In a box
My friend Christina gave me these tiny Russian dolls when she returned from Moscow several years ago. They aren’t nesting dolls; they don’t open up so you can fit one inside the other. But they always remind me of them.
Today, they remind me of the way we talk about God. “Don’t put God in a box,” we say, with every appearance of devoutness.
But hasn’t God put himself in a box? Isn’t the whole story of God’s relationship to humanity the story of God putting himself in ever-smaller boxes, from whence he makes ever-bigger promises?
Here are some of the boxes I’m thinking of:
- “The covenant” with Abraham and by extension the Jewish nation
- His Word, in which he circumscribes himself in the finite language of human discourse — describing himself, inviting us to know him, making promises
- Jesus, the ultimate box — a human body, and a human nature, holding the divine
- The new covenant, broadened to include everyone and not just the Jews
- My heart, where his Holy Spirit dwells in transforming power
The statements he makes from within these various boxes are, across the board, extravagant.
- “I love you with an everlasting love.”
- “What you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven.”
- “Whosoever believeth in me shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”
- “If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot be untrue to himself.”
- “If you say to this mountain, ‘You shall be moved,’ it shall be moved.”
- “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it.”
Yet we in the body of Christ are so good at saying,
- “Don’t put God in a box.”
- “God knows better than we do. We don’t really want him to do whatever we ask.”
- “We can’t treat God like a vending machine.”
- “Humans have free will and we’re the ones who mess things up.”
- “God is testing your love like he tested Job’s. He doesn’t want us to love him just for the things he gives us.” (What do we have, by the way, that he didn’t give us? He made us. “We love him because he first loved us.”)
We make so many excuses for God. What is this but unbelief?
Could it be that there is a sense in which God wants to be “put in a box” — spoken to as though he is, in fact, who he has taken such pains to claim to be? Could our insistence that he can’t be put in a box represent the only truly confining box — the box of unbelief?
9 Comments
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
I’m pondering. I love the idea that you’ve presented that God has indeed put himself in a box, nut that last part (about unbelief)–I’ll have to think about that some more.
Janet
I’m not sure myself… I sound like I put all the responsibility for unanswered prayer on human shoulders, and that’s not really how I feel. But I see and hear what humans think about the subject. I don’t see God’s explanations for why he doesn’t act to heal, or save a friend’s marriage, or provide for a material need… or whatever.
God doesn’t really explain why. He gives these extravagant promises, but when they seem not to be carried out, he’s inscrutable — like he is with Job.
Jess
This is really thought-provoking. You are right, God does put himself in boxes. We so easily dismiss his promises when we attempt to answer our questions about Him.
Amy @ Hope Is the Word
I think I know where you’re coming from–sort of like we’re “excusing” God when things don’t go the way we read His promises?
Polly
I think there is a lot to what you’re saying. We try to cover for God, so we come up with all those vague pious sounding excuses for the unanswered and unexplained. But the more we recite these to ourselves the less faith we have that God will answer as he has promised. Then we cease to pray in any meaningful, faithfilled, risky way. We are impotent in our unbelief.
Janet
Yes…
I think most of us pray, at some important point, in real faith. I think of C.S. Lewis as a child, praying that his mother would survive cancer. And if the prayer isn’t answered, instead of continuing to press in, we give up and rationalize. And it becomes self-perpetuating, like you say… we pray with less and less faith.
Carrie, Reading to Know
I’m sitting here thinking about your last statement too and I think I get where you are coming from (like Amy) and I do believe I agree. We don’t believe and that’s a fact! Almost like we think it’s “too good to be true” and so we fail to approach Him as He says we can and ought to do.
Very interesting post! (And I love those little Russian dolls.)
Barbara H.
I had never thought about it before, but you’re right that God does put Himself in certain boxes. But I don’t see the last list there as contradicting that (except that all calamities aren’t just due to man’s “free will,” as Job’s situations illustrates). Saying that “We can’t treat God like a vending machine” and the like isn’t unbelief –He does say “no” sometimes, and He wants our prayer but he wants more than just “Gimme” prayers. I think those sentences are just part of man’s trying to figure out God’s inscrutability (which, of course, we can’t.) I’ve always heard “Don’t put God in a box” said in a way to mean “Don’t expect God to act like the image you’ve created in your mind of Him.” If that image is Scriptural, if the boxes are the ones He made, as you said, that’s one thing, but people create their own (i.e., how can a loving God send people to hell — if they can’t reconcile that they either do away with hell or decide that God isn’t loving, and neither one is Scriptural, thus their “box” is one God won’t fit in.)
Janet
I’m not really talking here about unbiblical or self-constructed conceptions of God. I’m talking about the way he characterizes himself in his Word, and how we often fail to interact with him as though he means what he says.