4.2
A divine bully?
God reveals Himself in the Hebrew Scripture as so great a power and presence that many have accused Him of being cruelly heavy handed, driven by some narcissistic lust for power to feel good about Himself by intimidating others. Why else would God come out with such frightening force that the only way anyone could respond is in terror? Is God trying to overwhelm people with fear? Does He want to terrify us to the extreme so He can control us to the extreme? Does He relish driving us into such a frenzied panic that we would gladly be crushed under the heaviest boulders and buried under the highest mountains (Luke 23:30), just to be hidden from His sight? Such kinds of questions and speculations have everything to do with the human nature of our suspicions of God and nothing to do with His divine nature. God is awesome to those who behold Him because that is what He is: an awe inspiring, incomprehensibly majestic Being. To show Himself as anything else would be a gross delusion, a lie that can never come from a God of truth. To believe that an awesome God can somehow not elicit fear is to be oblivious to the reality of God’s nature
Would anyone dare to say to hurricane Katrina that devastated the US gulf coast in 2005: you big bully! Stop trying to scare us with your hype! Just tell us what you think you are and we’ll decide what to make of you? Would anyone think to say to the great tsunami of 2011 in Japan: cut the drama! Stop blowing your own horn just to get a rise out of us! We’re too busy with the more important things of life to bother with you. Besides, we don’t like your attitude, trying to push us around without even asking our permission. We just might decide to completely ignore you? Of course not! We would never attempt to negotiate with natural disasters over what they are to us. They are what they are and we respond to what they are, not to what we think they should be. How much more must we respond to the Creator of all as He is, not as we think He should be. If God is God, then He is over all things, including disastrous hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, imploding stars, expanding universes. How much more would a revelation of this great, all sovereign God inspire awe in us, this One to whom the nations are as a drop from a bucket (40:15)? Who can approach so terrifying a God? Who can hope to survive the faintest vision of Him?
How great is this God who is infinitely greater than the mightiest mountain or widest galaxy. How fierce is the power of this God who wields all nature’s forces in His hand without ever being worn out or strained by them. How confounding is the paradox of this God who allows His great majesty to be unrecognized by us, His power to be ignored, His glory to be worn as an ephemeral gauze that seems to dissolve with the slightest touch. How is it possible that the great God of Isaiah is so easily dismissed, criticized and even despised by so many of us? What kind of a God would allow Himself to be routinely reduced to irrelevance, even as He continues to give all that we have and are? Who is this King who subjects Himself to His subjects in such a way that He endures their constant disregard, ridicule and rejection, in silence?