The Un-Penned God

I grew up on a ranch. We raised sheep mostly, but had a dozen or so cows as well. I was involved in 4-H, particularly in the sheep exhibitions, but one year my parents and I decided to try our hand at a heifer. So, we bought one from a neighbor, and drove her the mile or so home and placed her in a pen we had built to contain her. The fence was high, she had plenty of food and water, and shelter was good.

She promptly jumped the fence and headed home- to her home. We caught her, placed her back in the pen, but quickly realized adjustments had to be made to keep her contained. But she was still too crazy to get in the pen with her and try to tame her. Honestly, we didn't have a clue what to do with her, so my heifer showing career ended before it started.

I think back to that time in my early teen years and one thing is vivid: that cow was too wild to be contained, too strong to be tamed. You could see it in her eyes like a fire: "You don't know who you're dealing with." Eventually we released her to be with the other cows, and she went on to have lots of babies and live her life, her way.

I draw a lot of comparisons to that incident and how I often view God. I mean, I recognize the power of God, and even notice His wildness at times (seriously, watch a Texas thunderstorm sometime), but I often try to pen Him up into my idea of what God should be. Really, we all do it. We want Him to be more like us, to make sense when He talks and with what He does. We want his complexities and His justice to be only as deep and as understandable as human complexities and justice.

In essence, we want God to exist within us- that is to say, within the boundaries of our understanding. Anything outside of that is grounds for immediately discounting or distrusting God.

Man has always been this way. Ancient cultures handled it more with religion, going so far as to create new gods to explain the strange and scary things they saw. Even more sophisticated cultures like the Greeks and Romans went this way. They went out of their way to try to appease the gods, so they made statues to all of them, and even statues to gods they didn't yet know about just in case that god got mad at them and attacked. Really, though, it wasn't about protecting themselves from the gods as it was exercising control over them. At least, that's how Paul saw it.

On one of his trips, Paul came face to face with idolatry, aka man's pen for God. In an attempt to serve a god that made sense, they just made one up. Paul addressed this thinking like this:

“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. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
--Acts 17:24-28

To me, seeing God as not being dependent on us is tremendously freeing. These words remind me that it is God who has mastery over me, not the other way around. And then, the fact that He actually penned us in (he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands) in an effort to call us to Him. He has set out to tame us- but not like we think.

I think we believe God sets rules to keep us from fun. God has actually set rules up to make life better. He wants to tame us from the actions that destroy us, but He wants us to be adventurous and full of life in our pursuit of Him. In that, He has set no limits. That leads me to my favorite part of this passage: 'For in him we live and move and have our being.’ Paul quotes a pagan philosopher who spoke a truth he didn't fully understand. That truth is that we exist in God. Not in an Eastern Mysticism "We are all god" way, but in a "God made us to exist for Him, whether we acknowledge it or not" way. He enables us to do what we do, even refuse Him.

Because God is big enough for that.

And no matter how hard we try, with idolatry or watering Him down to fit what we are comfortable with, we will not pen Him. His eyes are filled with a fire, not unlike the heifer of my youth, that screams of passion and power, and warns us that we don't know who we are messing with.