Our God is a great big God

At church we sing lots of kids' songs about God being BIG. A bit cringy, but not bad theology.

However, since kids (and the rest of us) need reality to support whatever the adults may tell them, I'm thinking: does the way we live our lives reflect a belief that God is big? Would someone observing the way I live think: 'blimey, he must have a big view of God?'

What would that kind of life look like? Well, I guess it would need to be based on whatever I believed - my beliefs about the world will determine how I live my life; if they don't then they aren't beliefs.

A big God must be bigger than any of my thoughts (to paraphrase Anselm, who defined his belief in the existence of God using the phrase "that than which nothing greater can be conceived"). Yet, too often we constrain God within the limitations not just of our thinking capacities but within something far short of our human imagining, namely doctrinal constructions. In saying that, I'm not being critical of doctrine per se. But, if we're to be faithful to our faith in a 'great big God', we must at least hold lightly to any concepts, ideas or doctrines we may hold; we must be humble in our conception of God.

A big God must also therefore be capable of surprising us. If God does not, there's something wrong with how we're seeing God in our life. The fact is, life is full of surprises, some of them unpleasant, many of them unseen - but we often attribute only a selection of life's events to God's activity, perhaps because our view of God doesn't encompass the other stuff, or because we don't take the time to reflect on the familiar things, and in the process our 'great big God' shrinks still further.

And a big God must surely be capable of greater deeds than his creation, greater love, greater forgiveness, greater mercy, greater goodness. Some of our doctrines don't reflect this - once again we limit God's 'bigness' to the extent of our capacities to love, forgive, show mercy, be good.

And before you know it, our great big God has been reduced to human scale.

No wonder so many of our kids don't believe it.