Before we can ever enter into a relationship with God, we must understand certain fundamental truths about him. The writer to the Hebrews makes this explicit: “Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
He exists. He rewards. These things are about as basic as it gets. Unless we entertain some hope, however microscopic, that there is a God to be known and that there is something to be gained by knowing him, we will never seek him out or respond to the convicting work of his Spirit in our hearts.
Beyond the Lowest Common Denominator
Such a view of God is the lowest common denominator for salvation. Beyond that, orthodoxy demands we think about God according to what he has revealed about himself, and not according to our own fantasies about him. Scripture says much more about God than “He exists” and “He rewards”. A common faith requires all who worship the Father through Christ to understand our God in the same way. To fail to do so is to worship “another Jesus” and “a different gospel”. The technical term for people who do that is “heretic”. We would rather not go there.
Still, as I observed a few weeks ago when commenting on my own family history, orthodox Christians may legitimately differ in their views of God. Our God is so immense and his glories so multifarious that no single human mind can apprehend him in his totality. He is like looking at a million-sided gem. Eternity will not be long enough for us to come to perfect knowledge of all that God is. As a result, Christians differ in their level of understanding and enjoyment of particular truths — God’s character, work, purposes, the interpersonal dynamics of the Godhead, and so on. Maturity factors into this, but so does gift, experience, the quality of teaching to which we are exposed, the circumstances under which we were saved, and many other things. At any given time, we are each engrossed with different facets of the million-sided gem.
My Favorite Facet
I have my favorite facets, and I’m sure you do too. I told this story here years ago, but it bears repeating. When I was five, our family took an ocean liner across the Atlantic. I vividly remember coming up on deck one morning when the sea was slightly turbulent. It wasn’t stormy, but it was far from calm. Great swells repeatedly arose to starboard. To me, they appeared higher than the ship itself, gradually dipping and moving slowly and methodically under us. The horizon seemed to disappear. I was sure the deck had tilted at some sort of incredible angle, though my lack of experience with big weather and the immensity of the ocean greatly exaggerated my impression of danger.
I have carried that moment with me all my life. I may have been only five, but I knew enough about God that the terrifying glory of creation spoke directly to my heart about the greater glory and vastness of its Creator. It was my first very tentative encounter with the concept of transcendence. I take no credit for special insight into my own relative insignificance in the universe. My parents taught their children well. Nobody in my family missed that lesson. If my complete inability to order the world according to my own wishes sent a shiver of fear down my spine, along with it came an inexplicable delight in the existence of something so majestic, so grand, so unfathomably beyond. A God that was not way, WAY bigger than me would not have been much of a God at all. I was glad to find mine was so absolutely, surpassingly gigantic.
Job and Transactions
Thousands of years before it ever dawned on me, a man named Job experienced the transcendence of God and somebody, perhaps Moses, wrote his story down for us. Prior to suffering at the hands of a merciless and malignant enemy seeking to break his spirit, Job worshiped God in a very practical way. We might call him devout. God called him blameless and upright. The very first sentence of the book tells us he feared God and turned away from evil. Job understood that obedience always accompanies true belief, so he ordered his behavior in such a way as to honor God. Chapter 31 lists the ways his faith affected his daily practice. He told the truth. He was faithful to his wife and refused to entertain even the thought of another woman. He behaved justly with his servants and was indiscriminate in his treatment of others regardless of their station in life. He was generous and free of greed. He was not spiteful. This was the quiet way in which he expressed his service and, as a result, he experienced nothing but blessing from God.
Job had what we might call a down-to-earth faith. It may even have been the tiniest bit superstitious. But Job well understood the concept of a pragmatic religious exchange. His faith was fundamentally transactional. He worshiped and served a God who rewards men for their worship and service, and he enjoyed those rewards. As long as life was good, his knowledge of God advanced no further. As long as he experienced material prosperity and the apparent favor of the Almighty, he had no reason to mature in his understanding of the Divine nature, character and purpose. We cannot fault Job for having a transactional God. Considering the time in history at which Job lived, the practices of the nations, and the amount of revelation available to him, it may not have been possible to view God any other way than he did. Satan’s mistake was to think that if God could be made to appear to break his side of an implicit bargain, Job would curse him to his face. Job didn’t, but he also had an exceptionally tough time with the question “Why?” along the way.
The Glories of Transcendence
You see, the problem with a transactional God is when the transactions stop working the way you expect. When you do the expected service, perform the expected pieties and pray the expected prayers and, instead of reward, you get what looks for all the world like punishment. That sort of thing will get you questioning the character of the God you serve, and Job began to do just that.
Chapters 38 through 41 of Job are all about the transcendence of God. In them, Job learns that God does not exist only in relation to man’s needs, desires and obligations. He laid the foundation of the earth. The sun rises because of him. The seasons change at his command. The heavenly bodies move at his direction. He maintains the natural world in all its glory, including creatures no man can master or dominate. God exists before Job, after Job and utterly independent of Job. He transcends not just human experience, but also the very universe in which we dwell. In the grand scheme of things, we are all five-year-olds on a ship in the middle of the ocean at the briefest of brief moments in history, and God is the wave that could send us all to the bottom in a heartbeat, then roll on forever invariable and unaffected.
If we put it colloquially, we might say that God has all kinds of stuff going on that has nothing to do with you or me. Job came to learn this, and he says, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” Indeed, he did not. Now he does. I bet all that suffering was well worth it.
A Vision of the Transcendent God
Now, that’s not a view of God everybody has, and I’m not going to find fault with younger or less mature Christians whose God is primarily or exclusively transactional. A transactional God is still better than no God at all, and the Lord does not expect us to know what he hasn’t yet revealed to us. Life is a non-stop learning process. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and our view of God, at least initially, will depend on the views of those who taught us. “A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master.” I have a transcendent God because my father did, not because of any great personal insight brought about by my own study of scripture.
But what I will say is this: every Christian needs to pursue the vision of a transcendent God so far as he or she is able. It is only to the extent that our God is transcendent that we can really come to appreciate the indescribable grace with which he condescends to humanity.
Think about it. If your unspoken assumption is that your personal happiness at any given moment is the Lord’s ongoing number one priority, prepare to be deeply disappointed at some future date. If your God is an amiable old gent who exists only to listen to your prayers, meet your needs and boost your self-esteem, expect to find yourself questioning, criticizing and complaining to him the moment your felt needs and desires end up at cross-purposes with his determination to make you over in the image of his Son. If you think your most basic acts of Christian compliance are cause for heavenly handsprings, you may have a slightly overinflated sense of your place in the universe.
But If Not
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego had a transcendent God. They told Nebuchadnezzar, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.”
That “But if not” speaks volumes to me. It’s the difference between transactional and transcendent. Unbelief starts its sentences with “A God who would allow [some horrible event to occur]” and ends them by abandoning any hope that God is good. But my God remains glorious and perfect whether I understand his purposes completely or whether they leave me in utter confusion. For these three men, the risk of incineration was incidental. God would continue to be himself regardless of the outcome of their situation, and would remain worthy of their worship however he might choose to respond to their dilemma. As a result, they communed with him as the fires burned all around them.
A transactional God can only deliver what we expect or disappoint us when he does not. A transcendent God can delight just by being who he is, whether that suits our present circumstances or ends our lives. Improbably, the latter sort of God is orders of magnitude more secure and satisfying.
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