• This may sound odd (it isn’t), but human beings like to be god over God. We have a tendency to conceive and define him in ways that fit our expectations and needs, our fears and obsessions. Think Lewis’s infamous woman in the Great Divorce, “my god is a god of love.” Well, madam, he isn’t your god. But the truth is we all do it. Whether through cherished Scripture passages we have come to repeat mindlessly, key doctrines, certain stories and phrases that we repeat over and over (reinforcing our conception) — instead of dealing with God in his infinite glory and majesty, we build a user-friendly replica for daily use.
• Remember Job. God says of him, “there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man.” And yet what Job discovers, when the dust has settled over the misery of pain and reckoning, is that he hardly knew God at all: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know… I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
• God is not a Republican, a Democrat, a Hipster, a Preppie, a Baby-Boomer, a Millennial, an American, or a Presbyterian. Whatever earthly category you would like him to fit into, he doesn’t. Lincoln never said anything so wise as his response to the general who sighed, “Well, Mr. President, I sure hope God is on our side.” Lincoln’s response was, “General, I hope we are on God’s side.” This is a perspective that takes more prayer, thought, and meditation on the Word than you might imagine.
• When John sees, in the vision of Patmos, the resurrected Christ standing before him, he falls “at his feet as though dead.” If it has been a long time since you’ve had anything like that moment in your personal experience, you are probably worshiping your own replica of God. Go to him and ask him to crush that replica under his foot, that you would see things, “too wonderful for me, which I did not know…”