"To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare Him? The workman molds a graven image...[the poor man] chooses a tree...[and] seeks unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image...
"Have ye not known? Have ye not heard?...It is He that sitteth above the circle of the earth...that bringeth the princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth useless. 'To whom, then, will ye liken Me, or shall I be equal?' saith the Holy One." Isaiah 40:18-25
"God, that made the world and all things therein...dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men's hands..." Acts 17:24-25
In the Narnia book, The Silver Chair, Lewis has his young heroes run into the Green Witch, who hypnotizes them into thinking that they imagined Narnia, that it was not real. In her underground lair, she began to convince them of such odd absurdities like that there was no sun; they just saw a torch (in her lair) and imagined a bigger, greater torch. She told them there was no Aslan; they just saw a cat and imagined a bigger, greater one. At every turn, she was replacing the archetype with an ectype.
The spell was broken when Puddleglum (a living scarecrow) told the witch that he just could not believe that some "children playing a game" could invent a world that could "lick your real world hollow." He could not believe that the whole of Narnia was merely an imaginative over-elaboration of something lesser in the witch's lair. He could not believe that a lesser somehow produced its greater, that the sun is because of torches and not the other way around.
There is a reason the Bible has verses like the ones in Isaiah and Acts. There is no possible invention of God. Of gods, maybe, or ideals and principles, but not God Himself. To assume so is to be incredibly ignorant of or short-sighted in regards to all that God is. He is not (as Freud would say) merely an expanded father figure, nor merely the expanded fulfillment of a wish (I'm sure the Canaanites never wished for the God of Israel). He is not (as the Pagans would say) some expanded element(s) of Nature, or Nature itself. He is not (as other psychologist would say) the expanded hallucination of some psychotic delusion. He is not (as some historians would say) the expanded fears and superstitions of ancient people. He is not (as psychoanalysts would say) the expanded projection of our "self." Simply put, God is not a reflection of us; we are a reflection of Him. He is the Dei; we are but the imago dei. God has many metaphorical references, but no physical or spiritual source. There are many things we can say God is like (He is like a father; He is like desire; He is like the rain), but there is nothing we can liken Him to, nothing to which we can point to and say that this encompasses the whole God, i.e., this is God in an absolute sense. He is the Creator, the Highest (as Chambers would say). Everything came from Him; He did not come from anything.
That His reflection is found in certain people, places, and things speaks more to His confirmation as reality than His dismissal as fantasy. All the "likeness" (but not "likenness") we see in things are but small fragments of the whole picture. God fills and transcends all those things. He is our Father, but He is not merely a father, nor is He a father in the sense we understand it (for all our fathers have sinned, and fallen short of His glory). That, of course, is the point. God is not only in all of our concepts, but also beyond them in that He is their source. All concepts, all nouns and verbs both concrete and abstract, find their being in Him. To make Him the creation of our concepts, instead of the Creator of them, is a sad (and blasphemous) reversal. We must not mistake the reflection for the sun, the inns for home. Things may point to God, they may exude God, but they are not God Himself. To get caught up in things instead of the one to Whom they are what they are is to be hopelessly sidetracked your whole life, ever seeking, never finding, for we are ever distracted and deceived. May we learn well the double-edged discipline of being able to enjoy things while all the while understanding, "Neither is this Thou."
"Eternal God,
Enmeshed and Independent:
We make you a creation,
And lose all that matters..."
-Jon Vowell
"Have ye not known? Have ye not heard?...It is He that sitteth above the circle of the earth...that bringeth the princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth useless. 'To whom, then, will ye liken Me, or shall I be equal?' saith the Holy One." Isaiah 40:18-25
"God, that made the world and all things therein...dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men's hands..." Acts 17:24-25
In the Narnia book, The Silver Chair, Lewis has his young heroes run into the Green Witch, who hypnotizes them into thinking that they imagined Narnia, that it was not real. In her underground lair, she began to convince them of such odd absurdities like that there was no sun; they just saw a torch (in her lair) and imagined a bigger, greater torch. She told them there was no Aslan; they just saw a cat and imagined a bigger, greater one. At every turn, she was replacing the archetype with an ectype.
The spell was broken when Puddleglum (a living scarecrow) told the witch that he just could not believe that some "children playing a game" could invent a world that could "lick your real world hollow." He could not believe that the whole of Narnia was merely an imaginative over-elaboration of something lesser in the witch's lair. He could not believe that a lesser somehow produced its greater, that the sun is because of torches and not the other way around.
There is a reason the Bible has verses like the ones in Isaiah and Acts. There is no possible invention of God. Of gods, maybe, or ideals and principles, but not God Himself. To assume so is to be incredibly ignorant of or short-sighted in regards to all that God is. He is not (as Freud would say) merely an expanded father figure, nor merely the expanded fulfillment of a wish (I'm sure the Canaanites never wished for the God of Israel). He is not (as the Pagans would say) some expanded element(s) of Nature, or Nature itself. He is not (as other psychologist would say) the expanded hallucination of some psychotic delusion. He is not (as some historians would say) the expanded fears and superstitions of ancient people. He is not (as psychoanalysts would say) the expanded projection of our "self." Simply put, God is not a reflection of us; we are a reflection of Him. He is the Dei; we are but the imago dei. God has many metaphorical references, but no physical or spiritual source. There are many things we can say God is like (He is like a father; He is like desire; He is like the rain), but there is nothing we can liken Him to, nothing to which we can point to and say that this encompasses the whole God, i.e., this is God in an absolute sense. He is the Creator, the Highest (as Chambers would say). Everything came from Him; He did not come from anything.
That His reflection is found in certain people, places, and things speaks more to His confirmation as reality than His dismissal as fantasy. All the "likeness" (but not "likenness") we see in things are but small fragments of the whole picture. God fills and transcends all those things. He is our Father, but He is not merely a father, nor is He a father in the sense we understand it (for all our fathers have sinned, and fallen short of His glory). That, of course, is the point. God is not only in all of our concepts, but also beyond them in that He is their source. All concepts, all nouns and verbs both concrete and abstract, find their being in Him. To make Him the creation of our concepts, instead of the Creator of them, is a sad (and blasphemous) reversal. We must not mistake the reflection for the sun, the inns for home. Things may point to God, they may exude God, but they are not God Himself. To get caught up in things instead of the one to Whom they are what they are is to be hopelessly sidetracked your whole life, ever seeking, never finding, for we are ever distracted and deceived. May we learn well the double-edged discipline of being able to enjoy things while all the while understanding, "Neither is this Thou."
"Eternal God,
Enmeshed and Independent:
We make you a creation,
And lose all that matters..."
-Jon Vowell
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