The Bigness of God

I used to wonder about the Bible telling us to magnify God. It seemed strange to be told to magnify something that is huge. I listened to John Piper on this subject and he shed some light on it. We are not to magnify God as in a microscope looking at something small. The concept is like a telescope magnifying something in space or in essence bringing something huge and seemingly distant close. Many seem to think that God is distant and out there somewhere. Not accessible. The Bible is clear that God is all around us, just outside the physical.

God uses the created realm to whisper the truths of the spiritual. Many have worshiped the sun as a god. It is not a god, yet its existance points to the real God. God may appear to be small and distant. The truth about the sun is that it is perfectly positioned for life on this planet. The sun is huge. Something like a million earths could fit inside of the sun. The heat from the sun would incinerate us if we got too close. The same way God is huge. His holiness would leave our sinful selves writhing in agony if we got too close.

He has positioned himself close enough to us in the physical for us to draw comfort from Him. Like a cat curling up in the warm comfort of a sunbeam we can seek His comforting warmth. He gives us life and sustains us exactly as we need. He hands us a telescope of prayer. So often I use the telescope to examine my tiny little problems. They seem huge and overwhelming. The telescope is meant to magnify God. When I focus on Him and see how huge He is my problems seems very small. The thing I am learning is to recognize the sunbeams and to warm myself in them. I am learning to trust. There may be droughts and crop failures, but the sun has never failed to rise. How much more so the Creator that made such things to point to Him?

This concept is something that I need to practice. It is, by nature, foreign to me. I am a first-born people pleaser with a tendency towards perfectionism. Not only that I am a born sinner. God, however, is bigger than those odds. It is probably why he had me get married and have seven children. They are doing much to peal away those things that are truly not worth wasting my time on. I am reminded that as my husband and I age, we have to savor the time together as it is getting shorter. My children are enthralled with sunbeams and other miracles of creation that I take for granted. My husband and children in and of themselves are miracles. God is at work. We just need to look.