Today I listened to one of Tim Keller’s older sermons from the free group recently released on God our Father. Early in the sermon he critiques us as reducing God to a cartoon character, a one dimensional being. He makes the assertion, which should be obvious, that God must be multi-faceted and complex. That struck me because I had to confess that too often my conception of God is simplistic.

As a pastor I deal with people and I deal with people dealing with people. There are many obstacles in life, but people are always the greatest ones. The same is true for God. God can make the universe by speaking it into being. He can stop the sun, stand up the waters, bring down fire and hail from the sky, but that library we call the Bible has 66 books of God mostly simply wrestling with us. We are God’s greatest obstacle and therefore God’s greatest prize. But how is it that we are more difficult for God to deal with than physics? For the same reason we are difficult for each other.

In our conflicts with each other we usually acknowledge our own complexity. If someone else lies they are a liar. If we lie, well, it’s complicated. We do exactly the same thing to God. We can’t get along with each other because we are complex, and whether we want to acknowledge it all of the people we deal with are complex and so, well, things are complicated.

If we can see that we are complex, why can’t we see that God is complex? Why can’t we see that God too must wear many hats, how he too must have conflicting feelings about us and our behavior. (Read the book of Hosea sometimes if you want to get a window into the complex relationship God has with us.) One of Keller’s favorite metaphors is that God is in the longest worst marriage you can imagine. “We’re the spouse from hell.”

Why do I imagine that I can figure out God if on a daily basis I have to acknowledge that I can’t figure out even the people I’m closest too and that I know best? God must of course be magnitudes more complex than anyone else I’ve ever met yet I foolishly imagine that I can get inside God’s skull in order to get out of him what I want from him or get him to govern the world to my tastes? I’m clearly an idiot.Yet God is complex and smart enough to know this about me, just like the parent of a manipulative toddler knows it about them and patiently works with them (often through decisions not appreciated by the toddler) to help the toddler grow out of it.