Looking Beyond

“When Isaiah cries out that we are to behold our God, he does so in a way that does not encourage us to start looking under the furniture. This is not altered in the slightest by his use of an image taken from the created order. Yet even here, each single image, however wonderful, if absolutized in isolation from the others, could lead us away from profound and orthodox oceans and into the backwater shallows of heresy . . . We have here a series of rhetorical questions, and the assumed answer in all of them is that anyone who has a hollow in his hand, or a tape measure, or a set of scales, did not have anything to do with the apportionment of all creation. Hands, spans, and scales [are] mentioned in order to teach us that this thing had nothing to do with hands, spans, and scales. Only God holds the oceans in the palm of His hand, and He is able to do this because He doesn’t have any hands” (“The Loveliness of Orthodoxy” in Bound Only Once, p. 25).