A HUMBLE GOD

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about our God who does not boast.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13: 4 that love “does not boast.”

God is love; therefore, God does not boast.

The Greek word for boasting or bragging is perpereuomai.

The following ideas are associated with the word:

Bragging, boasting, showing off, vaunting oneself, self adulation using rhetorical embellishments, gushing exaggerations, and tall tales to praise another person or the self excessively.

If God were a supreme being with a voice and a brain who created everything there is, he would have every right to boast. We might expect him to appear on every radio and television channel simultaneously and broadcast to the entire world in every language that he knows how to cook up a universe.

Yes, he could boast. We have seen samples in the Jewish Bible of Yahweh being very pleased with himself. The book of Job certainly depicts a god inclined to boast.

Of course, Job is a gadfly mucking up the pure fluidity of Yahweh’s boasting. If the god who created the sea monsters was so great, why did he create sea monsters? 

William Blake puts it this way in this sample of from his Songs of Experience:

Tyger Tyger burning bright

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Our God of love does not have to boast. Our God is the Creator.  The creation makes its own lovely case for rhetorical embellishments and gushing exaggerations.

Blessings…