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I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe;
I the LORD do all these things.
The congregation was riveted, not because of my delivery but, as I later found out, by the plain description of the terribleness of God. Afterward some extolled my courage for broaching a topic that puzzled them, others thanked me for helping them break through a personal crisis, and others still said they were simply moved for inexplicable reasons. It suggested to me once again the recurring relevance of one theme of my first book in this series, Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God: we are not attracted to God merely because of his great love. We instinctively know we need more than a divine grandfather who pats us on the head, or a cosmic bellhop who fulfills all our wishes, or a buddy and traveling companion. There is also something strangely and fearsomely attractive about the one who forms light and creates darkness, whose love is not only great but terrible.
Almost a half century ago, A. W. Tozer lamented that "The church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness makes her situation all the more tragic."
Tozer was shaking his finger at the church, but today we don't need a shaking finger, for we nod in assent when we hear this. We know from experience we are poorer as individuals and churches. The simplistic view of God, as Tozer suggested, "is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us," including the loss of "our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence."
He penned these lines in his classic The Knowledge of the Holy almost a half century ago. Another classic of the era, J. B. Phillips's Your God Is Too Small, argued along similar lines, but he was thinking more evangelistically: "Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish … but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough … to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation."
Both these authors were saying in their own way that we need not a warm and fuzzy God but one who offers a great and terrible love. They argued their point by writing about the attributes of God. Fifty years later, I believe a similar book is needed.
The attributes of God—omniscience, omnipresence, and so forth—have fallen on hard times. The philosophically inclined have deconstructed them one by one. They've asked penetrating questions like "How can an immutable God, one who doesn't change, answer prayer?" And "How can we have free will if an omniscient God already knows what we're going to do?" And "How can an omnipotent and all-loving God allow evil?" They've noted how much these divine attributes owe to Greek thought and how words like immutable and omniscient don't even appear in the Bible. They've suggested that Christian theology took a wrong turn at the beginning, abandoning the more personal God of the Bible for a god of philosophers.
