How Big Is Your God?

How big is your God? I suspect He is far smaller than He truly is.

How Small Have We Made Our God?

How big is your God? This isn’t any type of theological debate. It’s a question that demands serious introspection.

We talk endlessly about God’s love, forgiveness, and mercy. These attributes are real and wonderful. But in our daily choices, we shrink Him down to a more manageable size.

We create a convenient god. One who demands little. Threatens less. Stays conveniently out of our way.

Is your god as big as He really is? Or have you, without even noticing, chipped away at His magnificence until He fits neatly within the borders of your comfort zone?

How Big Is the God of Scripture vs. Our Imagination?

The God of the Bible is no tamed deity.

We often focus almost exclusively on His love and the gentleness of Jesus, forgetting how wonderfully, awe-inspiringly powerful He truly is. We emphasize His compassion but minimize His majesty.

This is the God who brought down Jericho’s mighty walls with nothing but trumpets and a shout. No battering rams or trebuchets required. Just His power manifesting through His people’s obedience.

How big is a God who reduces impenetrable fortifications to rubble with a breath?

Consider David facing Goliath. An overlooked shepherd boy deemed so unworthy that his own father hid him away on the day a king was to be chosen from among his sons. So insignificant that when the prophet came calling, no one even thought to invite him in from the fields.

This same overlooked boy stood before a giant that made entire armies flee in terror. While seasoned warriors cowered, David stepped forward with complete confidence—not in himself, but in the enormity of his God.

With just a sling and stone, he accomplished what battalions could not.

Is your God big enough to make giants fall?

When Paul encountered Him on the Damascus road, he was struck blind by the brilliance. The proud Pharisee was left shattered, led by the hand into Damascus, his entire worldview transformed in an instant.

Is your God awesome enough to blind with His glory? To remake a life with a word?

In Revelation, we see Jesus with eyes like flames of fire. Many crowns adorning His head. A robe dipped in blood. A sharp sword extending from His mouth to strike the nations.

This is no meek figure. This is Jesus as the warrior-king returning to establish justice with unbending righteousness.

Yet our cultural imagination often gives us something quite different—a Renaissance Jesus with flowing locks and delicate features. Unthreatening. Mild.

This portrayal captures His approachability and love. These qualities are certainly true of Him.

But have we emphasized these at the expense of His terrifying holiness? His absolute sovereignty? His universe-shaping power?

Is your God only the comfortable cultural image? Or do you embrace the full Biblical reality?

Oh, and that gentle Jesus with the flowing hair and kind eyes? That same Jesus was the Commander of the LORD’s armies who appeared to Joshua with sword drawn. The same one who came from heaven to escort the Israelites and stand beside them as they defeated their enemies.

As Jude reminds us, it was Jesus who “saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” The gentle teacher and the fierce warrior are one and the same person.

That’s how big your God really is.

How Does a Small God Serve Our Convenience?

How small have you made your God?

Let’s be honest. A small God doesn’t meddle much in your affairs. He doesn’t challenge your choices. He doesn’t require the uncomfortable or demand the impossible.

A small God is a convenient God.

We have mastered the art of divine downsizing. We shrink God precisely when it serves our purposes and only acknowledge His true enormity when we need something beyond our capabilities.

Is your God only allowed to be big when you need something from Him?

Consider how selectively we apply His attributes. We want His forgiveness, but not His holiness. We claim His promises, but ignore His commands. We celebrate His blessings, but rebel at His discipline.

This downsizing isn’t accidental. It’s strategic.

A God too magnificent to approach casually might interrupt our carefully constructed lives. A God who speaks and shatters worldviews might challenge our most cherished assumptions. A God who demands holiness might expose our comfortable compromises.

So we make Him smaller. Safer. More predictable.

This God we’ve diminished is the same God who devised a salvation plan so brilliant that neither angels nor demons could decipher it, though it was all in plain sight for a thousand years. As Paul writes, “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

How big is a God whose plans confound both angels and demons?

Is that the God you worship? Or have you settled for a deity who fits comfortably within the margins of your understanding?

How Big Must Your God Be to Be Truly Loved?

Hold this thought as we proceed: You cannot fully comprehend God’s love until you first understand His power.

Only when you grasp how mighty and formidable God is can you appreciate how amazing His mercy truly is.

The magnitude of mercy depends entirely on the magnitude of the one showing mercy. A pardon means little from someone powerless; it means everything from the one who could justly destroy you.

It’s wonderful that we celebrate God’s love—we should! But in our rush to embrace His kindness, we’ve become uncomfortable talking about His awesome power. We quickly tell others “God loves you” but rarely invite them to stand in awe before the One who created everything with a word and defeats armies without lifting a sword. It’s like describing a lion by only talking about how gently it treats its cubs, while completely ignoring its powerful jaws and deadly claws.

A God too small to fear is a God too small to truly worship.

Fear of God and experiencing His love and grace seem like oil and water—they appear incompatible, impossible to reconcile. But when you hold both perspectives at the same time, you discover what genuine worship actually feels like. It is precisely when we hold these seemingly contradictory realities together—His terrifying might alongside His tender mercy—that we discover what worship actually means.

This is the tension we resist. We want mercy without reverence. Forgiveness without holiness. Divine love without divine justice.

But these opposing forces aren’t meant to be resolved. They’re meant to be held in magnificent tension.

When Isaiah encountered God’s holiness, he cried out in terror, “Woe is me!” Yet in that same encounter, God cleansed his lips and commissioned him. Terror and tenderness in one divine moment.

When Peter realized who Jesus was, he begged, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!” Yet Jesus drew closer, not further away.

This is the God worth worshipping—not safe, but good. Not tame, but loving. Not small enough to fit our understanding, but big enough to shatter and remake it.

How can you be moved by a mercy whose necessity you don’t comprehend? How can grace amaze you when you’ve forgotten what you deserve?

A diminished view of God’s terrifying holiness inevitably produces a diminished experience of His mercy and grace. They rise and fall together.

Is your God big enough to make His mercy truly astonishing?

How Different Would Your Life Be with a Bigger God?

What changes when your God grows bigger?

Let me ask you something: Why don’t you smoke? If you’re like most people, it’s because you fear the consequences. Cancer. Disease. Death. The fear of tangible consequences restrains you where mere willpower might fail.

Yet that same fear often vanishes when we face spiritual choices. We sin casually, repeatedly, knowing it displeases God.

What does this reveal about the size of the God you truly worship?

If your God were truly as vast and magnificent as Scripture portrays Him, would you sin so readily? Would that persistent temptation hold the same power over you if you stood consciously in the presence of the Commander of the LORD’s armies?

I don’t think so.

We avoid smoking because we fear cancer’s consequences. We might avoid sin if we properly feared God’s holiness.

This isn’t about paralyzing terror. It’s about a proper sense of scale. When I stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, I don’t panic—but I certainly don’t casually step off the rim. The sheer magnitude inspires appropriate caution.

How differently might you approach temptation if you truly believed you stood before a God whose mere presence makes ground holy? Whose voice shatters cedar trees? Whose glory blinds the unready?

The greatest tragedy of a small God theology isn’t just incorrect thinking—it’s the unnecessary struggle it creates. We fight battles we were never meant to fight alone, striving against sin with human willpower when divine perspective would transform the entire battlefield.

What changes when your God grows bigger? Everything.

How Big Will You Allow Your God to Be?

How big is your God today?

Is He as vast and magnificent as Scripture reveals? Or have you been worshipping a deity of your own fashioning, cut down to comfortable size?

Try having a bigger God.

Jesus once told His disciples, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

I’ve often wondered if Jesus was being entirely literal. What if He was saying that no human has yet demonstrated even this much faith in so great a God?

What mountains remain unmoved in your life? What impossibilities persist? What if they remain not because God is too small, but because you’ve made Him so?

I suspect we’ve never seen what becomes possible when someone truly grasps God’s actual magnitude. When someone finally allows Him to be as big as He really is. When someone at last believes that the Commander of the LORD’s armies walks beside them.

What would it look like if you allowed God to grow back to His true size in your perception? If you stopped cutting Him down to fit your understanding?

Perhaps the Christian life is not about becoming stronger yourself, but about allowing your view of God to expand until your problems appear in proper proportion.

The question isn’t whether God is big enough. He is. The question is whether you will let Him be that big in your life.

So I ask you one final time: How big is Your God?

Dedicated to my friend Alec, whose gift of Mere Christianity reopened my eyes to how amazing C.S. Lewis’ writing is and started my journey toward writing more theological and apologetic articles like this one.