People tend to be fairly creative when thinking about God. Most of us know of the “Rain god” who is also known as “Huey” and each of us are able to think of names and constructs that others have applied to god that resonate with their own personal reality.
The problem is that when we frame our understanding of God within, or approximate to, our own experience we limit Him and try to put Him into a box of our own shaping. This is not the testimony of the Bible.
My experience is that God has always been just beyond my expectations when I look for Him, where I think He should be, I find that He is above or beyond the limits that I place upon Him.
The Bible story of the Exodus from Egypt starts from just this point. It might be a little stretch but it starts with Moses and his confrontation with God in the bush which did not burn when apparently on fire. Having commissioned Moses to bring the people out of Egypt God rather enigmatically calls Himself “I am who I am”, which Moses shortened to I Am, and then identified Himself with three fathers of the Hebrew nation rather than with as we would have expected the Hebrew people.
It is interesting that in the light of newer scholarship the term “I Am” has been turned into the phrase “I will be what I will be”. It rather picks up on the idea that I have been exploring that God is Beyond our expectations and our limitations - He cannot be tamed.
Of course there is a parallel thought that needs to be addressed in the context of His being Knowable. It is fundamental belief that God desires that we may be in relationship with Him, and basic to that desire is that He must be knowable. But by the same token, as many of us can testify, there is a limit to the amount that we can know another human person. How appropriate that our understanding of God is less than complete, delightfully incomplete, and that He will always be “Just Beyond” the understanding that we have of Him.
This becomes a spiritual comfort in that God reassures us that He is able. We look to something outside ourselves in times of crisis to lessen the impact however if God is only what we imagine Him to be then where is the support that will help us through the crisis.
God must be just beyond, be larger than life, and capable of being in control of life if He is truly God. Thank god He truly is God.
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