Are We Ready For God?

Are we ready for God? I mean now. I don’t mean “are you ready to meet God?” I don’t mean to imply that the end is coming or that you’re on your deathbed. I don’t need to know if you’ve accepted Him as your Lord and Savior. What I mean is: are we ready for God? Can we handle and understand Him here, now, in the present, as He is and already exists?

A.W. Tozer writes that one of the first questions we ask in trying to understand God is “what is God like?” C.S. Lewis, in Miracles, provides some possibilities. “An impersonal God – well and good,” he says. This is a version of God that many of us put into use. Someone that we can reference at certain times, that we can blame things on, and that has no relational value whatsoever. This version of God is akin to things like “traffic” and “weather.” Good some days, bad some days, inconvenient often, and a vague reality that we don’t know or care to know more about the intricacies of.

Lewis carries on: “a subjective God of beauty, truth, and goodness, inside our own heads – better still.” Yes, this version of God IS better. For starters, it acknowledges God’s goodness. It becomes personal. It speaks to His creation and confirms Him as the foundation for fact and fiction, right and wrong.  It points to Him as something to be sought after. However, our ideas of Him in this version are still limited to what is in our own heads, and are also subject to our own motives and other distortions and what we want him to be. In this version God is no longer just generic “traffic” or “weather,” He is a teacher, a judge, something more defined and more personal.

One step further from Lewis: “A formless life force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap- best of all.” Now we’re cooking! This isn’t a God that just laid things out and disappeared, this is something we can use! Now we acknowledge God has power beyond our own thoughts, power to create, to heal, to change, to work miracles! And we have that power to use! Now God is a full-blown resource, available to do the things we want Him to.

“But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband- that is quite another matter.,” Lewis goes on. “There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”

This is how Lewis concludes the list. THIS is the real, true, living God and He is so much more than we want Him to be. He is, and is in the middle of, everything, whether we want Him to be or not. This is also where Tozer answers His own question: “God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody. We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown. It is not possible for the mind to crash suddenly past the familiar into the totally unfamiliar. “

This is where our conflict arises. Now, Tozer acknowledges that God has disclosed things about Himself that we can take as truth. We’ve seen these in His book, and in His Son. However, what he has disclosed is far from being the entire picture. Tozer’s analysis also points out that even Ezekiel, who saw Heaven opened up, was left without any words to describe what he saw, referring only to “likenesses.” He is beyond our understanding and beyond our comprehension. Whatever we think He is, he’s even bigger than that.

That is what leaves us woefully unprepared and in a constant search for Him. It is why Saint Augustine said “our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” In a world where we are challenged just to understand the Earth and the stars, the wind and the waves, our own children or pets…how can we understand that God created and is all of these and more?

Are we ready for that? Do we want to admit that God is everything and everywhere; near and far, past, present, and future? Lewis doesn’t seem to think we’ve ever wanted it to come to that. We are fearful of what that means for us and our own comprehension, our own achievement, and our own sin. It is, however, God’s true magnitude and the critical reality. We all lose when we degrade God to our level. It is why Tozer starts The Knowledge of the Holy with a chapter titled “Think Rightly About God” and closes the chapter with this challenge: “The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him- and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place.”