God is Greatfeatured
The Greatness of God
Do you remember the first time you saw pictures of the universe with its galaxies packed full of stars? Did it also shock you at the realization of how small we are? To think for a moment that God is great because of His vast power and wisdom to create the universe is awe inspiring, but that is not the only way God is great.
God is also great because He lived as a man through incarnation, expressing His love in the most amazing way ever documented. His living on the earth, death on the cross, and resurrection paved the way to make the infinite and great God available to us in a personal and even intimate way.
Let’s take a look at three characteristics that make God Great.
His Power
God is great because He holds the entire universe with the word of His power (Hebrews 1:17). As amazing as this sounds, God is a speaking God, and not a mute strange looking statue or some energy floating in space. And by His power of speaking things into existence, via ways that us humans don’t understand, He created and holds the Universe together.
When God incarnated as a man, He expressed His power as no other human had previously manifested. In the gospels we see stories of blind people receiving their vision (John 9:1-6), leprous people getting healed instantly (Matthew 8:3), paralyzed ones whose mobility was restored immediately (Matthew 9:6-8), and raising some from the dead (John 11:43-44) among many other manifestations of His healing power.
As a Christian physician, I do not for a moment doubt the Biblical descriptions of Jesus Christ’s healing power. I’ve personally had patients that report to me that God released them from their drug addictions, horrific and constant nightmares, and other medical illnesses, but I haven’t heard of a case of someone being born blind and having his or her vision restored by God’s healing power. If you have heard of such a case, please send me a message and let me know about it.
Other manifestations of His Power in His earthly ministry:
- Seen by the disciples walking on water (Matthew 14:25)
- Speaking to the winds and waves to calm them down during a storm (Mark 4:39)
- Feeding thousands of people with a very limited amount of food (Matthew 14:16-21), and
- His resurrection (Luke chapter 24 and the other gospels).
- For some resources concerning the veracity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, consider reading: “More than Just a Carpenter,” by Josh and Sean McDowell, “The Reason for God”, especially chapter 13, by Timothy Keller, and “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel.
And the following are examples of God’s DELEGATED power to both created things and beings:
- Our sun, an average star out of the more than 200 billion trillion stars in the universe, is so powerful yet only a very small percentage of its solar energy reaches the earth, perhaps less than 0.00000005 %. But guess what? That small fraction is enough to heat up the entire earth to sustain life on it, charge up the close to 93 billion solar panels in use throughout the world today and provide light for the estimated three trillion plants,
- The power delegated to angels: “And that night an angel of Jehovah went out and struck the Assyrians’ camp, a hundred and eighty-five thousand; and when they rose up early in the morning, all of them were corpses, dead” (2 Kings 19:35). Notice that this portion refers to “an angel”, that is, ONE angel performed such a feat that night at God’s command. For comparison, the first atomic bomb ever deployed against humanity occurred on August 6th, 1945, in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and is estimated to have killed 80,000 people immediately.
The power delegated to His children to produce His Body, His church and to preserve and keep it:
- All members of His Body, having His Life in them, possess a certain degree of His power that expresses different functions. The Apostle Paul describes this in Ephesians 4:11-12: “And He Himself gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as shepherds and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of the ministry, unto the building up of the Body of Christ”.
- All the saints (believers) have a certain function which is powered by the Life in them to build His Body.
- Since the inception of the church more than 2,000 years ago, different nations, emperors, organized religion and other entities have persecuted, martyred, and tried unsuccessfully to stop and destroy the church (also refer to “Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s,” by John Foxe).
His Wisdom
God’s power also goes hand in hand with His wisdom in creating the trillions of stars and every created thing, seen and unseen. He likely knows the names of ALL the stars, their course, their composition, and their own “why”. For my four years of medical school, I was expected to memorize thousands of new words each year, but compare this to God’s capacity!
Continuing with this trend of thought, we can safely deduce that He must know the names of the myriad of His created angels, along with their history, thoughts, purpose, and each of their functions. Big Wow.
God’s wisdom is apparent in the way He made our brains, which allow us to see, taste, hear, smell, dream, store vast amounts of information, and reason about so many different issues. The world renowned and retired pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson said of the brain:
“First, we cannot overload the human brain. This divinely created brain has fourteen billion cells. If used to the maximum, this human computer inside our heads could contain all the knowledge of humanity from the beginning of the world to the present and still have room left over.”
Now let me take a 180-degree turn. Think about bees, flies, and ants. They look like “simple little insects”, correct? Well, grab a book from the library on any of these insects, and their intricacy quickly becomes apparent in just a few pages. Even the flagellum of a bacteria, which propels it forward is made up of more than 25 proteins and includes a “rotor, a stator, a drive-shaft, a U-joint, bushings, bearings, and a whip-like tail that functions as a propeller,” said Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, philosopher of science, and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
It’s interesting that inventors of cars and other machinery started developing these technologies in the 1800’s unaware that they were replicating the nano-tecnological machinery found even in simple bacteria that has existed for millennia. It is almost as if God’s creative powers are ingrained in our minds, and inventors simply recreate what God first conceived a long time ago.
God’s wisdom is at another level. He knows the number of hairs on our head (Luke 12:7), our thoughts (Psalm 139:2), our personal history, desires, dreams, and goals. Mind you, it is believed that there are more than 7,000 languages today and He understands all of them, including the extinct languages.
Have you ever heard the saying, “sharing is caring?” Well, I”m pretty sure God believes in it. God’s wisdom is so vast, that He doesn’t mind sharing it to those who ask for it.
When King Solomon was a young man and the time came for him to reign over Israel, he prayed “Now give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people” (2 Chronicles 1:10).
King Solomon, the author of the book of Proverbs and Song of Songs, without having any formal education, knew A LOT about “trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that shoots forth out of the wall; he also discoursed about animals and about birds and about creeping things and about fish. And they came from all the peoples to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom” (1 Kings 4:33-34). He also wrote much poetry, built great edifices (including the temple of God), and is considered to be the wealthiest man who ever lived. His wealth is estimated at $2.1 trillion. How would you like to have 0.00001% of that! At the time of writing this post, Elon Musk is considered to be the planet’s richest person, with an estimated wealth of $219 billion.
When a queen by the name of Queen Sheba heard of King Solomon’s fame and wisdom, she visited him and said, “The word that I heard in my land concerning your deeds and your wisdom is true, but I did not believe the words until I came and my own eyes saw. And indeed the half was not told to me; your wisdom and prosperity far exceed the report that I heard” 1 Kings 10:6-7.
Even though King Solomon was great in wisdom, this was but a shadow of the superabundant wisdom of God, which was fully manifested in Jesus Christ, referring to Himself as “greater than Solomon” (Matthew 12:42).
So where does all this Great Wisdom culminate? In His masterpiece, the church, which will end up becoming the New Jerusalem depicted in the book of Revelation. Indeed, The New Jerusalem will be the maximum manifestation of His power, wisdom, and love. God’s greatness is imparted through His Spirit to the millions and millions of His children, in time and space, constituting us with His Life, to eventually make us His Corporate dwelling place, which is the New Jerusalem.
His Love
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes into Him would not perish, but would have eternal life” (John 3:16).
God’s love toward us is supreme, sending His ONLY son Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect sinless life, and died on the cross for the sins of the world. Dying by way of crucifixion was meant to cause a severe amount of pain, while keeping you alive the longest amount of time. Actually, the word crucifixion comes from the Latin word crucificare, and the English word excruciating contains the same Latin word of crux or cross.
God’s love for us is unfathomable because He loved us even before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and also because “God commends His own love to us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He will also love us forever (Romans 8:38-39). GOD IS LOVE (1 John 4:8).
Even great historical and political leaders have recognized something of the majestic love of God. Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor who was a military and political leader during the French Revolution, once said, “Alexander, Charlemagne and myself all tried to found an empire on force and we failed. Jesus Christ is building an empire of love, and today there are millions of people who would gladly die for His sake.”
When we get to know a bit of God’s love, we realize how awesome and great He is, and then we willingly choose to love Him in return. We can choose NOT to believe in Him, NOT to love Him; we can choose to despise and oppose Him, and there are many that unfortunately do choose that. But God’s love is beyond words when we realize that He chose to give us a free will so that in turn He’d find those that choose to love Him voluntarily. He didn’t want a bunch of automatons without free will to love Him. Being so transcendent in power, God could have pre-programmed us to love Him, but what would that have proven?
He attracts us with His divine love, as He longs for an intimate relationship with us that will eventually consummate in a marriage. God, who is the Transcendent Being, creator of the Universe, longs to MARRY US, a group of people that contain Him, love Him, and express Him. Isn’t this amazing? God went through such a process of giving His life for us, which grows and matures in each of us, thereby transforming us into His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26).
There is so much more to God’s attributes that make Him great, and a simple blog such as this one is not enough to describe them, but I do hope that your appreciation for God’s power, wisdom, and love toward Him are increased. I encourage you to read the Bible and appreciate God’s Greatness!
Please let me know what you think about this post, feel free to share it and give me some feedback.
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