Simple God

How easy is it for you to define God? How many words does it take for you to explain him to others? These might not be fair questions for the culturally savvy believer, so let me ask in a different way. When pain hits or your faith feels stagnant, does your picture of God shrink?

For most of us, when life has thrown a curve ball or our private sins have once again knocked us down, the complexity of God gets replaced by a more manageable view. We begin to describe him with words like frustrating, distant, or confusing. These are manageable words because they offer us a small slice of control. If God is frustrating to us, all we need to do is begin to act according to his plan. If God feels distant, we just need to walk towards him through “spiritual disciplines.” Is God confusing? Well, that’s an easy fix. Just sit quietly and listen for his “still and small voice” whispering us an explanation. These are things we can manage to do under the covering of “obedience” and leading a more disciplined life.

But what happens when God still leaves us feeling lonely and broken after our best attempts at the conventional wisdom for living a spiritual life? In no way would I say reading God’s revealed word is unhelpful. And spiritual disciplines have been passed from one generation of believers to the next for a very good reason! But neither of these have the power (in and of themselves) to transport us completely away from the lingering tendency we all have to doubt and even shrink God into bite size portions when the sun refuses to shine on our face. But Jesus hanging on the cross has the power to enlarge our hearts and view of God.

Jurgen Multman makes a terrific observation about the complexity and vast mystery of God when he says: “The more one understands the whole event of the cross as an event of God, the more any simple concept of God falls apart.”[1] While many have different views of “exactly” what this “event” entails, all believers come to the conclusion there is more to God than we know. God is not easily placed on a clean, systematic shelf when he is cursed, bloody, and pinned to a tree to somehow bring about the total salvation of this world. Or when he is a Father, who both loves and abandons his son dying on a cross for the sake of all his children and creation. But when we look at the cross, God is anything but frustrating or distant. He is anything but a simple concept to understand.

The cross changes how we see God and our difficulties. Our loneliness begins to find a companion in a God who died abandoned. Our questions find themselves echoing Jesus asking “why” as the sky went dark before he breathed his last breathe. And, hopefully, eventually, the cross will stretch our gaze past our confusing circumstances into the hope of all things being made new and every tear being wiped away by God’s hand.

And yes, we find God revealing himself this way in Scripture and prayer. But he also reveals himself this way in our relationships with other confused and hurting believers. It’s a mess, and it gets messier until God completely restores what has been ripped apart by sin and death. Until then, things move slowly and unpredictably in God’s history of redemption. Sometimes all we can do is say with one another: “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly”… even when we don’t fully understand what we are asking.

[1] Jurgen Multman, The Crucified God, 204

Image Credit: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/10/reduce-desktop-clutter-with-these-great-simple-wallpapers/