Multifaceted Nature of God
For a little over a year now, when the weather permits, I've gone on a morning walk around my neighborhood. One morning on my walk, I wondered, "How do we respond to a multifaceted God when we live in a homogenized culture?"
Now, I don't normally use big words like multifaceted and homogenized in my daily conversations, so this thought really got my attention. Then I proceeded to look up the word "homogenized" just to make sure that it meant what I thought it did.
A homogenized culture is uniform or similar. Today, we tend to isolate into groups that largely look like, think like and believe like us. Even if there is some racial or ethnic diversity within our social groups, we still likely hold the same beliefs or worldview. This isn't a bad thing until it begins to create division.
This is where we find ourselves today.
As I've been pondering this, I think there's much more to our silos and thought bubbles than meets the eye. The solution is not to simply make a friend with someone of a different ethnicity or worldview (though that's not a bad thing). I actually believe our segmented and homogenized culture is related to how we view God.
Our God is complex. He's vast and multifaceted. God, amazingly, is not just one thing. He's just (Isaiah 30:18) and merciful (Psalm 116:5). These seem contradictory to us, but God is somehow both. He is also righteous (Psalm 7:11) and good (Luke 18:19). In the gospel accounts, we see that Jesus was both holy and did not sin, yet He spent time in close proximity with notorious sinners. The Bible also makes it clear that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all distinct and one. We may never fully understand the Trinity, but it is a glorious mystery to marvel in.
Despite the Bible making it clear that our God is more multifaceted than we can comprehend, we often try and make Him just one thing. For some, we focus on the fact that He is just. For others, we focus on the truth that He is a loving Father. It's hard to hold those two in balance with one another.
The way we see God and the way we see each other are related. If we see God as only one thing, then we will, in turn, see people as only one thing. If we see God as multifaceted, then naturally, we'll begin to see ourselves and others as multifaceted as well.
It sounds a bit simple, right? Almost too simple? I'm sitting here, staring at the words I've written and wondering if I'm way off track — surely there's got to be more to it than this!
But I'm reminded of the life of Jesus. Whenever people encountered Him, they had an opportunity to change. Think about every character that interacted with Jesus, who they were at the start of their encounter and who they were when they left His presence.
In Luke 19, Zacchaeus was a wee little man with a very large greed problem. But as he spent time with Jesus, the way he related to other people changed.
What about the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4? When we first meet her, she's isolated and alone, cloaked in shame. Then she spends time with Jesus, looking into His eyes and experiencing His heart. From that encounter, she runs back into the community she had isolated from and brings them all to Christ. Her view of herself and others changed through her intimacy with Jesus.
The disciples are the most known example of this. They believed that the Messiah could only come one way. When Jesus revealed to the disciples that He was going to die, Peter rebuked him (Mark 8:32) because he thought the Messiah was just one thing. Jesus's death, burial and resurrection was yet another glimpse at the infinitely complex nature of God. After Jesus' ascension, Peter and the rest of the disciples related to others very differently than they did when we first meet them.
So maybe there's something to this simple solution of embracing the multifaceted nature of God. Instead of layering our preferences or opinions about God onto Him, what if we embraced Him even when we don't understand Him?
Then maybe, just maybe, it will become more natural to embrace other people we don't understand. We can learn to extend the same grace, understanding and space to our fellow image-bearers who are also complex, multifaceted and more than one thing. Perhaps as we stare into the face of our gloriously vast God, our views of ourselves, others and the world around us will change. As we gaze upon the Lord, He can change the lenses through which we see the world.
