Opus 2020-275: Crickets

I am not a big reader of Max Lucado.  I have now read two of his books and in another ten years I might be ready for another.  In my latest, In the Grip of Grace he writes an analogy using a cricket.  He was picturing how a cricket that he had seen in the church sanctuary would view the world.  At one point he wrote,

“Perhaps the best question is, who does a cricket worship?  Does he acknowledge that there was a hand behind the building....Does he assume that since he has never seen the builder there was no builder?” p. 26, emphasis in original

He then goes on to make an application to human beings and the large group that deny God.  He calls them hedonists.  I never thought of the word in that way, but there it is.

The way these people deny God is not by saying no gods exist.  The problem is they cannot envision God.  When I say they can’t envision God, I don’t mean they can’t imagine a god.  They are good at that, but man-imagined gods tend to be limited by our vision.  As a general rule pagan gods are just people on steroids.  What they can’t comprehend is the God of the Bible.

I say this after reading a lot of science fiction/fantasy where people try all their ideas about gods.  Most of the results are little more than entities with strange powers and weird ideas about right and wrong.  They can be injured and even die.  Usually, if you read carefully, you find that they are the kind of being that the author would become if they had the ability to morph.  All of their fantasies get played out.

We saw this in ancient Greek and Roman mythology.  The gods were just spoiled children in adult bodies with some kind of super power.  They bickered and got involved sexually with anything that caught their eye.  They lied and cheated.  They were a lot like politicians today.

The God of the Bible is almost beyond our comprehension.  What do I mean, “He is beyond our comprehension”?  We cannot understand infinity, let alone holiness.  We cannot understand the kind of love that is driven toward the incarnation and the cross.  I have not been able to find the quote so I will paraphrase and make no accusations of the writer but a Christian who was a scientist said that the thing that drew him to the God of the Bible was the way in which understanding Him required a grasp of multi-dimensional space and even that wasn’t enough.  He said that in his dipping into other religions he found no ideas that were big enough to come from beyond the human mind but the Bible was different.

I worship a God that is so far beyond me that He has no problem balancing the creation of the universe with being aware of my every thought.  He is God, not a human construct.

Lucado, Max.  In the Grip of Grace.  Dallas:  Word Publishing, 1996.

homo unius libri