Theological Ramblings

This is something that’s been on my mind for a while. It’s something that comes up every once in a while for me, and I have to say something.

Have you ever heard someone (usually a pastor) say something like the following:

The word “awesome” is a big word. Only God is awesome. We should only use the word “awesome” to refer to God, because when we use it to refer to lesser things, we imply that God is not awesome.

I cannot begin to describe how much this drives me nuts! I’m sorry. I have a lot of respect for some of the people who have said this, but intellectually it’s quite a dumb thing to say. I call my first witness: Dictionary.com:

Awesome:

1. adj: inspiring awe.
2. adj: showing or characterized by awe.
3. adj: Slang: very impressive

OK. So I guess we have to figure out what “awe” is. I said “awe” A-W-E!!!! (sorry… George of the Jungle….)

awe:

1. noun: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.
2. verb: to inspire with awe

So, to sum up. By definition an awesome thing is a thing that inspires reverence, admiration or fear in someone who encounters it. Basically, it’s something that makes one feel the weight of his own smallness (if I’m allowed to make up words) at coming into contact with something so much bigger than him.

God most certainly does this. In fact he is the most awe inspiring of all! In the Bible, any time someone came into God’s presence they did an immediate face plant! Check out Isaiah 6! “Woe is me!” is the reaction to seeing God. Why? Because even the most Christ centered human is prone to primarily focusing on himself - at least for those of us in the West. We’re just wired to think that way. We spend our whole lives with ourselves at the center, battling to shove it out of the way so Christ can come in. And we ought to fight this battle all the time, but when we see God for who he is, we immediately realize how poor of a job we’ve been doing.

So I’m all in favor of using the word for God, and recognizing how awesome he is, and how much more awesome he is than anything else. But stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and tell me you’re not filled with wonder, reverence, admiration and fear. Tell me at that very moment that you don’t feel small! Tell me when you watch the Top Ten on Sports Center that you don’t suddenly feel like a very poor athlete when presented with the evidence of so many who are greater than you! Tell me, guitarists, when you hear Jimmi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn or Eddie Van Halen shredding you don’t feel quite poor in your ability to play. Sure you’re inspired to try harder and get better when you see an amazing catch made on the sidelines. Sure you’re inspired to try harder and get better when you hear Eruption. But that’s what awe is!

Truth be told, we have no context for understanding what the word means if we don’t see it in our daily lives. Would we know what the Bible means by calling God our Father if we did not ourselves have earthly Fathers? The author of Hebrews draws on this in chapter 12. So we look around and realize there are many awe inspiring things in this world, and it is because of that, we know what it is to be in awe of something. From there we turn our eyes on the one who’s awe inspiring nature is currently shielded from us who are made to wait in anticipation of the day when it will be revealed.

Hype. That’s what it is. You know it. The next great thing is happening and you can’t wait, because it’s going to be awesome. There’s that word! So you wait and you wait and you wait, and it finally gets here, and either it’s a huge let down or it lives up to its hype. We’re supposed to have this same type of anticipation for the day that God is revealed to us. St. John mentions this in his first epistle. “Beloved we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” St. Paul as well draws on this in his epistle to the Corinthians “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away… For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

So it’s not only OK to be caught up in awe by other things in this world. In fact it’s quite Christian. For God made this world, and all the wonders it holds - even the Grand Canyon which is a result of the Flood, a judgment of God upon man’s sin. Even the works of sinful men like Eddie Van Halen and Jimmi Hendrix can be enjoyed in a sense of awe at the God who invented music, the creative mind and the fingers required to play such beautiful music. It is divine to be enthralled at the prowess of those who through competition display their quality on the field of play. For in doing so we worship the God who made the man. But we must always remember that when we stare in awe of creation or creature, that we should direct our gaze upward to remember the creator. For when we forget the creator, our affections lower and then nothing is awesome, for there is no most awesome in our eyes. Awesome then becomes just another word.

Which is probably the heart of the objection. It appears to these people that the word has become trivialized to the point of having no meaning. I will grant this. It has been abused to the point of having almost no meaning at all. But then so has almost every other word in the English language. Does this mean that we should tear words out of our vocabulary and avoid their use because others misuse them? Of course not, for then words like beauty, good, bad and even love would have to be stricken from our lips. May it never be so. Let us instead try to redeem the proper meanings of these words by using them properly ourselves.