By trade I am an engineer, a software engineer to be precise. Much of software engineering is abstract... in essence, software engineering is the process of creating usable functions and applications from abstract concepts.
One of the difficult tasks in this type of environment is communication. It is just plain difficult to clearly communicate abstract ideas through verbal, or even textual, communication. Typically a conversation will find its way to either a piece of paper or a whiteboard so that through pictures, words, text, and body language one engineer may communicate an abstract thought to a practical solution.
I find that similar things happen when my mind turns to God. Trying to understand this incredible, eternal, wild, uncontainable, incorruptible, awesome God is not easy. .
God is the Creator of creation, not an object of creation. Can you image a painting claiming to be a painter? Seeing a painting, one instinctively knows that there must be a painter who panted the painting... Or how about a building? Seeing a building one can immediately ascertain that there was a builder of the building. Seeing creation, we know that there is a Creator.
The difficulty with this is that when considering God we don't really have much of a foundation to base our thoughts, so we must return to the basic, fundamental part of abstract thinking: the unknown.
We don't know much about God. God is love. God is a man of war. God is full of mercy and patient beyond measure. God is quick to forgive and slow to anger. God loves His creation. God has chosen to reveal Himself in three ways: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The list continues, but is never complete, because God is eternal.
I have resolved that there are some things that must stay abstract.
This is the same difficulty that the Apostle Paul was addressing in Romans 1:22-23 as he wrote,
Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man - and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things
Paul wrote of the idea that we cannot confine God to His creation.
God is God, and not a creating being. When we think of God in terms of creation, we change the glory of our magnificent God into something much less than it is... and we find that in this state this new god is no longer complete.
We must not confine God to our level of understanding. When we consider God we must think outside of creation and allow for our God-given abstract thinking to allow for variables that we cannot resolve.
Join me in glorifying and loving God where He is, for who He is, as He is.
Praise God!
