God Is Obsessed with Matter

It’s the first divine attribute.

In this newsletter, we’re talking about God, specifically his attributes, what he is like and what he is not like.  In some ways, it’s the most impractical of topics. Discussing the divine attributes won’t help us know how to vote come November, what job we should seek, whether to homeschool or not, how to instill values in our children, and so forth.  It won’t necessarily make us feel closer to God.  

What it will do is mess with our minds, and in a good way.  I don’t need to rant again about how our culture—Christian and secular—reduces God to a kindly grandfather who just wants to pat us on the head and tell us how wonderful we are.  This view of God will not give us the courage or wisdom to face the tumultuous times that await us all.  Pondering the nature of God will deepen the awe and mystery of every inch of existence.  It will allow us to slow down and contemplate myriad gifts that come our way, including trials and sufferings, which we slowly grasp are also gifts. It will fill us little by little with fullness of being, which is of course God himself.  As Paul put it, 

… may [you] have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge,
so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Eph.3:18-19).

Where to Begin?

When listing the attributes that characterize God, it is customary to begin with abstractions. God is omniscient.  God is omnipresent.  God is eternal.  And so forth.  Those attributes are almost guaranteed to elicit wonder.  But it seems to me that such a beginning gets us off on the wrong foot.  Right away we’re in the realm of philosophy, ideas, concepts, logic, and so forth, which will get our minds spinning. All well and good, and I’ll move in that direction at some point. 

But I think it’s crucial to begin as does the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. 

All things include angels and archangels, principalities and power, and heaven—all things spiritual. But it also includes all things material, from galaxies to microscopic life.  Mention of these only foreshadows this:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 

In short: Among all the divine attributes we might ponder and wax eloquent about, of all the great adjectives we might employ and all the heady concepts we might explore, the preeminent one, the one that is necessary to make sense of all the others is this: God is in love with matter.

He created solar systems and planets and their moons.  He populated earth with rivers and mountains and deserts and jungles and oceans teeming with life.  On dry ground his creative energies have sprung forth reptiles and birds and dinosaurs and cattle and dogs and bees and robins.  Not to mention roses and sequoias. And then there are humans, whom he not only formed from the grainy dirt he created, but with whom he longs to commune, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters. 

And just to make it as plain as the face in your mirror, the Word—who is not only with God but is God--took on human flesh and dwelt among us for a time:

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us (1 John 1).

This comes from another part of the Johannine corpus—the Gospel and letters of the Johannine school—that can’t get over the Word made flesh. Here three senses-- hearing, seeing, touching—are employed to convey that the revelation of the divine was a fleshly, tangible experience.  In the Gospel, a fourth sense is highlighted by Jesus to convey the ongoing, concrete divine presence: 

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;  for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.  Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me (John 6).

While some Christians have recently (in the last few hundred years anyway) chalked this up to only so much symbolism, for 2,000 years nearly all Christians have taken this with one degree of literalness or another.  The Catholic and Orthodox traditions say the bread becomes the body, Lutherans say Christ is “in, with, and under the bread,” Reformed believers say Christ is spiritually but really present in the sacrament, and so on.  In short, they don’t shy away from Christ’s teaching that God continues to be made manifest in tangible things like bread and wine, which are made from wheat and grapes.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis put it this way:

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. 

Add to this is a reminder that Christ ascended bodily into heaven.  That he “sits at the right hand of the Father” is clearly a picture image, yet the theological fact remains that the glorified body of Jesus is part and parcel of the Trinity.  He didn’t discard his body to rejoin the Father. 

Nor do we in the new heaven and earth.  We believe, after all, in the resurrection of the body.

Admittedly, we’re getting into complex theology here.  Yes, it is the Word that became flesh, not the entire Godhead.  Yes, as Jesus himself said, God is spirit.  We cannot talk about a God who is unbounded by space or time—as we must—and assume he is anything but spirit.

But as we go on to discuss things like omnipresence, eternity, and the like, we have to take into account God’s obsession with all those tangible, fleshly, bodily “things” he has brought into being; how he came to us in the body and blood of Jesus Christ; how the body and blood of Christ are still with us; how the glorified body and blood of Christ are intimately united with the Father and the Spirit; and how we will commune with God in resurrected bodies. 

We aren’t the first people who wondered what God is like:

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14).

It may be true that it is the Word, and not the Father, who became flesh. Then again, as Jesus put it, “If you know me, you will know my Father also” (John 12).

When it comes to thinking about God, matter matters, because matter matters to God.

Grace and peace,

Mark

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