How small is your god?

Isaiah 40

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? 

It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.  

He brings the princes to nothing;
He makes the judges of the earth useless.

 

This is written in the context of carving wooden gods, but it addresses a problem that was throughout the time of Israel - that their vision of the divine was always too small. Whether this was as small as a wooden doll or as small as the people of Israel, they always made God too small.

This passage ways that we are like grasshoppers. That sounds demeaning, but what I get from it is that we all look the same to the divine. Not pink, brown, rich or poor. And the "princes" and "judges" comment means that being PM or being on benefits doesn't matter from the divine perspective.

Our God is not the God of us. Of Quakers or Anglicans or Methodists or westerners or Africans or - whoever. This perspective is that the divine is for all humanity, every one of us. Even - especially - those who we disagree with.

Perspective is important - actually, in my reading of the Bible, so much is about perspective. That we - people - so often don't see things from the right perspective, we usually see the world and the divine-with-the-world far too small, far too local. We cannot see from the divine persepctive, but we need to understand that that is the right one to have. And to acknowledge that our perspective is - always - too small.