VI - DIVINE PROVIDENCE AND DESIGN (Isa. xlvi: 5)

Summary

“To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?”

—Isa. xlvi: 5.

There is no attempt in the Hebrew Scriptures to give definite form to God, nor strict analysis, nor any comprehensive theory; as we formulate in modern times “the philosophy of things,” there is no philosophy of God made known in the Bible,—any more than there is science in nature. Science is the recognition by men of things preexisting in the world of matter; and theologies are the consciousness and the intellectual views of men respecting the facts that are set forth in the Bible. It was expressly forbidden, indeed, that there should be any form given to God in carved statues. They were not to be allowed to make images, and the spirit of the command is equally strong against pictures and against fashioning in the imagination any definite conception of form. It degrades God in the mind and imagination of men to limit him by forms of matter. There is, to be sure, addressed not to the senses but to the imagination, some form given to God by descriptions—Isaiah, Daniel, John, the Apocalyptic writer; yet even then there was but sublime indefiniteness. There was the declaration of will, the quality of disposition, the attributes of power and of glory; but they were all diffused through time and space, and with no definite outlines.