We are loved by a Great Big God
February 24th 2011 at 11:33am
Recently I preached from Exodus 5-7 and I was struck by God’s challenge to the gods of Egypt. Repeatedly God says that he will show himself to be LORD – to have all claims on authority and power and our worship and service. He tells Moses that his great power will be displayed, that Pharaoh’s resistance will simply serve to show God’s power all the more clearly.
As I reflected on the magnitude of God’s works in the Exodus – the scale of the miracles that were about to unfold – I couldn’t help but be reminded of the magnitude of God’s great works in creation. God was able to turn the Nile to blood and to plunge part of Egypt into darkness while another part enjoyed normal daylight and even to part the red sea. He was able to do all that because those elements were his own creation, he controls them absolutely.
In exercising his power over Egypt like that God was simply demonstrating his rule over his creation. He alone is God and ruler of creation. \In the fact of competing gods he was asserting his claim to his world.
We know the events of the exodus, and even how they were fulfilled and surpassed in Jesus’ death and resurrection. And yet we so easily fall into the mindset of the Israelites in thinking that God is too small and powerless to help us (they ask God to curse Moses for making trouble with Pharaoh, rather than asking God to deliver them from Pharaoh!). Or the mindset of the Egyptians, thinking that God is too small to stop us and call us to account (Pharaoh: I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go! – ie. there is no God, your imaginary God won’t stop me doing exactly what I want).
We could use a moments reflection on how big God really is – he made all that is, and it was as easy as opening his mouth and commanding it into being. And what he made is still being revealed to us in unimaginable scale. The universe God made is vast beyond our comprehension. If we were travelling at the speed of light (671 million miles an hour) it would take billions of years to reach the edge of the known universe – billions of years, that is simply beyond imagining.
Thankfully we live in a digital age and people can put those numbers into a form we can see and after that sermon someone kindly sent me a couple of videos that show the scale of God’s works. If you’ve got a few minutes watch these (here and here) and reflect that the God who comes to us personally, who makes himself known through his Son, who invites us to approach him as Father and who personally provides for all our needs is the same God who holds our vast universe in his hand.
God isn’t too small to help us, and we shouldn’t be too timid to ask for it.