What does Tribe teach about who is god?

At Tribe, the teaching on who God is starts with an honest admission: most of us hold a picture of the spiritual universe that is far too small. Brian Zahn opened this series by describing how he carried a yin-and-yang image for years, God on one side, Satan on the other, two roughly equal forces in permanent tension. The problem with that picture, he said, is that it makes God only modestly impressive, a hero who wins more than he loses. The Bible, Brian argued, describes something far stranger and larger. Using the Hebrew word Elohim, he traced a whole populated spiritual realm that includes angels, demons, seraphim, cherubim, and other beings, and then introduced what he called the divine council, the idea that God at some point delegated jurisdictional authority over nations to certain of these spiritual beings. Those beings eventually failed their assignment by drawing human worship toward themselves. The gods of history were not simply products of human imagination. They had real influence, shaped real cultures, and still fell catastrophically short.

The point of widening the picture is not to unsettle anyone but to make the contrast actually land. Brian compared God to Lionel Messi to illustrate what it looks like when someone sits so far beyond the field that normal comparisons break down. Psalm 89 and Exodus 15 both press the same question: when you hold God up against every other being that has ever claimed divine status, what do you find? The answer the text keeps returning to is that the comparison itself almost cannot be made. Brian says, "A fish would have a difficult time describing what water is like because it is the entire universe of that fish." That is what it is like to try to describe God's uniqueness from inside it. He has always existed, never started, and stands entirely outside of space and time, as Brian put it: "He has no end, but he also never had a beginning. He stands outside of space and time."

What keeps this from being an abstract theology lecture is where Brian lands every time. The God who dwarfs everything else in the cosmos, who looked across all existing nations and found none that suited his purposes and so started from nothing, is the same God who refuses to keep his distance. Brian says, "Not only does he not keep you at arm's distance, but he longs to draw close to you." At Tribe, the teaching on who God is always moves in that direction: the more clearly you see how vast and incomparable he is, the more remarkable it becomes that he is personally near.

Taught from Exodus 15:11 · Psalm 89:6-8