God of the Dust Speck

The LORD said to Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you."  Exodus 19:9

God of the Dust Speck
By Rev. William Dohle

Have you ever gone away from the city lights, way out in the countryside someplace, late at night at watched the stars?  Aren't they amazing!

I have this app I bought awhile ago called the Night Sky.  In it, you can peer in at the objects that you can't usually see with your naked eye.  Galaxies, star clusters, nebula.  The list goes on and on!

I like to stare at those pictures sometime and imagine.  If there are billions of stars in our own galaxy and of them a billion or so have planets and of them a half million of them have life.  If that is true of our galaxy, as they say it might be, just imagine how many trillions upon trillions of stars there are in the sky from all the trillions of galaxies.  Life could be more than abundant.  It could be overflowing.

And all of them stem from just one God!  All those galaxies and stars, all those planets and planetoids.  The countless forms of life just waiting to be discovered.  They are all created by God!  Wow!

That's some God!

That's the vision that comes to us at the foot of Mt. Sinai.  As Moses climbs up the mountain to talk with God, the people are told...

Put limits for the people around the mountain and tell them, ‘Be careful that you do not approach the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain is to be put to death. They are to be stoned or shot with arrows; not a hand is to be laid on them. No person or animal shall be permitted to live. (Exodus 19:12-13)

Why would God sequester himself off like this?  Why would this God who chose the people of Israel as His people out of all the nations be so inaccessible to them?

Because that's what God is!  God is bigger and stronger and wiser and incomprehesible.  God evades our limited way of thinking about him.

Is he with the ants as they nest in the earth?  Yes!  After all, he oversaw their creation!
But is he also over the supernova that exploded some 40 million years ago in some far off galaxy?  Yes!  For the same reason!


God is so big and holy and awesome that we might think: Why does God care?  Why does God bother with us?  If we are, as Calvin in the cartoon rightly suggests, a mere dust spec in the universe, why does God give us any mind?  Why does he bother with us?

Because, in his heart, God is love!  God is a compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

In short, God is a God of the details.  He thrives on the details of existence.  True, God is also a God of the galaxies and far flung solar systems of the world, but God is also a God of the details.  A God of the winds of Saturn and the winds of Central Illinois, a God of the cicadas chirping in the trees and a God of the largest star clusters in the universe.

Our God is small and large at the same time.  A God of the details and the big picture.  Busy with the details but knowing the whole.  Loving his creation and tending to even our petty needs.

How can he do it?  How can God be so much and still be here?  I don't know!  It's something we can't even comprehend.  Should we even begin to wrap our brains around it, it would kill us.

Maybe that's why God is inaccessible, even on Mt. Sinai.  For, as much as the Lord tells Moses, "...be ready for the third day because on that day the Lord will come down."

God can't come down as God.  He never does come to the people.

As much as God tells Moses, "Go down and bring Aaron up with you..."

Moses himself knows, "The people cannot come up Mount Sinai, because you yourself warned us, 'Put limits around the mountain and set it apart as holy.'"  And Aaron never comes either.

As much as we'd like to experience God as God...we cannot!

Maybe that's where we see our need for Jesus.  For, in Jesus, we see God.  We see and experience God as Father.  We see what matters most to God in the end is grace, hope, and steadfast love.  In Jesus...we see what God looks like in our flesh and through that flesh we experience the Lord God, king of all the universe.

Take a look up and the night sky.  God is out there...and also right here!

Touch us with your grace, Lord, that the boxes we build for you might crumble and that we might see what you truly look like, face to face, in the faces and lives around us.  Amen.