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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Christmas stands as too ingenious, too outlandish, too improbable, and simply too sacrificial to be penned by men. 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.
December 20, 2014
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC