Life As A Symphony

 

“God’s not here, we haven’t found Him anywhere.”

“I don’t have a relationship with Him, I can’t talk to Him.”

“The Bible is out of date, it’s just a list of old rules.”

These may sound statements from the non-believer or the new believer, but even the most committed believers have similar concerns:

“How could someone who loves everyone, condemn anyone to Hell?”

“God’s not just, look at all of the evil people who are successful.”

“Jesus may have lived, but he never faced temptation like THIS.”

My aim in this post is not to solve all of those struggles. I only want to point out that much of our struggle originates from our dedication to focusing on what God is not.

In his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis spells out a situation involving a limpet, which is a kind of aquatic snail that lives inside its shell and attaches itself to rocks. This particular limpet in the story gets the chance for a glimpse of Man, and reports back to his limpet buddies. Naturally, he will have to use many negatives, but those he reports back to will get some idea of what Man will look like.

Then along come the erudite limpets. These are the scholars of the limpet universe, who have no vision at all of what man is like. In their perennial cynicism, what they will take away from the limpet who has seen Man is solely the negatives.

As humans we take this same approach, focusing on the ideas that God is “infinite, immaterial, impassible, immutable, etc.”  This is where we get lost. One by one we strip away human attributes of God and disconnect Him more and more from ourselves, because He is, in fact, divine and beyond us. However, what we often fail to do in this process is replace the human attributes with divine attributes, and so we end up worshipping a non-entity. When we worship a non-entity, we determine that being a non-entity is the divine form of existence.

This is equivalent to a puzzle where the wrong pieces are taken out but not replaced. A song where instead of finding the right keys, we just close the piano altogether. A painting where instead of correcting the shading, we just throw the whole canvas in the trash. Being a non-entity is no way to live, and no way to make disciples. Our lives, and our vision of God, should both be beautiful symphonies where we take pieces and put them together for beautiful imagery.

After we strip everything away, what are the attributes that we can plug back into our work of art? If you ask A.W. Tozer in his book The Knowledge of The Holy, the divine attributes are “whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of himself.” Tozer further explains that being infinite, God must have attributes which we cannot possibly comprehend. So, the attributes we are looking for are what God has revealed and also what we can conceive about Him. “These answers He has provided in nature, in the Scriptures, and in the person of His Son.”

As believers our focus is placed on knowing these attributes; but what do we do with them? Back in Miracles, Lewis continues: “Imagination may help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree, head us off from abyss of abstraction.” The key is to experience God’s attributes! “For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, ‘Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses.’”

When as Christians we only rely on knowledge and study and reason for our image of God, we become the people lying curious in bed in the dark while God is the cat in the linen-cupboard. We fall short of knowing the full truth, and we wake up in the morning with only guesses to carry us forward. Our understanding of God is as incomplete as a drum solo from a novice musician.

Our routine is to gain knowledge of God’s attributes, but our duty is to experience those attributes.

That duty is made up of two things. First, we use those attributes to build our understanding of God. We build an image of Him that allows us to find Him in our lives and to relate to Him in our selves. In that image we find something to strive for each day, and something to anticipate in our eternity that helps us endure our hardest times.

Secondly, we make a symphony out of our lives when we experience those attributes and exemplify them. Day by day, moment by moment, we add a note to the song. Sometimes the song is full of low notes, low moments, and heavy and dramatic. Other times it is higher pitched, moments overflowing with joy and warmth. The tempo can be fast at certain points and slow in others. Our lives come together as a collection of moments full of God’s attributes, of notes of praise to Him.

Most songs, writings, and artwork are meant to tell a story. Don’t strip your story down to only what is not. Don’t limit your song to only the slow, monotone notes of knowledge. Take what God has revealed about Himself and take your experience with His attributes. Conduct your life as a symphony of moments that show His story to those around you and draws them to it like we are drawn to our own favorite pieces. The Bible is God’s main instrument for making disciples; but your song, your story, is your key tool to do the same.