God is Other: The Experience of Wonder - Part 1

By Ben Petersen, 07 Apr 2022

God is Other: The Experience of Wonder – Part 1[1]

Through January and February, some of us read Truth on Fire, by Adam Ramsey.[2] His aim is to hold two things together that should never be torn apart. He’s trying to make sure Bible-loving Christians don’t stop at head knowledge, and he’s trying to make sure joyful Christians know who it is that they love as God. I don’t think that’s controversial! We love the Bible at Church by the Bay, and we’re convinced that the Bible calls us to cherish Christ as we hear the gospel. It’s not dry head knowledge.

Across two posts I’m going to introduce some of the ideas from Ramsey’s first chapter, show how they grow out of God’s word, and draw the lines that Ramsey does so well, from these truths to our lives.

God is other

What’s your first reaction when you think of who God is, what does your gut do? Do you flinch at a terrifying dictator? Do you sing for joy on the inside? And maybe the outside? Or does it take a little while for the emotions motor to splutter into life? I think for me it’s the latter. I’m slow to warm up inside - even when it’s God himself staring me in the face.

Ramsey thinks that a big part of this is that we picture God as too much like us. Maybe a lot bigger, more powerful, more patient, but basically the same. And that means the God we picture is tame.

Tamed views of the Divine are almost always the result of a “God-in-the-mirror” theology, where we see the Lord of all as little more than a reflection of ourselves; a God who conveniently winks at almost everything we presently practice and approve of, rarely being so audacious as to contradict our wishes. (24)

We think God is a being among beings, a creature among creatures. But, you may be thinking, aren’t we in the image of God? Surely there’s something like us in God? Of course, that’s true, but it’s not all there is to say.

To be sure, there is a profound sense in which we are like God ... yet in a deeper way, God is entirely unlike us. (26)

We’ve seen recently in our Isaiah series that this is exactly how the LORD describes himself to his people. In Isaiah 46:5. After showing how idols are a burden, where he sustains, God asks, ‘To whom will you compare me or count me equal? To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?’ You can’t compare apples and oranges. But you can compare a Ferrari with a Porsche. You can compare football teams - that’s why you put all the ones of a similar ability in the same league, so you can compare them. You can even compare teams from different leagues, because they play the same sport. They exist within the same category. But not so for God.

What makes the gap of God’s transcendence so insurmountable is that, biblically speaking, God does not merely exist in the highest possible category; he goes beyond the concept of categories. (27)

No creature, no idol, can say, ‘I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: my purpose will stand, and I will do what I please.’[3]

See how this is the basic thing the whole Bible assumes about God; let’s see the very first verse of the Bible.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1

What was there in the beginning? God. Before everything we see around us existed, there was God. There was nothing outside of him. Whatever that first moment where the universe sprung into being looked like, there was a point where all things went from not existing to existing. And the reason they did is that they were created. This means that if we were to divide everything that exists into two boxes, we’d have one full of created things and the other with uncreated things. In the ‘created’ box you could put Ferraris and Porsches, humans, and even apples and oranges. But in the other box is only God.

We can’t compare God to anything because he has nothing in his category to compare him with. Everything created depends on God himself for its existence. He creates and he sustains.

we are utterly dependent … think about breathing! (27-8)

We see this vividly in Exodus 3:1-14, where God reveals himself to Moses ‘in flames of fire from within a bush.’ He also gives Moses a name to know him by, I AM. What does this capture about who he is? He is the one who is who he is. That means he’s not the one who’s becoming, he’s not one thing and then another thing. He doesn’t need someone else to be who he is, like a husband might say of his wife ‘she completes me;’ or like all of creation needs God - without him we’d just blow away like dust. God is who he is.

And he gives us a picture of what that means. ‘The Angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.’ The angel of the LORD here is divine - somehow he is God.[4] This is God himself speaking from the fire. We often call this the burning bush, but the bush isn’t burning. The fire burns, but it doesn’t burn the bush. The LORD reveals his name - I AM - and he shows us what that means, too. To be I AM is to be a fire that burns without fuel. A life that needs no life-giver. I Am what I am. His life comes from himself. Fire that burns without fuel.

He is, in himself, all that is needed; happy and whole. (28)

Because God is full of life in himself, he can give life to others. That’s why in Genesis 1 God creates, but no one creates him. That’s why when death enters the world he promises to defeat it and give life. It’s why his name is meant to give Moses confidence as he goes back and confronts the leader of the world’s biggest superpower.

Conclusion

Before we can say anything about how we reflect God’s image we must grasp how unlike us he is, how he is other. He is the life who needs no life-giver; he is a fire that burns without fuel. He has life in himself, and so he can give us life, both life from nothing in creation, and life from death in salvation. And our first response to who he is should be sheer awe!

In Part 2 we will see how the Lord Jesus displays God’s otherness in human form.

[1] This blog post is an edited version of the Teaching Time from Sunday 6^th February.

[2] Quotes followed by page numbers in the body of text are from Adam Ramsey, Truth on Fire: Gazing at God until Your Heart Sings (Epsom: The Good Book Company, 2021).

[3] Isaiah 46: 10.

[4] See v4 When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush. From the NT we have reason to think that this is the Son - the Lord Jesus before he took on human flesh.