fearing God

This summer after making the decision to visit the Creation Museum near Cincinnati, OH, we did something I will never regret. After paying an arm and a leg to get in to the museum, we gave another arm to see a planetarium show. Yes, it was expensive. No, we will never have quite that kind of experience anywhere else. This was space from a Biblical perspective!

The part of the show that will never leave my memory was when the narrator began to take us away from our solar system. I don't remember the details exactly (my memory, though certainly taken in by the scene, isn't that great) but it seemed as though every time we moved out, we did so by a power of ten--perhaps based on the size of our own galaxy. Galaxies, massive suns, and nebulae, an expanse which made my head spin, met our eyes again and again. Out further and further, to the very edges of the known (known!!) universe. Then back in again, by a power of ten each time. I lost track of counting how many times we moved in somewhere around 20.

How big is God? This is what I wonder every time I look up at the stars for any period of time. It is all there to see as much as we can with the naked eye--the massive expanse of space, and knowledge of an even bigger God who created it all. It is an amazing thought to consider that same God took on the form of a human body, a body He will retain forever, and entered into one time and one space through His Son to redeem the one thing in all creation that rebels against His authority: man. "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Ps. 8:4)

A certain sense of that bigness of God will be with me now for as long as I live. But as I study the book of Isaiah this year, I'm challenged in a new way to consider the magnificent size of God. As He commands nations to accomplish His sovereign plans, as He gives His prophet a glimpse of His holiness, as He pursues His own people in mercy and discipline, as He promises the coming Messiah to take care of a problem so massive they can't fix it on their own, the size of God grows by powers of ten. And that is a good thing, as I come to fear Him by just barely learning to grasp God in my mind as big as He truly is in reality. It will take all eternity to stand in awe of who He really is.

A sense of the holiness and grand nature of God in any soul gives way for more of His authority, holiness, and reverence in a life that beholds Him. Not that that life knows much of this: for a quick glance at a holy God leaves one bowing, trembling, and sick at heart at the thought of being in the presence of such a Being as this. Only by the blood of Christ can such a glimpse give way to life and not death. Yet perhaps there is both: death to the horror of self and the sin that infects it, "Woe to me...I am ruined!" and life in this: "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

I can hardly look, yet it's getting awfully hard to turn my gaze away.