To behold the character of God is a sight worth working for. Much like a great vista can be obscured by shrubs and rocks, trees and mist, the glory of God can be obscured by the world around us, encroaching ever closer to our eyes and putting us out of focus, even misleading us.
God is love. God is holy. Both are in unity with one another, neither are at odds with one another. But that is not necessarily readily accepted by many. That is because our culture affects how we see things, not excluding how we see God. We see God through his all sufficient word, the Bible. That is of course as our minds are renewed by God’s spirit working in us through his word. Oppositely however, we can be conformed to this world. And now our conformity to the world affects how we view God because it affects how we view his word.
How are we going to be renewing our minds? Simple in one sense. We must be reading the word of God. The word of God must be confronting us regularly, and shaping us. However this task is not going to have its effect if we cannot focus long enough, linger long enough, to receive the truth of God from his word. “Every age has its own challenges. This is one of ours, it is the affliction of distraction.” Says David Wells (p.18).
One of the ironies is, however, that we are so distracted because we have such an abundance of good things. Our standard of health is high, our choices for entertainment – endless, the range of experiences we can have – vast, the feats that we can accomplish – great. And yet with all the things we could do, we are a depressed people, a lonely people, a sad people. It is a paradox (see p.22). Stimulated in every conceivable way, yet not stimulated enough.
In our Western world where we experience an abundance of blessings (generally speaking) and yet a deprivation of emotional and mental well-being, we want God to provide more blessings while fixing our emotional and mental burdens. ‘Please God give us more stuff,’ we secretly hope for in our hearts (or not so secretly), and give me an emotional perk up, and encouragement.
Now there’s nothing wrong with these things. But these are the desires of everyone around us. Hopefully it’s a little bit unnerving for us to realise that our hopes of God’s provision towards us are really no different from the God-less hopes of others.
What might be happening? Perhaps we are addressing the god that is within us, and not the God that is outside of ourselves, the objective God.
The centre of reality does not come from within, it is not subjective. The centre of reality is God who is not within us, but ultimately outside of us, in front of us. He is encountered in his word (of course God dwells within us by his Holy Spirit, but I’m more thinking here about God’s transcendence).
God does meet our needs, more than we could possibly fathom. Ultimately these are spiritual needs. And every spiritual deficiency within us is met by the one who is outside of us, the Lord Jesus.
Yes God does meet our physical, emotional and psychological needs. But the problem is that we are so inwardly focused that these needs become our god. And in a strange cyclical downward spiral, our needs are our gods and we want our god to meet our needs. That’s to say, our needs are our idols, and we want our idols to meet our needs.
But we need to clear our eyes from the mist. We need to climb higher to see more. We need to take ourselves to the heights that the Bible takes us to see God’s holy-love towards us and to be re-orientated by it. As we see God’s holy-love displayed towards us in Jesus, it is then that we see our needs met.
Wells, D. F. (2014). God in the whirlwind: How the holy-love of God reorients our world.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 