Wednesday, July 15, 2009

God Is Bigger Than Your Brain

This is really just a post to give my readers (all 2 of you), a little treat to tide y'all over until the next great post. Literally...the post is on greatness.

Anyway, enjoy this excerpt from The God Who Smokes by Timothy J. Stoner (yes, you are allowed to laugh at his name and the title). It is a response to many Open Theists and others like them who would diminish God's majesty to make Him logical.



"All that we needed to learn we really did learn in kindergarten. The lessons are so simple and basic that as grown-ups we may tend to forget them. Two of these are don't run with scissors, and don't play with fire.

This massaging of God's public image, this painting over the portions of God's masterpiece we don't like, this "deconstruction" is doing both those activities your teacher warned you against. And both can yet you and others hurt. While falling with scissors in hand may only poke your eye out, it is possible to burn down your own house and your neighbor's as well playing with matches in the attic.

What the prophets report from behind the smoke is that God scares the pants off us. And to even entertain the idea that we can improve His painting by airbrushing away some offensive "flaws" is incredibly demeaning at best. To act as though God needs our assistance to better position Himself for improved market penetration is so presumptuous and stunningly disrespectful that it is really kind of frightening.

As the tokers and stoners used to say in the sixties, "He is wild, man! Wild!" They were right and still are. He was wild with Moses and Pharaoh, and He's still wild today. He is fierce, and He acts like He owns the entire planet. No, make that the universe.

He really believes that He is the most worthy, most majestic, magnificent, glorious, stunningly beautiful being in the universe. And He is fixated on the certainty that only He deserves worship - that to Him alone belong honor, glory, and praise forever and forever. With red-rimmed, stinging eyes and burning hair, all we an say is - He is right. He is astonishingly beautiful, utterly majestic and perfect in the symmetries of justice and righteousness, knowledge and wisdom. He is as hypnotically compelling as a surging forest fire and ten times as dangerous.

He is out of control - ours, not His.

All us smoking-hair types admit that none of us imagined we'd need biohazard suits to protect us from the radioactive isotopes emanating from the Transcendent One. However, had we taken the biblical Epic a little more seriously, maybe we wouldn't have been so surprised."

Good night.

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