A Great and Terrible Love

A spiritual journey into the attributes of God

Who then are you, my God? … Most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent, most
merciful.—Augustine
We are desperate for a great and terrible love.

We need a great love, one that captures our imagination—and transcends it. The
philosopher Anselm offered this proof for God's existence: God is that which nothing
greater can be conceived. We need a love that is greater than we can even conceive.

We are a desperately lonely people, in a lifelong search for someone who will listen
without judgment; who will embrace without conditions; who will give us permission to be
who we are—sordid, sinful, lost, confused; who will not interrupt when we admit our
adultery or describe our schemes of revenge or explain the wicked intricacies of our
motives. We don't want more advice. We don't want to be fixed. We don't need a seven-
step plan for a better life. We need a love so great that it just listens with an empathy and
offers an embrace that says it's okay to be, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer,
"a miserable sinner."

We also need a terrible love. A terrible love "causing great fear and alarm," like a terrible
bolt of lightning. A terrible love that is "extremely formidable," like responsibilities that are
terrible in their weight. A terrible love that is "intense" and "extreme," like a life that paid
so terrible a price. And yes, a terrible love that is "unpleasant and disagreeable" at times,
like having a terrible time at a party.

We are a desperately inadequate people. We know all too well all too often what we are
called by divine fiat to do. From the daily calls to clean up another's mess to the life calls
of serving others in the home and in the world, we know what we are supposed to do,
and a part of us wants to do it.

But sometimes sloth stalls obedience to the call—we just don't have the energy to love
another minute. We need a love that will strike us like a bolt of lightning, to get our hearts
racing with the will to move.

Sometimes the problem is selfishness—some days we just don't care. We need a love
that can help us carry the great weight of the responsibility to love.

Sometimes it is hopelessness—we have failed so many times in so many ways that we

just cannot imagine that making another effort will do any good. We need a love that is
so intense and extreme, it makes despair an impossibility.
A love like this will be unpleasant and disagreeable at times, but the kingdom party is not
decorated in Mary Englebreit motifs. We need a love that will offer an embrace that braces
us to do the unpleasant and disagreeable things we are called to do.

In the famous book and movie The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the
Lion approached in fear and trembling the Wizard of Oz, who with signs and wonders and
a thundering voice described himself as "the great and terrible Oz." It was his terribleness
that drew the three companions to him and sent them forth on a mission in the course of
which they slew the Wicked Witch. It was his greatness that, in the end, embraced them
with mercy and kindness.
I was preaching on that most enigmatic of passages—where God tells Abraham to
sacrifice his son Isaac and then prevents him from doing the very thing he commanded
(see Gen. 22:1-14). I spoke candidly about the mystery of God' sovereign will, about how
difficult it is to discern what God is doing and why he's doing it. I chastised our weak
attempt to explain and defend God's inexplicable behavior, both in Scripture and in light
of then recent world tragedies. I reminded the congregation that the Bible is less
interested in justifying God's behavior than in simply acknowledging his sovereignty:

The congregation was riveted, not because of my delivery but, as I later found out, by the
plain description of the terribleness of God. Afterward some extolled my courage for
broaching a topic that puzzled them, others thanked me for helping them break through
a personal crisis, and others still said they were simply moved for inexplicable reasons. It
suggested to me once again the recurring relevance of one theme of my first book in this
series, Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God: we are not
attracted to God merely because of his great love. We instinctively know we need more
than a divine grandfather who pats us on the head, or a cosmic bellhop who fulfills all our
wishes, or a buddy and traveling companion. There is also something strangely and
fearsomely attractive about the one who forms light and creates darkness, whose love is
not only great but terrible.
Almost a half century ago, A. W. Tozer lamented that "The church has surrendered her
once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly
unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by
little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness makes her situation all the
more tragic."

Tozer was shaking his finger at the church, but today we don't need a shaking finger, for
we nod in assent when we hear this. We know from experience we are poorer as
individuals and churches. The simplistic view of God, as Tozer suggested, "is the cause
of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us," including the loss of "our spirit of worship
and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence."

He penned these lines in his classic The Knowledge of the Holy almost a half century ago.
Another classic of the era, J. B. Phillips's Your God Is Too Small, argued along similar
lines, but he was thinking more evangelistically: "Many men and women today are living,
often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they
are particularly wicked or selfish … but because they have not found with their adult minds
a God big enough … to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently
their willing co-operation."
Both these authors were saying in their own way that we need not a warm and fuzzy God
but one who offers a great and terrible love. They argued their point by writing about the
attributes of God. Fifty years later, I believe a similar book is needed.

The attributes of God—omniscience, omnipresence, and so forth—have fallen on hard

times. The philosophically inclined have deconstructed them one by one. They've asked
penetrating questions like "How can an immutable God, one who doesn't change, answer
prayer?" And "How can we have free will if an omniscient God already knows what we're
going to do?" And "How can an omnipotent and all-loving God allow evil?" They've noted
how much these divine attributes owe to Greek thought and how words
like immutable and omniscient don't even appear in the Bible. They've suggested that
Christian theology took a wrong turn at the beginning, abandoning the more personal God
of the Bible for a god of philosophers.

There is some truth to these charges. If the classic attributes are not handled with
discernment, God will indeed appear as a philosophical idea—distant and
unapproachable. This indeed has happened from time to time in Christian circles, so
anxious were preachers and teachers to guard the majesty of God.

But the theologians who have most eloquently expounded on the classic attributes—
Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm, for example—never abandoned the personal God of
the Bible. They managed to integrate their philosophical training with their theological
understanding to give us a full-orbed and compelling picture of the biblical God. I've read
the philosophical arguments for a complete revision of the classic attributes, but I find
them generally unpersuasive and unbiblical. Naturally, theological knowledge continues
to grow, so that our understanding of some of the attributes has become more nuanced.
But I've not been convinced that we can do better than many of the classical expressions,
which combine intellectual rigor with fierce devotion. As Augustine said:

Who then are you, my God? … Most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent,
most merciful and most just, deeply hidden yet most intimately present, perfection of both
beauty and strength, stable and incomprehensible, immutable and yet changing all things,
never new, never old, making everything new.