For Us

Kids love ten dollar words. I don't know why, and adults find them irritating, but kids love'em. Whether it was fake words made up by magical governesses or real ones, I remember as I child delighting in saying, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Triceratops or antidisestablishmentarianism. We even got big words in church. The favorites were the omni-words. We learned that God was omnipresent (not bad), omniscient (better) and omnipotent (best church word ever).

We learned that these words meant God was everywhere, knew everything and could do anything. For kids God becomes a kind of superhero, faster than light, stronger than Superman, smarter than Einstein. God is big, and strong and lives up in heaven. We learn the word infinite and begin to wrap our minds around that. But there is a problem with this. God can become distant, strange, unapproachable; God can seem powerful just to be powerful. But that is never how God is presented in the Scriptures. In fact those omni-words never appear in the Bible, they are words made up to explain God's attributes based on passages like this in Psalm 139:

Psalm 139:1-18

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"

even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them-- they are more than the sand; I come to the end-- I am still with you.

Do we read here a God who is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent? Yes. But notice the why. God is all these things for us. These are not stark attributes of a distant deity, but are presented as the power and strength of God's infinite and intimate love for us. God is not naked power, presence and knowledge. God is infinite love, a love so strong that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”