BIG GOD, LITTLE GOD

How great is God--beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out. -Job 36:26

Scooby-Doo: Big Dog
Do you remember Scooby-Doo? I used to watch this show on Saturday mornings when I was a child. Scooby was an original. He was the Big Dog. Scooby and Shaggy portrayed some of the best animated physical comedy ever!

Scrappy-Doo: Little Dog
The show started going down when they introduced Scrappy. This runt had small-dog syndrome! Before Scrappy, Scooby and the gang used to solve mysteries, while dodging all kinds of alleged creatures of the night. Whatever "ghost,"or "monster" came after them during the show was always a bad guy in a mask. The mystery-solvers would pull the mask off, revealing the bad guy, who would say, “And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

When Scrappy came along the ghosts and monsters were no longer villains wearing masks, who were later discovered to be criminals. The supernatural villains that Scrappy fought were real! Spiritualizing these facts, you could interpret that Scooby was a righteous dog, while Scrappy was of the devil! I know, that's a little extreme. Mainly, he was obnoxious. Scrappy-Doo was one little dog that the Mystery Machine should have run over!

Big God - Little God
Taking the analogy infinitely higher, we find that people occasionally have traded their Big-God for a little-god. After the Exodus, I always thought that when the Israelites bowed down to the golden calf they were worshiping the calf as their God. But according to Exodus 32 they were worshiping God as the calf. The scripture says we're going to hold a festival to the LORD (YHWH - The vowel-less Hebrew name for God, sometimes pronounced, "Yahweh"). Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” They didn't say, "let's worship this instead of YHWH." It's as though they were saying, "This little idol that we can manipulate, let's just call this YHWH."

The sin of idolatry isn’t limited to calling a statue your god and bowing down to it. It can also be any attempt to shrink the real, true and living God down to a size we can handle; a god we can predict, manage and even control; a god we conceive in our own mind. I call this god, “little god.” Taking our small view of god and calling it "God," is as idolatrous as worshiping a lump of coal.

The commandment says, "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." -Exodus 20:4 (ESV) This forbids us from making any kind of image of God out of physical materials. What about making a god out of our own small ideas about God? This commandment is also against us trying to characterize God by any kind of concept in our mind that is less than what God actually is.

Study the true characteristics of God, to keep from substituting Him with "little-god" attributes.

Big-God is Almighty (Omnipotent)
Job 42:2, Jeremiah 32:27, Jeremiah 32:17, Mark 10:27

Big-God is All-Knowing (Omniscient)
Psalm 147:4-5, Isaiah 46:9-10, Matthew 10:29-30, 1John 3:20

Big-God is Everywhere (Omnipresent)
1Kings 8:27, Psalm 139:7-10, Proverbs 15:3, Jeremiah 23:23-24

These three Big-God attributes should be enough to study for now. Remember, if you're serving someone who doesn't meet these three characteristics, you're serving a false god! Taste and see that the (Real, and Big) Lord is good!

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? -Job 11:7

[Still frame from the debut episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: "What a Night for a Knight". (original airdate: September 13, 1969). Copyright © 1969 Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.]