We are told to think outside of the box. It is drilled in our heads from a young age, so we learn to see things differently and think differently. We learn to be the square pegs in the round holes. We change and we adapt and, so, outside of the box we think.
But in light of this, allow me to pose a question that I have time and time again asked myself: if we think outside of the box in regards to business, politics, and medicine, why are we putting God in one?
The boxes we put the Lord in often relate directly to how we view Him. For each Christian, a certain characteristic or identity of God may resonate more than the others. For me, it is that God is the Creator. For people with absent worldly fathers, Abba may carry more weight. For others, it is El Roi- The One Who Sees Me. Praising God for being the Creator or our Father or for seeing us in not intrinsically wrong; it is wrong when we forget to praise God for everything else that He is. When we focus on one part of God’s nature, we are limiting His power.
We need to realize who God really is. Of course, God is chock-full of love, compassion, grace, and mercy-He sent His perfect Son to die on a cross so that we wouldn’t have to, for pete’s sake! But we cannot limit our God to just being forgiving and Fatherly-He is not a genie who grants our every wish. The Bible says that my God is a jealous God; He is a just God. He is the God that destroyed an entire city because they were not living pure lives. He is the God that hardened the heart of Pharaoh in Exodus so that when the Israelites fled, He would be glorified. And, please excuse my candor, but He is the God that sends those who blatantly deny His free gift of salvation and eternal life to eternal damnation in the fiery pits of Hell.
My God is not just rainbows and butterflies, but above all, in every part of His character, He is holy. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is found in Isaiah 6. The Prophet Isaiah had a vision from the Lord. In his vision, he saw seraphim flying with 6 wings-2 to fly with, 2 to cover their eyes to protect them from the grandeur of the Lord, and 2 to cover their feet, as they were flying over holy ground. They spend all of eternity repeating that the Lord is “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Oftentimes when writing, an author will repeat an idea so that the importance of it is fully grasped by the reader. Similarly, the seraphim repeat and repeat that the Lord is holy. Holiness is the only attribute of God that is repeated in such a way. It is because His holiness is what separates Him from us. Since we are made in His image, He has given us the ability to love and give grace and forgiveness and be just, but we are inherently sinners and He is inherently Holy.
See, when we put Him in a box, we are essentially stripping our all-Holy God of His most defining attribute. When we put Him in a box, we are saying that we can understand all that He is just because on our good days, we exhibit some of the same characteristics that God has. When we put Him in a box, we are saying that He could be contained by one. However, I’ve noticed that as your understanding of the Lord grows, the box you put Him in grows. As we get one peek at His glory, it grows. When we get one peek at His mercy, it grows a little more. When we remember that He is holy and we are far from it, it grows. And it grows and it grows and it grows and it will never be big enough to actually contain the idea of who our God is because our feeble minds cannot grasp the ideas of eternity, relentless love, or true perfection, but we can begin to understand a bit more of our incomprehensible Lord when we study His character. And before we know it, the top blows off of our box because my God cannot be contained by any boundaries. When the top blows off our box and the walls come down, we can see Him for what He truly is: perfect, sovereign, holy. Subsequently, as our foggy image of our all-sufficient savior gets clearer and clearer, we can start to, with His help, implement His character into our own lives.
