On the Majesty of God

On the Majesty of God

May 17, 2020

Scripture: Psalm 93

Psalm 93 is powerful testimony to the majesty of God:

More majestic then the thunders

          of mighty waters,

     more majestic than the waves

          of the sea,

     majestic on high is the Lord! Psalm 93:4

I just read Psalm 93 perhaps for the first time because it’s in the Revised Common Lectionary’s daily lectionary for tomorrow. When I read it I had a strange reaction. I thought: I don’t normally think of God as majestic. I so think of God as a God of grace, love, distributive justice attained nonviolently, and peace that I rarely think of God as powerful and certainly not as majestic. Which is not to say that that I don’t think God is powerful and majestic. It’s just to say that I don’t usually think of God that way. I want to reflect here on what my reaction on Psalm 93 says about how we humans think of God.

We cannot think of God in any terms other than human ones. That’s because we’re human and nothing else. They say that if camels thought of God, God would look like a camel. It’s not that I think that God looks like a human being. I don’t know what God looks like, although it’s certainly true that God doesn’t look like anything we familiar with. God doesn’t look like anything we can visualize that we aren’t familiar with either, for God utterly transcends any image of God we could possibly come up with. Still, like every other human I can’t help but think of God in human terms. I can know that God transcends our human terms, but human terms are all we humans have with which to think and speak of God.

I have a set of human terms that I usually apply to God. Love. Grace. Distributive justice achieved nonviolently. Peace. I tend to think of God in human terms that convey gentleness. Yes, God makes demands on us, but God does that subtly, gently. God at most prods us. God never forces us. I think we see as much of God as we are capable of seeing in Jesus Christ. Jesus could get angry, but mostly he was gentle himself and praised gentleness in others. Blessed are the meek he said, not blessed are the majestic. He came as a man of no worldly account, a poor man from a poor town in a backwater province ruled by Rome. I’m sure that the last word to describe him that came to those who saw him was majestic. He wasn’t majestic. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey not on a magnificent war horse. Being majestic just wasn’t his thing.

Being majestic wasn’t his thing, I think, because being majestic mostly isn’t God’s thing. At least when God came to us in Jesus God didn’t think we needed more revelation of divine majesty. Does that mean that God just isn’t majestic? Not necessarily. It may be well-nigh impossible for a human being to be both majestic and gentle. Few if any of us have ever been both. Yet surely it isn’t at all impossible for God. I see God’s gentle side in Jesus, but then I think: just look at what God has created! Not just this tiny planet we live on and seem hell-bent on destroying. Look at the whole universe. It is vast beyond our comprehension. Scientists can express its size in mathematical formulas, but even with those formulas we can’t really comprehend how big it is. The distance light travels in billions of years? I can say it, but I can’t really comprehend it. There is power in God’s universe beyond our greatest imagining. Billions upon billions of stars, each one a nuclear reactor generating more power than we can ever imagine.

Even here on our little planet there is evidence of God’s majesty. Massive land formations lifted thousands of feet into the air. Canyons eroded thousands of feet into the earth. Oceans with tides and currents we can never control. As I write these words I’ve just seen images of Yosemite National Park on PBS. I’ve never been there, but even in pictures of it I can see a majestic beauty no human could ever create. There’s evidence of God’s majesty even in us mortal humans. Our spirit always strives to know more, to control more, and to connect more with God. So I may not normally think of God as majestic, but when I stop to think about it I can see just how majestic God really is.

There’s an important lesson for us in the way we can come to think of God in ways we normally don’t. God transcends all of our ways of seeing God. God is every way we think God is and so much more. No way we have of thinking about God can ever fully encompass God, not even close. Yet think of God we do, and think of God we must. As we do we must always remember that our images of God are not God. Only God is God. So let us never make our understandings of God absolute. They aren’t. Only God is absolute. So let us be temperate in our claims about God. Only God is God, and we humans get into worlds of trouble when we forget that divine truth. So let’s remember it, OK? Amen.