"How Big is God?"
This was the question that greeted me when I answered the phone at 5 pm yesterday. The caller was a child of, I estimate, 7 years of age. Naturally, I kept her talking whilst I phoned her father to complain that his daughter was making nuisance calls to a Pastor. This resulted in my aurally witnessing the just chastisement that must naturally follow.
However, the question stuck in my mind as a possibly important theological point.
We know that God is everywhere, but we also know that God was born of woman in that little stable in Bethlehem of Judea.
We also can see that immediately before Jesus was born, God was everywhere, but at the moment that Christ was born what happened to the universal presence? Did it suddenly
(i) reduce to nothing and immediately return centered upon Christ (or Emmanuel as He was then known, although only once and for a very short time)? Or
(ii) change and Christ’s assumption of the role of His Father (in which He was His Father) then became restricted to those who were aware of Jesus and accepted His teachings?
I am thinking of the effect upon some wandering Jewish tent maker in the far-flung reaches of, say Anatolia. I ask you to imagine the scene – he is a loyal servant of Yahweh but suddenly, Jesus is born and God’s presence disappears and then Boom! it returns but he finds himself rendered into nothing more than an atheist, or, at the very least, “A Christian minus Christ” – both highways to Damnation.
Yes, we all know that “That tent-maker needs to get himself right with Jesus” but first he has to
know there is a Jesus and next he has to understand what Jesus is saying.
If the answer is (i) then does it mean that Yahweh’s OT/Pre-Jesus presence was imperfect?
No, it is more likely that God must have instilled in the soul of all men a knowledge of Jesus and what He would say and do and His Mission and Sacrifice. Thus the entire world became Christian at the moment of Christ’s birth, and the only way a man could change this was by actively rejecting Christ or ignoring His yet to be spoken message.
I had reached this stage and it seemed that I was satisfied with my answer, so I continued hunting through the online Library of Congress for something that would allow Mr Trump to continue as “President for Life or until Jesus Returns which is ever the Sooner”, when I was struck by another explanation:
Could it be that God is not in fact “big” – He is the size of the sum total of those who believe? He resides in us but not in the non-living or the soulless. This would also account for how God knows everything that happens – we are CCTV security cameras for God and thus He knows everything we do - and because He knows more besides, He is God.
It would also account for why there were once people who believed in Greek and Roman “gods” and those “gods” were big. Whereas, because we know Jesus was
really the Son of Yahweh, we now know that those “gods” were simply empty idols devoid of all power, although those gods took on an
illusory power and “grew.”
Jesus is not so much big as “presently boundless” meaning the bounds of the belief in Him are elastic and have not yet reached their maximum.
Now that conclusion provides
the most important answer –
- The elasticity will reach a maximum –
- One more person will become a Christian and Boom!
- The release of all that energy will cause the Cracks of Doom to open and herald the coming of Armageddon.
There is proof of this in the Bible: You remember how God looked down on His creation and saw men were doing things that were “inconvenient” so He flooded the world? Well, we also know that not long after Noah and family stepped out of the Ark into a muddy world with a lot of dead fish hanging about, that evil started to take hold again.
God recognized this and promised not to do floods again.
This introduction to Armageddon is the Godly Alternative.