A God Made in Our Image
/“My God is so big, so strong, and so mighty; there’s nothing my God cannot do.”
This is a line from the popular children’s song, My God is So Big, by Ruth Harms Calkin. I remember singing it often growing up. Pioneer Clubs, Daily Vacation Bible School, Sunday mornings. Wherever two or more children were gathered with a world-weary adult to start the off-key singing, this song was there. An absolute classic. If you haven’t heard it before, here it is.
This song is a common way that is emphasized to think of God in our branches of the church. God as strong, as mighty, as beyond comprehension in this way and that. There is certainly a biblical case to be made to think of God in just this way. God created all things by speaking them into existence (Gen 1-3), God sustains all creation day to day (Heb 1:3), and one day all the powers and principalities will bow down and acknowledge He is above all (Rom 14:11). As Job puts it, God is truly above all to the point that he is beyond understanding (Job 36:26).
While this is all true, there is a problem that presents itself when we focus our thinking on God in just this way. Namely, that though God may be beyond our understanding, that doesn’t stop us from assuming that we can picture Him in all glory, all the same. How do we come up with an image for the unimaginable? Well, we extrapolate a bit too far.
If God is strong beyond knowing, how do you picture how strong God is? Well, the current deadlift record, set by Oleskii Novikov is about 1,200 lbs. So, with that picture in mind, maybe we figure to ourselves that God is like that, just more. And suddenly, the image of God in our mind is of someone stronger than the world’s strongest man; a big man, absolutely ripped. If God is so mighty, how do you picture that? Well, the French emperor Napolean (I like history, so this is my example; you pick your own) conquered most of Europe in no small part through his own military brilliance. Napoleon was, by my definition, a pretty mighty guy. Suddenly, how I picture God as mighty is like a military general or like an emperor or old.
Now, this might not seem like that big of a problem. After all, this is just how our minds work. We love to think of images to go with our thoughts and understandings. It is how we make sense of ideas and concepts, even those we cannot otherwise make sense of.
But here is a potent reason recently pointed out to me by Dr. Christina Reimer in the CMU Xplore Zoom class, Disability, Theology and the Church (two weeks in, so far high recommend), as to why this tendency can so easily become a BIG issue. If some trait of God is beyond our understanding, but we make sense of that trait of God by imagining that trait in people and then just ratcheting it up a bit, I ask you, in this new understanding we have, is a person who exhibits those traits closer to God than someone who doesn’t?
That right there, is at the heart of many of the problems that the church faces today. Here are just a few examples as to why:
If how we picture the strength of God is in terms of the strength of men, does that impact how we value disabled people or the elderly? Does that impact how we view men who are not in peak physical condition with a BMI to match? Does that impact how we value women or children? Inversely, does it impact the value we place on those who are fit and able-bodied?
If how we picture the mightiness of God is in terms of the might of other human beings, does this impact how we see war, conflict, and violence especially if the powers involved are mismatched or if we are more primed to like one over the other?
How about a few more?
If how we picture God’s omnipotence is in terms of people who we think of as powerful, does that impact how we see the countless people who are not well represented among the halls of affluence? For example, poor, refugee, black, LGBTQIA+ and indigenous peoples tend not to find themselves well-represented in positions of true power. Does it impact the value that we place on those who are wealthy and powerful? Does it impact us that in our country, most of the wealth and power are held by white men?
If how we picture God as everlasting is in terms of people with the most health and vigour, does that impact how we think of our senior citizens or people who struggle with various ongoing health issues that are both mental or physical?
And now, the example that set me to think about all of this to begin with, if how we picture the omniscience of God is in terms of the intelligence of fellow human beings with high IQs, does that impact the value we place on those we think of as “smart,” and more importantly, does it impact the value we place in the church on people with learning disabilities like my daughter, who is Autistic?
The answer to all these questions, I would say, is a a quick and obvious yes. But the solution is much more lengthy to enact. It is not hard to explain how we picture God to others, but most of these issues come less from that image itself than from what we don’t even think to include in it. It is notoriously difficult to pin down unconscious values that we as people, as a society, and as a congregation place on things and deprive from other things. But, where we should start when examining this issue is thankfully laid out plainly to us, as well: Jesus Christ.
Jesus, we know to be both fully human and also fully God. As such by looking at Jesus, by reading about him in our Bibles, by spending time with others talking of him, by praying and by following Him, we believe the true picture of who God is becomes better revealed to us day by day. It is like how we get a better picture of who our friends are the more time we spend getting to know them as well.
And right from the get-go, Jesus confronts a number of the problems that we laid out with picturing God, head-on. For Jesus chose to be born into a poor and oppressed family, so clearly to devalue the poor and oppressed in no bueno. Jesus chose to spend his days with those who were considered at the time to be undesirable. He brushed off the tainted interest of those we would think of as important without so much as a second thought (Luke 7:36-50). He showed value to those who we wouldn’t otherwise think of as being valuable to the point that he died for all of us on a cross and then rose again proving that nothing would keep us from his Love.
Parsing all the ways that who we think God is impacts how we think of other people is a process that is long and difficult, but it is a process that begins with Jesus Christ. It is also a process through which our God is revealed to us more fully as well. And so, it is a process that we should think of ourselves as blessed to undertake, as out the far end, we will be in a deeper understanding of who the God that loves us is.
So who do you picture God to be? What are some things and people that you can think of that are not represented in that image you have of him?
