God’s Mighty Majesty

Yesterday the daily Bible reading I receive by email began with Psalm 93. “The Lord reigns; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he has put on strength as his belt.” A few lines later I read “Mightier than the thunders of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty!” That wasn’t the passage I had planned to use with Mighty Majesty (my notes had Psalm 145:12), but I decided the timing made it a good choice.

I found myself wondering, as I read the first two lines, why the phrase “he is robed” was repeated. From what I understand about Hebrew (purely secondhand, from my husband’s studies in seminary), repetition is used to emphasize a point. I can understand using such emphasis on the majesty of God, or His might. But why the emphasis on “he is robed”?

I suppose the best way to understand this would be to learn more about the Hebrew word translated as “robed” and its uses in various contexts. I might be able to figure out something using my husband’s interlinear Bible and Strong’s concordance. But while I can do that reasonably well with Greek words in the New Testament, I find it harder to deal with the Hebrew, where I keep forgetting I have to read from right to left.

In any case, I found myself thinking about the possible significance of the word without having done any word study on it. If this were about a human king being robed with majesty, I would think it might have to do with the exceptional beauty of his garments, or perhaps an oblique hint at the fact that under the robes he is like the rest of us, and it is the robes and the office they signify that set him apart, rather than his own inherent qualities.

But of course with God it is quite the opposite. It is God’s own inherent qualities that set Him apart from us, and any reference to robes is purely metaphorical. To my ears, it sounds strange to emphasize the metaphor, rather than the real majesty with which God is metaphorically robed.

God is the Life-giving Lord

If you want a challenge, try defining the word life – without, of course, using the words live, living, or alive.

My husband sometimes tells about a teacher he had who told the class that fire was alive. After all, she pointed out, fire consumes fuel (eating), it grows, it moves, and it even reproduces (when one fire turns into multiple fires). Since they weren’t convinced, she challenged them to come up with a good explanation why she was wrong. I have to admit, I’d have trouble myself knowing quite how to go about forming the argument to refute her.

In case you’re having trouble coming up with a good definition of life, be assured that you are not alone. This article explains how difficult it is to formulate an adequate definition. If life is defined as something that can reproduce itself, sterile animals such as mules would not be considered living. If it is defined as a system that takes in energy to create order locally, crystals might be considered alive. And if it is defined as that which consumes energy to grow, move, or reproduce, fire could be considered living, as my husband’s teacher suggested.

Of course, that’s just trying to define biological life. God gives us not only physical life but also spiritual life. Any ideas on how to define that?

Both kinds of life are a lot easier to describe, or give examples of, than to define. And that’s fine – I’d rather spend my time and energy living than figuring out how to define what it is I’m doing. And the kind of life I’d like to be living is the kind described by Jesus as “abundant life.” I’m afraid my life often doesn’t seem very abundant – unless you count the stacks of dishes and clothes waiting to be washed.

God is a Kind King

It was easy to pick the word “king” as a title for God. But picking an adjective to go with it was much harder. I thought of “kind” right away, but I was concerned that it’s too much like the word “nice” – a bit on the vague side, and more about being pleasant than righteous. God is certainly kind – there are dozens and dozens of Bible verses that say so. But in many people’s minds I think “kind” is somewhat akin to “soft.”

There are not a lot of good adjectives starting with K, however. I thought of knowing as a possibility. (I considered Knowing Keeper based on Psalm 121:4-5.) Kingly might work if I had a different noun. Knightly doesn’t really fit, even if the virtues that make a knight knightly also apply to God.

Of course, there’s no rule that I have to come up with an alliterative pair to describe God for every letter of the alphabet. I don’t intend to do Q or X, and so far I haven’t come up with any ideas for Y and I’m not doing well on Z. But the image of King is a very prominent one in Scripture, so I didn’t want to skip it.

Today I looked up the word kind to get an official definition.  ”Generous, good” – that certainly applies to God. So do some of the words supplied as synonyms of kind: benevolent, compassionate, gracious, loving. But would I call God amiable? Or congenial? I know I wouldn’t want to use indulgent or softhearted. And humane just doesn’t sound right.

But I also found out something else interesting, about the etymology of kind. It is related to Old English cynn, meaning “family,” which became our modern English kin. Kind meant having the feelings that relatives have for each other. Since God is our Father, we are His kin, in a sense. But is He kind to us as our Father, rather than as our King?

Then I checked out the etymology of king. And I discovered that it may also be related to the word cynn. If so, it originally meant a leader of a group of people who were related to each other (as tribal groups were). So a kind king was someone who led a group of people related to him and felt toward them as relatives do toward one another. (Though from reading history, one doesn’t get that impression of most kings, even in the days when they were more tribal chieftains than rulers of sovereign states.)

Human kings tend to become somewhat distanced from their subjects, and would consider very few of them as relatives. There is a far greater gap between us and God – yet He chooses to make us His children and treat us as family rather than just subjects under His rule. Of course, being “kind” doesn’t mean He is always “nice” – far from it. But considering how poorly we often follow the laws of His Kingdom, He is very patient – and kind – to us.

God is a Just Judge

When I did this (using the alphabet to come up with a list of words describing God) twenty-something years ago, I’m sure I didn’t wonder what it meant to say that God was just. Every church I have been part of since I was converted at age fourteen has clearly taught that justice means that God has to punish sin. We receive forgiveness only because the punishment we deserve was suffered by Jesus in our place.

This was a doctrine my mother hated. To her, that was the opposite of justice, for an innocent man to suffer in the place of the guilty, even if it was voluntary on his part. But she agreed that justice meant that people must bear the consequences of their mistakes. In this life, that meant one suffered the consequences of poor choices. After death, it meant reincarnation (or possibly transmigration) in order to continue working on problems left unresolved in the previous life.

I don’t remember ever hearing, until sometime in the past several years, the idea that justice might be seen in a significantly different way. At some point I read that the Hebrew notion of justice (what we see in the Old Testament) was not about punishment for wrongdoing so much as about wholeness, not just of the individual but of the entire community. Of course, there are a lot of different ideas out there when it comes to Bible interpretation, and I really didn’t know just how much validity this idea had.

I also read several books by Tony Hillerman, who wrote mysteries set (mostly) on a Navajo reservation. In Sacred Clowns, Navajo Tribal Police detective Jim Chee explains the Navajo concept of justice. In an interview before the book was released, Hillerman discusses the issue himself:

For example, the murderer in this new book has apologized anonymously, and, because traditional Navahos attach no value on vengeance beyond restitution, there is no real need to solve the murder. The Navaho way assumes the person who committed the crime is out of harmony and needs a ceremonial cure. It’s this contrast between justice and harmony that holds my attention as a writer.

Our Intimate Intercessor

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. (Romans 8:26-27)

I may not be able to find a verse in the Bible that uses the word “intimate” in relation to God, but I don’t know a better description of it than “he who searches our hearts” who also knows the mind and will of God. How much more intimate can one be than to know someone’s heart?

Science fiction stories that deal with telepathy often bring up interesting issues with regard to people know other people’s thoughts. What would it be like to know someone else’s deepest thoughts? What would it be like for someone else to know every thought that goes through my mind? I remember one story where such knowledge led to greater understanding, but most of us would greatly fear having another person know us that well.

With God, though, it’s a comfort rather than a fear. If there were a choice on our part, of course, I don’t know whether we would choose to let God know everything about us. But since He does, and extends His love to us anyway, it is a comfort to be known intimately and loved.

And it is a comfort to know that our prayers are somehow “translated” from our stumbling and fumbling attempts to what they should be according to God’s will. I know my prayers are often pretty pathetic, but they are transformed by our Intimate Intercessor into something infinitely better.

God is our Holy Helper

We generally think of a helper as an assistant, someone lower in status and probably in abilities. Even knowing that by definition, it simply means “one who helps” (though my dictionary immediately adds “assistant” to help define the word), it’s not a word that conveys a sense of God’s greatness the way we might like.

But the Bible speaks many times of God as our Helper. (Of thirteen occurrences of the word “helper” in the NIV, six refer to God. I’m not even going to try to check all 284 occurrences of “help,” “helped,” or some other form of the word.) He is our Helper in the way a parent helps young children.

There are very few things I can’t do better than a young child. (Duck, Duck, Goose is one, though – I can run OK for a short distance, but they have a distinct advantage when it comes to getting up and sitting down quickly.) I am helping out of a position of greater status and ability, not less.

Of course when I help a child, I’m always asking myself, how much help should I be giving? My parents – especially my mother – refused to help me much so that I would learn on my own. I think she carried it too far, so I try to be somewhat more of a help. But like her, I do want to develop independence in my children, so I don’t want to do too much for them.

God doesn’t have that problem. He knows exactly how much help I need, even if I frequently think I could use a bit more help than He is giving. At least that’s what I’ve been taught, and what I’m willing to believe, even if I can rarely point to anything in particular and say, “There, that was God helping me.” Since there’s nothing I have that did not ultimately come from God, there is nothing I have or can do that does not depend on His help.

That difference between God and us is part of what we mean when we say “holy.” I remember as a child not having the faintest idea what the word meant, although it was part of familiar prayers and hymns. One time a Sunday School teacher asked us what we thought the word meant, and no one could answer. I don’t remember what she said it meant, either, but I’m sure my overall impression of the word was simply that it meant something to do with God.

I suppose that’s not too far off, but it doesn’t explain what it means for God to be holy. In Bible school I learned that its basic meaning is “set apart.” Holy things were set apart for God, and couldn’t be used for ordinary everyday uses. Saying that God is holy is saying that He is set apart from all that He has made – if only by the mere fact that He is the Maker and everything else exists only by His will.

But of course when we say God is holy – or people are holy – we are thinking in a moral sense also. God is set apart from sinners because He is pure and righteous. When people are holy, they also act righteously, like God but unlike so many other people. Not that any of us are perfectly holy, but our Holy Helper (John 14:26)  is helping us grow toward holiness.

Our Glorious Good and Gracious God is a Generous Giver

I tried to decide between Good God and Generous Giver. And what I decided was that it was silly to think I had to choose between them. Then I decided I could add in Glorious and Gracious as well, as they also highlight such significant attributes of God’s character. I did leave out Great and Grand, as they seemed somewhat reduntant after using Glorious. (Besides, there’s probably a character limitation on titles for blog posts.)

Good

When I was little I learned the mealtime blessing that begins “God is great and God is good, let us thank Him for our food.” I don’t know what I thought those two adjectives said about God, other than that He was the ultimate source for all our food, and everything else. While there were definite differences between my father’s understanding of God and my mother’s, they both believed that God was both great and good. So I never really questioned those points either.

I did question some of the religious concepts my mother tried to teach me. On one occasion, for some reason I do not remember, I visited the Sunday School at her church (Unity School of Christianity). It wasn’t much fun – instead of making puppets or acting out Bible stories as we did at my father’s church (Congregationalist, part of the United Church of Christ), we just sat and talked about God.

And we learned a song, which was so short and simple that I still remember both words and music. “Nothing but good can happen to me, for God is all there is.” I found that song rather pointless, because it was clear that bad things sometimes happened to me, and to everyone I knew, and most likely to everyone in the world. Even if there was some deep truth in those simple words, that the things that seemed bad were really good in some mysterious way, it was still pointless, because singing it neither kept bad things from happening nor made them easier to deal with.

God is our Forgiving Father

If I had to pick one of these alliterative names for God as my favorite, it would have to be Forgiving Father (Mark 11:25). It’s good for us to think about the different attributes of God and the varied aspects of our relationship to Him, because an overemphasis on any one of them (and a corresponding underemphasis on others) is not good. But “Father” encapsulates so many of those truths in a single word.

Father means that

• He is the source of our life
• He is in authority over us
• He love us
• He helps and teaches us
• He corrects us when necessary
• He has a continuing relationship with us
• He is personally interested in each one of us

I did not have a close relationship with my own father. I liked going hiking with him, or doing other physical activities (biking, swimming, making things on his toolbench downstairs). But I don’t remember talking much. He didn’t talk a lot (unlike our mother, who was aggravated by this lack of communication), and neither did I, so conversations between us were generally limited to practical matters – how to do something or how to get somewhere.

I remember one time at the dinner table he commented on Communion at church, saying that he felt close to God then – I think he even said something about God speaking to Him through Communion. It was one of the rare times when I learned something about his inner life. But I didn’t feel comfortable asking him to say more about it.

God is Evil’s Enemy

Thinking of adjectives starting with E to describe God was easy. God is eternal, exalted, and excellent, just for starters. Coming up with nouns was more difficult, as usual. I could call God an educator, but I prefer the word teacher (my choice for the letter T). I could say that He is an engineer, making the entire physical universe work as it does, but the word barely hints at the greatness of what God does.

I thought of emperor, but I found that while God is many times called a King in the Bible, the word emperor is used only of the Roman emperor. I think this must be because the word empire implies multiple kingdoms (each governed by someone appointed by the emperor) under the emperor’s reign. That image of multiple kingdoms does not apply to God’s rule.

I thought of expert, which God certainly is. Albert Einstein’s knowledge of physics was barely a sliver of what God knows on the subject. He is the expert on subjects as diverse as interpersonal relationships, molecular biology, and music theory. He understands every human language ever spoken. I don’t know how much interest He takes in who is going to win the World Series, but He certainly knows the batting averages and every other stat on every player on both the Phillies and the Yankees.

I was initially not going to use the phrase Evil’s Enemy, because it put the focus on what God is against instead of God’s own nature. But much of what we believe God to be – as evidenced by some of the adjectives I mentioned in yesterday’s post – is defined by what He is not. He is not limited by time or space, nor is there any limit to His power or knowledge. He is without sin or errors in judgment.

Besides, it is an essential element of goodness to oppose evil. We consider no person good who is indifferent to evil. We often disagree on the best means to oppose evil, but we agree that it is necessary to do so. So it is also necessary that God, being perfectly good, oppose evil. I’m sure there are many Scriptures I could reference, but one I found as an example is Ezekiel 13:8

Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: “Because you have uttered falsehood and seen lying visions, therefore behold, I am against you, declares the Lord GOD.

Perhaps I was reluctant to use this phrase because it is not a comfortable image. It is an image intended to comfort those who are oppressed by God’s enemies, but for many of us in this society, raised on concepts of tolerance and making peace instead of war, it is a more difficult one to think of as part of God’s moral excellence. But while God is comforting, we should not expect to find Him comfortable. Any mental image of God that makes Him comfortable to us, and leaves out the discomforting aspects, is an idol as much as those sculpted from wood, marble, or gold.

God is our Divine Deliverer

D proved a surprisingly difficult letter to develop into descriptions of God. So many English words that start with the letter D use a prefix such as de- or dis- to negate the root of the word they are added to. There are many words that describe God that use a prefix that negates the root word, but they tend to use in- (or im). God is immortal, immutable, incomprehensible, incorruptible, ineffable, infallible, infinite, and invisible.

These are entirely the opposite of words such as despicable, decadent, defunct, degenerate, desperate, discouraging, disparaging, or disappointing. I can think of contexts in which it would make sense to speak of God as demanding (of our obedience),  disdainful (of people and nations who think they are great but do not recognize that all they have comes from God), or dangerous (to those who defy Him). But then I would have to be careful to explain the context, and someone might see the initial description but miss the explanation.

I first thought of using the word dependable, which would certainly apply to God. But I was also trying to find words that could be found in a single passage of Scripture, or synonyms of them. Perhaps there is a verse that would give me Dependable Deliverer, but I didn’t come across one. Besides, at least one of the phrases in my list should point out that the Person being described is in fact divine.

There are many passages I could have chosen that praise our Divine Deliverer, but I chose Psalm 18:2

The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.
He is my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

(In case you’re wondering, I got the word divine from the use of the word God in the second line. Divine means “of or pertaining to a god.”)

One thing that intrigued me as I looked through the many uses of the word deliver in the Bible was that it was used in two rather different ways. One sense refers to a rescue, enabling someone to escape from danger. This is how I am using it here, and what we mean when we use the word deliverer.

But there are also many verses where it speaks of God delivering someone into an enemy’s hands (whether delivering Israel’s enemies into their hands or, when Israel has been disobedient, delivering Israel into the enemy’s hands). I wondered how the same word came to be used both to mean escaping from the enemy and being handed over to the enemy.

I looked up a number of verses in Strong’s concordance, both from the Old and New Testaments, and learned that this peculiarity is in the English translation, not the original. Both Hebrew and Greek use different words for the two different meanings translated deliver in English.

So I started looking up the etymology of deliver. It wasn’t hard to find out that it comes from the Latin deliberare, but here I found differing opinions on the meaning of that word. (You think people who write reference materials know what they’re talking about, but either some of them don’t, or deliberare also had two meanings.) Most of them said what I had assumed, that it meant to set free, related to the Latin word liber, meaning free.

This source, however, disagrees. It says that deliberare meant to deliberate, to weigh options in the balance, from the Latin libra, meaning scales. Deliver came to mean to see free because so many uneducated people knew some Latin but not very well, so they assumed they knew what the word meant and they were mistaken. Lots of words develop that way, so it’s not surprising that this should be one of them. What is surprising is that my Random House unabridged dictionary doesn’t seem to know this.

What also surprised me is that I still haven’t found, either online or in any of my books on word origins, is how our word deliver came to mean not only see free but to bring to or hand over. So if you happen to know, please let me know. It’s not that important, of course, but I am curious now.

Of course, none of that has much to do with God being our Divine Deliverer. But the idea seems pretty straightforward, as long as you’re not confusing a deliverer with a delivery man, so I didn’t see what I could add. Besides, I really was intrigued by my discoveries delving into the development of our word deliver.