Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in His holy mountain. (Psalm 48:1)
There is an old idiom that says, “familiarity breeds contempt,” meaning that it is our nature to lose respect for a person or situation that we are well acquainted with. In fact, it is our tendency to think better of certain people when there is a “healthy distance” between us. If we begin to spend more time with these people, we start to notice things and find fault with their unique characteristics and habits we don’t care for. In such a situation, we can grow careless about how we interact with them and can easily begin to treat them with disrespect and inconsideration. Rather than regarding them in high esteem, we develop a complete disregard for them. Now let’s juxtapose this scenario with one in which the Almighty is the other party.
Because He is the One and Only God, His Greatness is eternal and unabated by distance or the passage of time. Still, it seems obvious to me that how men perceive His greatness can be skewed by their wicked and selfish pursuits, and especially as more time passes since He first demonstrated His greatness in an obvious way. In that vein of thought, consider that when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, most people were inclined to recognize His greatness and, consequently, provoked to publicly acknowledge it more readily. But when the Temple was destroyed, leaving Mount Moriah desolate, and the Jewish people were scattered to the winds, His greatness was not as evident to many as it had been. In other words, the greater distance a person is from His Holy Presence, the more likely it is that they will hesitate to acknowledge His Greatness.
And so here is this point: unlike the scenario with people, our unfamiliarity and lack of intimacy with the Creator is the very thing that breeds contempt for Him and His ways within the human heart. Conversely, the closer we draw to Him — the more intimate the relationship we have with Him — the more we are compelled to recognize His holiness and His greatness. Rather than finding contempt for Him, His greatness provokes us to see our own inadequacies and, in some cases, we come to loathe our weaknesses. In fact, it is written, “They will loathe themselves for the evils which they committed in all their abominations. And they shall know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 6:9-10). To know the Lord is to be in an intimate relationship with Him; and to be that close to Him means we cannot help but acknowledge His greatness.
Blessings and Shalom,
Bill
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