R is for Reduction

Unsurprisingly, we humans do not always have faith to pass this trial. This is evident in the several ways we deny God's hugeness. We diminish God, cut God down to our own less daunting size. We shrink God by minimizing God's gifts or laws or power. The gifts we lessen when we forget what great miracles they are (the sun! our bodies! wholesome and delightful daily bread!), or when we slip into thinking that we have these by our working and not by God's giving. Even common complaining, which implies that God has been cheap with us, minimizes his gifts. With such thoughts, words and deeds we reduce God from the liberal Creator he is (and reduce how obliged we are to him).

Some people minimize God and God's laws by retracting the Ten Commandments from Jesus' call for purity of thought and feeling to prohibitions of outward felonies. Others challenge from the get-go the Creator's right to tell us how to live. There is a temptation to think God small enough that we don't have to worry about him passing judgment on such good folk as we.

God's power is diminished sometimes by God's own defenders. To spare God from angry accusations--"He should have done something!"--some will quietly assert that God did do some little things. That sounds like "he did what he could." The prophets had a different view: that God led great armies, even of those who did not know him, and that the Lord powerfully determined the fates of nations. Is God big enough to do more than give advice and encouragement? Or is God no longer the field marshal but the kindly chaplain?