We humanize God. It’s in our nature to create and craft a god who is more of us and less of anything divine. We have this terribly odd proclivity to need a god, but to concurrently need that god to be something that we can control. We want a deity that has enough supernatural qualities to rush into our lives in times of crisis, or handily answer the bottomless laundry-list of prayers that we pray, or keep us safe from life’s malicious attacks. While we want to afford that god some sufficient degree of power to pull all of that off, we don’t want to give him enough power to offset whatever our agendas or passions or desires might be. We want a god alright, but we humanize him enough to force him to be at our beck-and-call verses responding to the utter magnificence of His call. Yes, we humanize God.
The God I’m Looking For
Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance. While they might serve me, they don’t serve to seize my soul. While they might tickle my fancy, they don’t speak to the persistent yearnings that chafe against spirit. While I find them handy in aiding my agendas, they take me no further than my agendas.
And so, I’m looking for a God that isn’t designed by human hands because He’s infinitely out of arm’s reach. I’m looking for something that lays leagues beyond the constructs of the greatest minds, that exists light-years beyond the deliberations of theologians of the most studious sort, and that effortlessly eclipse the creativity of the most ingenious authors that ever lived. I’m looking for something so otherworldly that the mind of man simply could not have authored or concocted this God because this God is God, and we are not.
But while I am looking for something so utterly divine that mankind could not have conceptualized Him, I’m also looking for something that is so much a part of me that belief in Him is a given and is faith entirely natural. I’m looking for the utterly impossible combination of a God who is sovereign beyond my wildest comprehension, but who is completely comprehensible at the same incomprehensible time. I’m looking for the contradictory combination of a God who is God in every respect, but who abides with me in every aspect of my sordid humanity. I’m seeking out a God who is the insatiable author of countless journeys, but who can still be intimately engaged with every minuscule facet of my journey. I’m looking for the impossible God. Yet lucky for me, the impossible is what God specializes in.
Christmas as Penned by God
Christmas is incomprehensible. It is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing. It is a story of the greatest sort, penned in a manner that thoroughly excels human authorship, defiantly out-paces human imagination, and effortlessly defies human logic. Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit in the rubric of such an emaciated plot. It’s a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script. Christmas marks the first step in the implementation of that ingenious strategy.
The story of Christmas has been told and retold for millennia. The telling’s and the manner of the telling’s are without number. And in the telling, we humanize this ingenious story as a little bit of our humanity rubs off each time in the telling. It seems that our humanity inadvertently smears various lines as it touches the prose of the divine. And when that happens we end up with a humanized god that is God incessantly diluted by our handling of the script.
A Script that Can’t Be Humanized
We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself. Eternal beginnings can only arise from something that itself had no beginning. Anything that we create will end because we are born of beginnings and therefore we are subject to endings. Yet this God of no beginnings subjected Himself to a beginning so that He can grant us eternal beginnings, and that kind of story does not arise from humanized gods.
We cannot humanize the fact that this God decided to lay perfect knowledge aside and submit Himself to human beings who, by comparison, had no knowledge. The risk in such a seemingly foolish venture is horrific. Yet, ingenuity that is beyond our intellect will always look entirely foolish to us. Christmas was an ingenious plan designed to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men. It was a strategy of power laid aside for sacrifice that would lay Him aside. It was understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all. It was realizing that intersecting mankind at this level would be far more powerful and persuasive than intimidating mankind from God’s level. That kind of decision does not rise from humanized gods.
We cannot humanize the fact that wiping out creation would have been much easier and a bit tidier than dying for it. Maybe we need to consider that God could have walked away and allowed us to perish in the filth of our own devices and die at the hands of our own selfish strategies. Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him. Maybe we need to understand that the point at which we have long given up is the point at which God is continuing to get up. Those kinds of choices do not arise from a humanized god.
The Hallmark of God’s Stories
Christmas was a beautifully covert act of love that mankind has found as wholly wonderful but completely incomprehensible at the same time. God writes scripts that amaze us and leave us tingling with the power of the lines He has penned, but that likewise leave us entirely lost in our ability to grasp them. The hallmark of the stories that God writes are the fact that we are enraptured by them, but we cannot fathom them at the same time. We wish that we lived such stories and we long to have them be the story of our lives, but we recognize that they are just too grand to live without God helping us live them. Somehow we know that there are no greater stories, and we find ourselves distraught by the sad fact that we have chosen to live those lesser stories. Those lesser stories are written by the gods we humanize.
Christmas stands as too ingenious, too outlandish, too improbable, and simply too sacrificial to be penned by men. It is God setting Himself apart so that longing eyes and yearning hearts might see the real God in the stories that He alone can craft. May we look deep into the story without smearing any lines, and may we see the real God this Christmas. May we find the God who is the insatiable author of countless journeys, and discover the God who can be intimately engaged with every minuscule facet of our journey. May we be driven to look for the impossible God because we simply can no longer tolerate our humanized gods, and may we forever find this God this Christmas.
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC