When I was in seminary, Richard Pratt drew up this little diagram describing the attributes of God under two headings - transcendence and immanence. God's transcendent attributes are those attributes which show how He is above us. His immanent attributes are those that describe how He is with us.
Some transcendent attributes might be things like justice, righteousness, omniscience, omnipotence, holiness, wrath and things like that. Immanent attributes were things like love, mercy, compassion and things like that.
Dr. Pratt would joke that us young reformed zealots loved to talk about the transcendent attributes of God but not so much about the immanent attributes. True, he would concede, God did possess those immanent attributes but the rest of the evangelical church focused so much on those things that we saw ourselves as the ones who needed to provide a balance by jumping up and down on the transcendent attributes.
He said we acted like "real men" theologians were those who majored on the transcendent things and all those people who only wanted to talk about the love and mercy of God were wimps. And of course, "real men" theologians were also borderline rationalists who were erudite and academic and they weren't like those wimps who believed in things like emotions and relationships.
Pratt tried hard to help us get over ourselves and for the most part he succeeded with a lot of us. I was thinking about that a few weeks ago when I heard Sinclair Ferguson, Scott Hafeman and Steve Garber speak at the Jonathan Edwards Institute conference and one of them said that God's plan for our lives, once we become Christians, is to draw us in to the experience of the Trinity. His goal is to show us how deep His love is for us and to cause us to love Him more and more.
This is what I mean by the "softer side of God," and J. I. Packer has some words in Knowing God which capture this beautifully.
What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it - the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.
This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort - the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates - in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusionioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.
There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and am I glad!) and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience) is enough. There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. We cannot work these thoughts out here, but merely to mention them is to enough to show how much it means to know not merely that we know God, but that he knows us.
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