I had this thought the other day, about how many false gods and pretend gods/goddesses there are in fictional media, and in ancient history, etc. None of those pretend gods compare to the true Lord of Heaven and Earth. A while back I made a comment in a sermon about how God is not a fickle, unpredictable, angry god like Zeus. I pointed out how great it is for us that God is good, loving, kind, etc. Imagine if God was a jerk: He would still be the only God who existed, but He’d be a jerk. What would we do? We’d have no recourse. We can’t fight Him. There’s no other god we could appeal to. There’s only one God…and He’s the best one.
Isn’t that great?
And then I got to thinking, there really is no god like God in any fictional religious concept. Zeus is petty. Mars is violent. Poseidon is boastful. On and on it goes. The God of the Bible, however, is perfectly good, and there’s never been another “god” that man has ever dreamed up like that. Think about it: Suppose you sat down to write a story about a god that you conjured up in your mind, and you wanted him to be perfectly good. The more you wrote about him, the more likely it is that you would eventually allow some of your own flaws to slip into the writing. At some point, that “good” god of yours will do something that someone else could argue is not consistently good. That’s just the limitation of the human imagination.
The God of the Bible, however, is unimaginably good. None of us could ever fathom a goodness so good as to become a man to die (and rise) to save those who sinned against Him. None of us could ever envision a level of goodness so deep that He would die in order to spare us from the punishment we deserved for the crime of killing Him! That degree of goodness goes beyond the limits of human understanding.
God is unimaginable, and that’s all the more reason to be certain that He is not the product of human imagination.
~Matthew
addendum: I wrote this devotional a few months ago, but coincidentally, last weekend Bob Turner made a statement that fits in nicely with what is written here: “Do not reduce God to the limitation of human imagination.” We cannot fathom the limits of God’s power, because our fathoming has limits, and God’s power does not. What an amazing idea!