God In History

One thing that I appreciate about my studying church history is that it causes you to broaden your mind concerning the work, will, and the presence of God throughout the history of the world. Intuitively and theologically we understand that God is present. We understand that he possesses all power. We have landed on the correct conclusion that he knows all things and that his knowledge is not limited by time and space, but he preexists outside those limitations, simply meaning that he is before the beginning and he continues after the end. When we meditate on the fact that God is not affected by temporal things, it become all the more amazing to consider that at the same time God can express feelings towards his creation and still declare absoluteness in his character. This is an amazing thing to ponder, not to analyze, but to experience awe at the splendor and grandeur of God.

Isaiah in his description of the Messiah said that he was wonderful. It's interesting when you discover that wonderful doesn't mean wonderful in a modern context. Wonderful to us means great, marvelous, magnificent, etc. And of course, Jesus is all those things and more. When Isaiah used this word he uses a hyperbole to attempt to explain a God that he has been given a vision of but cannot seem to grapple with the essence of who he is...and so he calls him "wonderful." The word wonderful simply means "difficult to understand", "incomprehensible", or "beyond finding out." Later in his book, which I like to call the Old Testament Gospel, Isaiah declares that "there is no searching of his understanding."

In the five weeks that I have been in my Modern Church History class at Fuller Theological Seminary I am again (this is second stab at graduate seminary) going through a deconstruction of sorts of my personal theology. The deconstruction is not designed to cause you to abort your faith, but in a sense "test" the theological ground that you stand on to verify if it is a sure foundation built on the Word of God. If after the process of deconstruction one finds that their faith has been eradicated, there is a positive chance that it may not have been present initially as previously perceived.

However, in my deconstruction, out of all the wars that have been fought over the faith, out of all of the coerced conversions, the creeds that magnified classicism, sexism, and racism above the knowledge of God, the stain of Roman culture that diluted the simplicity of the apostle's doctrine, I still see the mighty hand of God and I marvel at the presence, power, and love of Jesus Christ to permeate our inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and outright misrepresentation of the kingdom of God, and look past our faults and see our real need.

God is an awesome God and he loves us more than we will ever know.