The unfamiliar God

One of biggest problems humanity has is that we have difficulty imagining that God is far different from us. After all, we are pretty good, pretty god-like: our technology has achieved so much; we know so much; we are so beautiful and creative; we have such great self-esteem. Why wouldn’t God want to be like us? Surely God must be just like us, only bigger. And I think, too, that we want to imagine a God who isn’t absolutely alien to us: we want to look at him and find a friend, not a foreigner. We want him to be familiar and comforting.

But the way the Bible talks about the God of Israel is very different from this: he is very unhuman; strange, even. The Bible uses the word “holy” to express this about him. This morning, I want for us to grasp the radical difference between us and God: to consider his holiness. I want us to look into the sometimes terrifying ravine that separates us from the incomparable Creator; and to ask, if we are so far away from him, how can we possibly know him?