Our Mighty God
For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward. Deuteronomy 10:17
As a child in the public school, we used to pray before snack time. God is great, God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. Amen!
Indeed, God is good and He is great. He is a God of gods and Lord of lords, revealing His absolute exclusiveness. There are no other gods and all that men refer to as “God,” outside of Jehovah God are idols. We would think that other gods would be of man’s imagination, but we can be certain that Satan himself placed those imaginations within the minds of mankind. Since God alone is good and great, all other gods would be evil and worthless.
When the Spirit of God gave these words to Moses, there were all kinds of other gods worshipped in the lands of Egypt and Canaan. To great and mighty, the text adds the word “terrible” in the King James. In the Hebrew, it is a root word indicating a response on our part to fear, revere or reverence. Some translations use the word “awesome” for His goodness and power are indeed that. For the genuine follower of God, He would be good and great, but for the non-believer, the word can easily communicate “terrible, a Person to dread or fear.”
The psalmist wrote, When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained (Psalm 8:3). When is the last time you investigated the heavens on a cloudless night? David obviously did this in the night and there would be little light from the homes and businesses to interfere. It was the witness of the universe that caused him to recognize the difference between himself and God – millions of stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and meteors. When we think of the distance of these stars, the planets and our own sun and then realize that we are just one galaxy of many. The Milky Way alone has an estimated diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 lightyears with 100-400 billion stars and more than 100 billion planets. It is estimated that there are over one hundred billion other galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
David’s contemplations moved him to worship. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork (Psalm 19:1). Have you ever looked up into space and considered the mighty power required to produce such an incredible universe? Since God’s power is that great, it only makes sense to believe His Word when it is made clear that His power is sufficient for our lives. There is no reason to ever doubt Him.
Dr. Earl Radmacher wrote, “I am driven to the question then: ‘What is God like?’ And yet as I begin my search in the things around me, I find at the outset that the question cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything: that is, He is not exactly like anybody or anything. When we try to imagine what God is like, we must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on, and thus, whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made, and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end up with an idol, made not with hands, but with thoughts, and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hands. You see, when we are left to ourselves, we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control.”
We can assume the psalmist was out in the evening looking up into space. Psalm eight both begins and ends with his response. O LORD our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth! Who has set Thy glory above the heavens (Psalm 8:1). O LORD our Lord is literally, O Jehovah, our sovereign Master. His response is immediately one of worship as he gazes in wonder of God’s mighty power.
Our belief as to Who God is and what He has done is so crucial because what we believe about Him will always translate into how we live. Does your belief in God match with what He says about Himself in His Word? How has this affected your life?
Isaiah wrote: To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto Him? The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains. He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto Him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved. HAVE YE NOT KNOW? Have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth (Isaiah 40:18-21).
God has made Himself known through His incredible creation and through His Holy Word. Take your Bible today and see how many times you will find this phrase or one like it – AND GOD SAID?
Question: Are you committed to live based on what you say you believe about God?
George Stiekes held successful pastorates in churches in Michigan and Washington among other places. He currently resides in North Carolina and blogs at Reverent Reflections. We recommend his ministry and republish his material by permission.