Willard’s World 3- Our God is that Great?!

The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is the absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.

-Adam Clarke

In addition to containing maybe the longest sentence I’ve ever read, this may be the grandest description of God I’ve ever read. There’s nothing really more to say but I’ll try to highlight a few of Willard’s thoughts on this great God and his interactions with us now.

First of all Willard suggests that God is joyous. I was first introduced to this idea in John Piper’s Desiring God a number of years ago where he says, “…God's saving designs are penultimate, not ultimate. Redemption, salvation, and restoration are not God's ultimate goal. These he performs for the sake of something greater: namely, the enjoyment he has in glorifying himself. The bedrock foundation of Christian Hedonism is not God's allegiance to us, but to himself.” This greatly shifted my view of the world when I first realized it. Instead of God being eternally frustrated at our constant struggles he is eternally joyful in the glory of his kingdom. Willard gives the example of looking at a awe-inspiring beach in South Africa, (we all have our own examples of the beauty of the earth), and realizing that God sees this all the time along with every other beautiful breath catching scene he created. This is the kingdom he created. How could he not be joyous?

Second, Willard presents the idea that Heaven and therefore God is not somewhere beyond space but is near and all around us. He points to Jesus’ chiding Nicodemus in John, “for not understanding the ‘birth from above’—the receiving of a superhuman kind of life from the God who is literally with us in the surrounding space. To be born ‘from above,’ in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not. And that, of course is ‘The Kingdom Among Us.” Willard though is careful to clarify that the idea of God being all around us is different from God being all the stuff that’s around us. He uses the analogy of a human body. My body is filled with me just as the earth is filled with God, but just as if someone were to carefully dissect my body to find me they would be unsuccessful trying, attempting to localize God to one bit of his creation would also be futile. This speaks to the Spirit nature of God.

The spirit nature of God as well as us who are created in his image is his third main idea in the chapter. Willard explains that, “the center point of the spiritual in humans as well as in God is self determination, also called freedom and creativity.” He goes on to say that because God is the perfect demonstration of self sufficiency, needing nothing, being the “I Am”, he is the ultimate spiritual being. Humans are then lacking something in our spirit nature because we are limited in our sovereignty. It is when we align our kingdoms with that of God’s that, “our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.” We can then fulfill our spirit natures.

Lastly Willard concludes with the idea that if all the above is true and our God is really that great Death should be a minor blip in our thinking about the future. He says, “Once we have grasped our situation in God’s full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament writers had for ‘physical death’ suddenly makes sense.” He continues, “We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe.”

May my view of God be as grand as Adam Clarke’s so that death is no more than a beginning.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,
Than when we first begun

-John Newton, Amazing Grace