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God Is Amazing: Everything Changes When You See God for Who He Really Is
224Overview
Bogged down with the burdens of life? Maybe your God is too small. You may need a newer, bigger view of God—the awesome, powerful, mysterious God, who is, quite frankly, amazing. This brand-new book from Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz—authors of the million-selling God Is in the Small Stuff series—celebrates the majestic, heroic God we serve. God Is Amazing will help you lift your gaze above the complications and concerns of this life, to a place of wonder, incredible beauty, and vast power. . .unlike anything we can experience on our own. In their easy-to-read yet always thought-provoking style, Bruce and Stan call us to something much bigger than ourselves—the amazing God of the universe.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781630581824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Barbour Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
When Bruce Bickel didn’t make the cut as a stand-up comedian, he became a lawyer, which is a career in which he’s considered hilarious. He is active in church ministries and currently serves on the Board of Westmont College. He lives in Central California with his wife, where kids and grandkids surround them.
Bruce and Stan have co-authored more than sixty books about the Christian faith, including bestsellers such as God Is in the Small Stuff—and it all matters. They are passionate about presenting the truth of God in a manner that is correct, clear, concise, and casual.
Stan Jantz has been involved with content throughout his professional career as a bookseller, publisher, and writer. He resides with his wife in Southern California, where he serves on the board of trustees of Biola University.
Read an Excerpt
God is Amazing
Everything Changes When You See God For Who He Really Is
By Bruce Bickel, Stan Jantz
Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Bruce Bickel and Stan JantzAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63058-182-4
CHAPTER 1
God Is Self-Sufficient
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else."
The Apostle Paul Acts 17:24–25
One of the most amazing things about God—His self-sufficiency—is also one of the hardest to comprehend. It's not very difficult to think of God being so powerful that He could create the universe. Even people who don't think much about God can at least imagine how an almighty higher power could bring the world into existence. But the idea that God is uncreated and completely self-sufficient, that He has no beginning and has always existed with no help from any other power—well, that just isn't comprehensible to our finite human minds.
The self-existence of God is such a primal puzzlement that even a child, when told that God made the world, will often respond with the question, "Who made God?" This remarkable bit of reasoning shows that children understand the concept of cause and effect: if something or someone exists, then something or someone else had to have made it.
It's as if the human race has an origin-seeking gene. We want to know where things came from and how stuff happened. We're like the police interrogator who asks a suspect, "Where were you on the night of August 27?" because he is following the scientific task of accounting for things and being skeptical of anything that hasn't given an account for itself.
One of the reasons so many people are skeptical about God is that He won't give an account of Himself. We want to know where He came from, but He won't tell us. Instead, He just reveals to us that He is and always was, and with no outside help. God doesn't fit into our cause-and-effect world, and that frustrates us to no end.
Thank God He doesn't exist within the bounds of cause and effect. If God were the effect of some other cause, He wouldn't be God and we wouldn't exist. You see, you can't have an endless series of causes reaching back into eternity past. If that were the case, you would never get to the present time, and you would never get to you. The very fact that you and the world exist is proof that at some point there must be a First Cause that itself isn't caused. There must be an originator. There must be God.
Is your mind spinning yet? Hang on, because here is where it gets really amazing. Take all the wonder of the world and the history of humanity—the billions and billions of people who have ever lived and everything they have accomplished. None of them would have existed were it not for God.
Set aside the proofs for the existence of God and ponder this single startling reality: if there is no God, there's nothing else. But there is something. There's you and your life and your ability to think about a self-sufficient God who doesn't need you for His existence because He was here way before you. And yet He wants you to realize He exists so that you can experience His goodness, grace, and love.
God doesn't need us, but He wants us to enjoy Him. Why do you think God didn't just make a world with nothing but dull features but instead created extravagant beauty and unimaginable variety? The simplest and best answer is that He created it all for our enjoyment. He wants us to see the world and everything in it and then give Him the credit for getting it all going.
Two thousand years ago the apostle Paul was walking through Athens, a great city filled with smart and religious people who preferred to give credit to man-made idols rather than the living God. Paul boldly told them that God was the One "who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth." Furthermore, Paul continued, He is not "served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind breath and everything" (Acts 17:24–25 ESV).
Some of the Athenians got it, but many didn't—much like it is with people today. So don't get discouraged if others don't share your amazement at the First-Cause God. They're looking for answers in man-made objects. Keep your eyes and your heart and your mind focused on the One who made everything possible.
CHAPTER 2God Is Invisible And Spiritual
To say that God is invisible is to walk around with your eyes closed.
Andrew Peterson
The power of invisibility is cool if you are a superhero, but it can have some disadvantages if you are a supreme being. For example, skeptics assert that God does not exist because we cannot see Him. But the fact of God's invisibility does not limit His ability to make Himself known, nor does it inhibit His power to reveal His strength and His presence.
The Bible describes God as invisible with statements such as: "No one has ever seen God" (John 1:18) and "Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever" (1 Timothy 1:17). Because humans don't have much experience with invisibility, we tend to think that anything we can't see doesn't have much substance. After all, our thoughts are invisible, but they vanish at the slightest distraction, perhaps never to be recaptured. But being invisible doesn't imply that God is a wispy, ethereal essence without substance. Like a violent wind, you might not see Him approaching, but He can make His presence known.
But don't let God's invisibility fool you. He is there—just not usually in a physical form, for the Bible also describes Him as being a Spirit. As Jesus said: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24 ESV). He is invisible because He is a spirit and not flesh. So God has no form, no physical body. The absence of a physical body could be a disadvantage to a human, but being a form-free spirit facilitates other awesome characteristics that are unique to God—such as being unrestricted by the space-and-time continuum in which humanity operates.
Rather than being a handicap to proving God's existence, the invisible and spirit nature of God allows Him creativity and impact whenever and however He chooses to reveal Himself to earth's inhabitants. The bottom line is this: if God were limited to human form, He wouldn't be any more spectacular. But as an invisible spirit, He has the ability to present Himself through attention-grabbing modalities:
• In some manner, God appeared to Adam in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve "heard the sound of LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Genesis 3:8 ESV).
• God and two angels appeared as sojourners to Abraham, who invited them to dinner around a campfire (see Genesis 18:2–5).
• God appeared and spoke to Moses from a burning bush (see Exodus 3).
• When the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, God showed up as a pillar of clouds in the daytime and as a pillar of fire in the evening (see Exodus 13:21–22).
While an enflamed shrub or a cloud column are impressive, these phenomena don't particularly project a personal, relational God. Yet God is all about a personal and intimate relationship with the members of the human race. So, through His supernatural capabilities, He is able to connect with us as a loving Father, despite being invisible and without form. Although He has no physical body, the Bible attributes to God anthropomorphic characteristics than help us envision how He can care for, protect, and love us. Thus, the Scripture tells us that:
• God's eyes are on us (Psalm 33:18)
• If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us (1 John 5:15)
• The righteous are in God's hands (Ecclesiastes 9:1)
• God speaks to us (Psalm 85:8)
In addition to these physical similarities to us, the invisible God who is without form or body expresses emotions to which every human can relate. He experiences and expresses anger, laughter, compassion, grief, jealousy, wrath, joy, and love. While He may be invisible and a spirit, He knows our human emotions and shares them with us. He has experienced suffering, and He can offer understanding and comfort to us in the midst of ours.
Knowing that humans are dense when it comes to spiritual matters, God knew that we needed something much more obvious than an invisible God. So, through a supernatural transformation, God assumed human form and established residency on earth for approximately thirty-three years. In the God-Man of Jesus Christ, the human race was exposed to God in the flesh. And there was no beating around a burning bush about this.
He proclaimed it clearly as the Son of God: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Jesus wasn't referring to His facial features or His physique. Rather, He was saying that His character, His teaching, and His actions were accurate reflections of His heavenly Father.
How awesome is that? This invisible God of ours went to great lengths to make His existence obvious and to make His nature known to all of us.
CHAPTER 3God Is Eternal, Infinite, And Everywhere
From everlasting to everlasting you are God.
Moses Psalm 90:2
Many things about our amazing God are difficult for our finite minds to grasp, but the most challenging may be the idea that He is eternal, infinite, and everywhere. We can understand and even relate to other aspects of His being—His love, His grace, His power—but His eternity, infinity, and omnipresence seem beyond our comprehension, mainly because we have no point of reference.
It's hard for us to think about eternity because there's nothing in our experience to measure it against. We try to come up with clever analogies, such as the parable of a little bird that goes to a huge mountain once every thousand years to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has been worn away by this periodic beak sharpening, a single day of eternity will have passed. Cute story, but even that fails to capture the true essence of eternity because it describes an activity that is bound by time. Truthfully, there's nothing we can use to describe eternity or even compare it to because there's only one being who is truly eternal, and that's our indescribable, incomparable, amazing God.
While eternity has to do with His existence, ITL∞ITL describes His being. To say God is eternal is to say He has no beginning and no end. Since God is self-existent and uncreated, He exists outside of time. By comparison, the infinite part of God's being means that everything about God—His love, His grace, His power—knows no bounds. And all of that infinitude belongs to you. What this means for you is intensely personal and practical. Your needs, no matter how great, will never exhaust the infinite resources of God.
God's eternal existence and infinite being are complemented by the reality that He is everywhere. Or to use theological language, God is omnipresent. On the face of it, this makes God sound abstract and distant. In fact, the word has a very different meaning. As A. W. Tozer points out, "the word present means here, close to, next to, and the prefix omni gives it universality." So to say that God is omnipresent is to mean that He is right there close to you—no matter who you are or where you are.
The French mystic Hildebert of Lavardin described God's omnipresence like this:
God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within but not enclosed; without but not excluded; above but not raised up; below but not depressed; wholly above, presiding, wholly beneath, sustaining; wholly within, filling.
Such a lofty concept is almost too amazing for us to comprehend. Part of the difficulty lies in our attachment to our material universe. Even those who believe in God can live day-to-day as if there's nothing beyond what they can touch, taste, feel, or see. With such a practical and natural mind-set, it's a struggle to imagine a supernatural God who is everywhere yet always somewhere. But the Bible teaches and Christians believe that the world is essentially spiritual. It was created out of nothing by a God who is Spirit, and though the material aspect of our universe is all around us in the form of matter, it's the unseen reality—the spiritual essence of the world—that really matters. For here is where the eternal, infinite, omnipresent God dwells. He created time and material for us, but He cannot be contained by either one.
God's grandeur would be difficult to grasp were it not for His omnipresence. Because of this quality, God is both near us and in us by way of His Spirit. He always sees us, not to find fault and punish us, but to know and bless us. The presence of God in our lives is unlike any other experience. In this way God is a source of pleasure in the midst of our pain. He is our sustainer no matter where we are.
As fragile, finite beings who have experienced our share of difficulty and tragedy, God's eternal being, infinite nature, and omnipresence are within our grasp because God is personal. God is bigger and more amazing than we can imagine yet more approachable than we could ever dream. This isn't a fantasy. This is real because God is real. He knows exactly who He is, and He longs for you to know Him just as He is.
"I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come."
Isaiah 46:9–10
CHAPTER 4God Is Unchanging
"I the Lord do not change."
Malachi 3:6
There is a growing belief among many Christians today that God, in order to keep up with our changing culture, is evolving. People in the past didn't know God the way we do, this line of thinking goes, so their ideas of God were incomplete. Today, we know better, and God "understands," so what was once considered wrong or taboo is now true and acceptable. He's a pragmatic God, after all, and He doesn't want His followers to embarrass themselves in a culture that is more "tolerant" than past cultures were.
As popular as this notion is these days, we urge you not to buy into it—mainly because it shows a misunderstanding of the character of our amazing God. As you are discovering as you read this book (and perhaps already knew), every aspect of God's personality is important. No one of God's qualities should be magnified so that it overshadows the others, and none can be minimized for our convenience.
One of those traits often minimized or overlooked is God's immutability, which is another way of saying God doesn't change. We sometimes struggle with this one, because we view change as good. The poet E.E. Cummings wrote, "It takes courage to grow up and become who you truly are." We don't disagree with that, as long as you're applying it to us mortals. We humans need to change so we can reach our full potential, whether it's physically, mentally, or spiritually. That's fine for us, because we can always do better. But God doesn't need to do better. He doesn't need to reach His full potential, and He doesn't need to become more than He is. God cannot become more eternal, more infinite, more powerful, or more holy. He is at the apex of all those qualities. He is as perfect and fully realized as He can be.
God certainly doesn't need to change His character to accommodate a shift in our culture. He is the North Star, fixed in position while everything else changes. His character and actions are utterly reliable. You can always count on Him to be faithful and true. Nothing that happens in our world takes Him by surprise, so He never needs to make an adjustment. There are no contingencies to the things that have or could happen that God has not already taken into consideration. God is our "refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1 ESV).
God's unchanging nature also means He will not respond to our deficiencies with anything that denies His character. At the end of his ministry, just before his life was ended at the hands of Roman executioners, the apostle Paul wrote: "If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13 ESV). Clearly, Paul understood that despite our trials and our unfaithfulness—and both are going to happen at points in our lives—God does not change. He remains our rock and our fortress. What an amazing reality!
But what about those cases when God seems to change His mind? A few times in the Bible, God threatened to punish people, but then "changed His mind" when someone (such as Abraham, Moses, or Jonah) pleaded and asked Him to reconsider. In these cases, the Scriptures tell us that God "relented" (see Exodus 32:14; Jonah 3:10). Does that mean He changed by changing His mind?
It's tempting to "anthropomorphize" God—that is, make Him human—but that's not the right approach. Rather than bringing God to our level, we need to lift our eyes and appreciate our amazing God for who He really is, even if it's difficult to comprehend.
What seems like change to us is just God being God. As Michael Horton says, "He is so active and dynamic that no change can make Him more active."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from God is Amazing by Bruce Bickel, Stan Jantz. Copyright © 2014 Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz. Excerpted by permission of Barbour Publishing, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 5
Part 1 Amazing God 9
Chapter 1 God Is Self-Sufficient 13
Chapter 2 God Is Invisible and Spiritual 17
Chapter 3 God Is Eternal, Infinite, and Everywhere 21
Chapter 4 God Is Unchanging 25
Chapter 5 God Is Loving 29
Chapter 6 God Is Just and Righteous 33
Chapter 7 God Is Merciful and Gracious 37
Chapter 8 God Is All-Knowing and All-Wise 41
Chapter 9 God Is Faithful 45
Chapter 10 God Is All-Powerful 49
Chapter 11 God Is Jealous 53
Chapter 12 God Is Holy 57
Part 2 Amazing Creator 61
Chapter 13 Science and Faith 66
Chapter 14 Evidence for God 70
Chapter 15 God Was Here First 74
Chapter 16 God and the Big Bang 78
Chapter 17 A Pretty Fine Universe 83
Chapter 18 Our Amazing Solar System and Just-Right Earth 86
Chapter 19 Irreducible Complexity 90
Chapter 20 Amazing DNA 94
Chapter 21 Made in God's Image 98
Chapter 22 The Human Mind 102
Chapter 23 Designed for Discovery 106
Chapter 24 God's Amazing Miracles 110
Section 3 Amazing Jesus 115
Chapter 25 God in the Flesh 120
Chapter 26 The Messiah Nobody Wanted 124
Chapter 27 The King Nobody Wanted 128
Chapter 28 The Hero Everybody Needs 132
Chapter 29 Full of Intelligence and Wisdom 135
Chapter 30 The One Who Calmed the Storm 139
Chapter 31 Full of Healing Power 143
Chapter 32 Full of Compassion 147
Chapter 33 Able to Forgive 151
Chapter 34 The One Who Suffered and Died 155
Chapter 35 The One Who Conquered Death 159
Chapter 36 In Heaven Working on Our Behalf 163
Section 4 Amazing Grace 167
Chapter 37 What God Requires of You 171
Chapter 38 God Loves Underdogs 175
Chapter 39 God Wants to Use Your Failures 179
Chapter 40 God Is for the Weak 183
Chapter 41 God's Will for Your Life 187
Chapter 42 God Answers the Question of Suffering and Pain 191
Chapter 43 God Wants You to Find Him in Your World 195
Chapter 44 God Wants to Help You Be a Better Person 199
Chapter 45 God Has Given You an Assignment-and the Power to Do It 203
Chapter 46 God Wants You to Love Everybody 207
Chapter 47 The Mystery of God 211
Chapter 48 Christianity Really Does Make Sense (When You Understand Who God Is and Who You Aren't) 215
Afterword 221