The Big God of small things

It's easy, when we reflect on nature or read the scriptures about God spreading out the stars, to think about how small we are. We are so small, smaller than dust motes, and that God should know us, much less love us, is unthinkable. But therein lies our hubris; our egocentrism. We hear about the sheer bigness of God and all we can concentrate on is ourselves. Perhaps the question isn't how He can know us when we are so small, but when He is so big. Isaiah 40:12, one of the most incredible scriptures in the Bible, says:

"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?"

Did you get that? God measured the "heavens", or the entire universe, between his thumb and his pinkie. How can we even begin to imagine that level of bigness? We haven't even figured out our own galaxy, our own solar system, even our own planet! How then can we begin to fathom something bigger than what we can't fathom already?

Christians often make a big point of debating Intelligent Design and evolution, and refuting scientific theories. And while that is important, as I mentioned in my last post, it cannot define our faith. How can we debate what we can't even begin to understand? We work with our understanding of natural laws, of the universe, of physics and biology. We debate the meaning of Hebrew words like "yom", and whether it means "day" or "age" or even "eon". We forget that God is bigger than our understanding of days and eons and even Hebrew. The end of that chapter in Isaiah says:

"Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel,
'My way is hidden from the Lord;
my cause is disregarded by my God'?
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary.
and his understanding no one can fathom."

Why do we continually limit God? Why do we suppose that simply because we get tired and irritated of our problems that God does too? Why do we, in all our endless wisdom, suppose that God has forsaken us just because we cannot see how He is working in a situation? How egoistic of us to assume that we can even begin to understand what God is and how He moves?

I do not write this for you to stop thinking about God, or debating about Intelligent Design, or trying to see God moving in the world; I write this for you to stop, just for a moment, and simply appreciate how truly Big of a God we serve. Our God is not a God of idols, or statues that we can label and measure. He is bigger than the biggest thing we can't even imagine, and that's pretty big indeed. I think I'm with the Orthodox Christians here (if I understand their creed right), when I say let's revel in the mystery of God. For one moment, let's stop trying to name the ineffable, and simply be the trusting children He created us to be. We don't have to know everything. We weren't created to know everything. And while that may be the modus operandi of modernity, it is not of classical Christianity. Let's be countercultural for a moment, and simply worship because we serve a God that is so Big, He even cares about us.