–6)

The answer, of course, is no one. Creation, existing within the limits of time and space, cannot rival, much less fully articulate, the splendors of a limitless God. Yet from our earliest moments, rivalry has been our intent.

Becoming Like God

As soon as my first child could crawl, he began exploring the limits of his world. What was he allowed to touch? What was off-limits? Any parent can tell you that if you place a small child in an empty room with twenty objects, nineteen of which he is allowed to touch and one he is not, an interesting phenomenon will take place. At first he may play contentedly with what is allowed, but before long he will turn his eyes toward the forbidden item. Soon he will begin moving closer to it, perhaps extending a hand toward it but not actually touching it. A gently worded warning may cause him to shift his gaze to his parent and reconsider his course, but eventually, barring physical intervention by that parent, he will almost certainly lay hands on the one object out of twenty he knows is not meant for him.