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Important truths about God
Pastor Eric J. Kregel
South Peace News
Let’s imagine you’re watching a scary movie about a monster that swallows people whole. This monster slowly creeps and slinks to its prey and the heroine is being chased. Her ankle is sprained and she is crawling from the monster down an unlit hallway. The monster is about to get her and she might be a goner.
At this moment, she throws up her hands in the air as she remembers something. She reaches in for her cell phone and exclaims to the camera, “Oh, I nearly forgot! I have to call the carpool and tell them I won’t make it to pick up the kids for hockey practice!”
She makes the call and says under her breath, “I’m glad I remembered. I’m so afraid of these women and would hate to be on their bad list!”
Meanwhile, the flesh-eating creature creeps towards her.
“What?” you ask. “She’s about to be eaten by a mutant and she is worried about a carpool group?”
Why doesn’t this example make sense? In the presence of something greater or more fearful, our smaller fears will naturally lose priority.
And God is bigger and greater than anything we can ever fear.
The place where we can enjoy our fears and learn from them is a nexus where two theological truths meet and form our reality: immanent and transcendent theology. What is transcendent and immanent theology? And how do they relate to our journey through fear?
Well, first let us understand these theologies. Transcendent theology is the understanding that God is separate from and independent from our world. God is big, very big and entirely alien to our world. He is awesome, He is bigger than our brains, and to try to fit into our thinking would cause our heads to explode. He is austere, He is epic, and He is grand. “Who shall I compare you to?” Isaiah asks in Isaiah 40:13. The answer: nothing!
Then there’s immanent theology. God’s immanence is the other side of the coin, the “B-Side” to his transcendence. Immanent Theology is the study of God’s presence and activity with our world. We celebrate His immanence at Christmas when we sing “For unto us, a Child is born.” This is the understanding that God is here, God cares for us, and that He is not inactive during our suffering.
God came down to our level, lives amongst us, and is alive on Earth. We do not have to climb a mountain to seek Him for He already made the hike and waits on our doorstep. God is immanent, present, and only 13 inches away, or the length of an arm’s reach.
Both of these theologies - Immanent and Transcendent - must work together if they are ever to have any real impact on our lives, concerning fear. You see, if we focus on one and skip the other we have a mutation, a half-truth that can be used to only further our fear. If we only believe that God is very big and very much different than humanity, we serve a God that is aloof, distant, and disconnected from reality. If we only believe that God is amongst us and has become tawdry for us, than we’ve reduced Him to just “one of the boys”. How can He help us? He can never be the Lion of Judah, the Rock of Ages, or any help in our time of distress. He’s just our buddy.
God is both immanent and transcendent. If we start dwelling upon these two conflicting realities, then the cure begins with our fear. How?
God is immanent, so we are not alone in our fears. “Do not worry about anything,” Paul says in Philippians 4:6. “But in everything, through prayer and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.”
God is with us in, through, and on the other side of our fears.
But God is not just immanent, but bigger than what we fear. God speaks and something comes from nothing. There was a time before mater, before the cosmos and yet there was not time before God. God is bigger than gangs, cancer, the economy’s collapse, our small group’s disapproval, the colour of our teenager’s hair, zombies, being fired, mud on the floor, spilled milk, or a tumour. We fear, as humans, things that are inferior to the supremacy and terror of God. God is not just bigger than what scares us, His existence cannot even compare to these things so there is not even a suggestion of terror on his side.
God is scary and God is with us: two important truths we must own if we are ever going to enjoy our fears. These two, true perspectives allow us to gain priority over our fears, setting them against the ever-present infinity that is God.
A friend of mine shared about her newfound perspective when she survived breast cancer. Seeking God daily with her fears of death, she came through the other end as cancer free with the knowledge that she was one of the luckier ones.
“I used to be afraid to leave the house with a ‘bad hair day’,” she said to me. “Until I endured chemotherapy and lost all of my hair. Every strand lost was a reminder that God was in control, that God could beat this, and that I wasn’t alone.”
Her fears gained the perspective set against God’s immanence and transcendence.
And this is the hope we have in what we fear: God is bigger than our problems and is present to help.
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