Outside (Part 1)

Imagine one beam of white light passing through a glass prism. The light separates into colors, each one distinct, and yet they share a single source.

That is the picture for this series, with one important caveat. Christians have always said that God is both one and three. Father, Son, and Spirit are three distinct persons, not three masks or three roles that one person takes on, and they are not three separate gods working as a team. They are three persons who share a single being. The prism cannot really show that, because nothing in our world really shows that. The picture is a hand-hold to get started, and then it has to be set down.

This first part is about one of those three persons, God the Father, and about what it means that there is a someone behind the universe.

The size of everything

The universe is bigger than you can hold in your head for very long.

The observable universe contains roughly two trillion galaxies. Our own galaxy is one of them, and it contains somewhere between a hundred billion and four hundred billion stars. Multiply those out and you get a number with more zeroes than is useful to say out loud.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and at that speed it takes about eight minutes to reach your face from the sun. From the next nearest star after the sun, it takes a little over four years. From the far edge of the observable universe, it takes around forty six billion years. And that is only what we can see. The actual universe is probably much larger than that, possibly infinite.

You are about five and a half feet tall.

Outside

The Bible opens with a single sentence: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

The sentence does not argue for God or try to prove him. It just states, plainly, that before there was a universe there was God, and the universe came from him. So God is not the biggest thing inside the universe. He is outside the universe, and he is the one who made it.

Isaiah, writing many centuries later, says the same thing this way:

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.” (Isaiah 40:21-22)

The picture is staggering. God looks down on the planet the way you might look down on an ant farm, and the whole thing, with its dying stars and its tiny crawling humans, sits inside the cup of his attention.

That is what the Bible means when it calls God the Creator: not a craftsman who shaped material he found lying around, but someone who spoke, and the material itself appeared.

The problem

A God like that has no real reason to notice you, and the math is offensive on its face.

If you put the observable universe on one side and a single human life on the other, the human disappears as a statistical zero. There are around eight billion of those zeroes walking the planet right now, and many billions more who have already lived and died. By any honest accounting, no one that big should be paying attention to anyone that small.

And yet the same Isaiah passage keeps going. It says that God “calls them each by name.” It is talking about the stars when it says that, but a few chapters later, when the prophet turns to human beings, he writes the same kind of thing: “I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”

Either this is a wild overreach by an ancient writer with too much imagination, or it is one of the most disorienting claims in any religion. The someone outside the universe, whose attention should be impossible to attract, knows your name and is turned toward you.

The Bible never apologizes for the tension. It just keeps holding both halves at once: bigger than everything, and closer than your own skin.

Father

The Bible uses a lot of names for God. Most of them are titles like the Almighty, the Most High, and the Lord of hosts: formal words you say with a bowed head, the kind that sound like the titles of a king.

Then Jesus shows up and starts using a different word, and he uses it constantly. Of all the names available to him, the one he says again and again for God is the same name a child says for the man who raised him: Father. Sometimes he uses an even more familiar form, the Aramaic word “Abba,” which is closer to “Dad” than to anything formal. It is the word a small child says before they have learned how to be polite.

Father is a complicated word for a lot of people. Some readers will have had fathers who were present and steady, and others will have had fathers who were distant or angry or gone, so the word does not land the same way in every house. The Bible is not pretending otherwise, and it is not borrowing the word in order to flatter the men who happen to be fathers. It is using the word to say something about the Creator of two trillion galaxies, and the thing it is saying is that he is turned toward you.

So what does Father add to Creator? Creator says he made you, and Father says he meant to. Creator says he is the source of you, and Father says you are not an accident of the source. The universe is not a factory that happened to produce humans the way a forest happens to produce mushrooms. There is a someone behind it, and that someone had a face in mind, including yours.

That is the claim being made when the Bible calls God Father. It is not flattery, and it is not sentiment, and it is not a coupon for an easy life. It is the claim that the someone outside the universe wanted you here, knows you here, and is turned toward you, whether or not anyone else ever was.

One light

Back to the prism, but with care. The Father is one person of the one God, and he is not the only one. From before there was a universe, he has been with the Son and the Spirit. The three of them are distinct from one another, and together they are the single God, not three gods.

If the Father is outside the universe and bigger than everything in it, the next question is how something that vast becomes close enough for you to know.

In the Christian story, the answer is not the Father stepping out of who he is and into his own creation. The one who enters creation is the Son, a second person who is distinct from the Father but shares his being completely. He takes on a face and a body and a voice, and he walks around inside the world the Father made as one of us.

That is part two.