God Is Above Us Series

And that’s the very caution I see at work here in the account of Moses and his request. It is God’s mercy that will not permit Moses to look on him in all his splendor. “For no one shall see me and live,” the Lord said. And so, he covers Moses’ eyes with his hand as his glory passes by, and when he removes his hand, it is to permit Moses to see only the residuals of his glory, the remaining sparks, so to speak.

There are some ways in which God is like us, and there are ways in which we are to be like him. These are sometimes called his communicable attributes, and we will look at those some other time. But there are ways that God is not like us and we could never be like him. These are sometimes called his incommunicable attributes. God is all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite, unchanging, self-sufficient, transcendent, and sovereign. We will never be any of these things. In short, God is God, and we are not. And it is when we forget that that we exalt ourselves and our desires and become arrogant and prideful and foolish.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul spends three chapters extolling the unassailable sovereignty and wisdom of God, and he concludes that section with an acclamation of praise that is unparalleled anywhere in Scripture. He almost sings it. It almost shouts itself off the page:

“O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him to receive a gift in return?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.”

God is above us, you see – far above us. And when you think about that, you will see that there are some corollaries to this truth. One is that we must not be overly curious about the secret things of God. Psalm 131:1 says, “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” And this is a wise stance to take. In Deuteronomy 29:29, we read, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever.”

Another corollary is this: In the face of God’s transcendence, we should be profoundly reverent. In short, we should fear him. The fear of the Lord has become so foreign to our generation that to speak of it registers a certain dissonance to the ear. But when you and I listen to the Scriptures, we find them resonant with the idea. Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” and Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”

But let’s be clear. The fear of the Lord is not the servile fear of a slave toward a master. The fear of the Lord, someone has said, is “the loving respect of a child toward a parent. To fear the Lord means to seek to glorify God in everything we do. It means listening to His Word, honoring it, and obeying it. ‘The remarkable thing about fearing God,’ wrote Oswald Chambers, ‘is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else’” (Warren Wiersbe). “This is the one to whom I will look,” the Lord says. I will look “to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word” (Isa. 66:2). This was this very thing the Apostle Peter had in view when he wrote, “Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God” (1 Pet. 2:17).