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The Wrong Way to Magnify God

by Abby Kelly  
1/16/2015 / Christian Apologetics

To magnify, means "to make much of, to intensify". Two very different disciplines employ magnification. For example: the biologist marveling at the intricate structure of a fly's compound eye on the sliver of glass beneath his microscope, or the astronomisthead tilted, neck craned gazing through the length of his telescope. These two learners would demonstrate both the right and wrong way to obey God's command to magnify Him.

With limited human understanding, it's easy for us to hone in on one aspect of God's character and magnify it to the exclusion of its glorious counterpart. For example, some pastors and churches are sometimes categorized as "radical grace" people as opposed to those who espouse the glory, beauty and holiness of God's law. Some describe themselves as emotional and prefer moving, worship songs, others relish the deep theology of the old hymns. Some seem to get stuck on the "God of the Old Testament" and admire His attributes of justice, sweeping displays of holiness and judgement against sin, as if that were opposed to Jesus in the New Testament who embodied love, forgiveness, mercy and compassion.

Akin the microscope, these attitudes parse God's nature and selectively magnify certain aspects of His character. This type of magnification zeros in on a minuscule aspect of an infinite God and is often oblivious to the full spectrum of His beauty, the composite of His nature.

Step over to the telescope. I invite you to tilt your head back, lift your eyes and attempt to consume the height and width, breadth and depth of the One True God. In fact, if we were to take that telescopic view, biblically (Eph. 3:19), God's love alone would overwhelm us; His love alone exceeds our knowledge.

Just as an telescope attempts to intake and magnify the cosmos, something infinitely beyond its capacity, so too we must do our best to magnify our Creator. Jeremiah 10:6 says, "There is none like you, O LORD; you are great, and your name is great in might."

He cannot be scaled down. God cannot be wholly, rightly magnified when we selectively accent a single aspect of Him. The God of the Old Testament, is the God of the New, embodied in the person of Christ (John 1, Malachi 3:6).

The God of mercy is the God of justice (Isaiah 16:5). He is perfectly expressed in His own words, "And the Lord passed by before him [Moses], and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation." (Exodus 34:6-7)

The God of public worship, "Oh give thanks to the LORD; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples," (Psalm 105:1) is the God who calls us to solitude, "And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed." (Mark 1:35)

John 4:24 says, "God is Spirit and they that worship must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

That word "truth" is alētheia in the Greek. It means, as you might expect, that God must be worshipped as He is in reality. He must be magnified in all of His expansiveness, including that which is uncontainable for our small minds.

First Corinthians 2:16 says, "'For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?' But we have the mind of Christ."

Though we do not have the capacity to understand all of God, all of Him who is worthy of all our worship, because we possess the mind of Christ, we are invited to try. More importantly, we are invited to be taught.

Broaden that passage just a bit: "these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words."
(emphasis mine)

As we are taught by the Holy Spirit within us, let us be careful not pull God into our laboratory, to attempt to magnify pieces of Him, to worship Him on our own terms.

No, let us take our frailty to the open skies, widen our eyes, tune our ears to the voice of the Spirit and magnify what we cannot begin to constrain.

Learn more about me on my website: http://predatory-lies.com/about-me/

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