© 2003 Gary Dangerfield
© 2003 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Gary Dangerfield is a 20-year reader in Eureka Springs Arkansas. For many years he was a Christian minister, but he was haunted by the idea that there must be something more, something he had not yet found. The Urantia Book satisfied that hunger in Gary. He says he continues to find in the pages of The Urantia Book the breathtaking inspiration of a “Bigger God.” Even before finding the book, Gary used to tell his audiences, “No matter how grand you can ever conceive God to be, He will always remain bigger and grander than that concept.” Gary is now semi-retired, and owns a seasonal woodcrafting shop in the beautiful and historic Ozark mountain town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. He satisfies his desire to outreach with a number of pamphlets designed to give mainstream Christians the idea of a “Bigger God” as depicted in the Urantia Papers. We reprint below two of his many titles.
Many years ago this arresting question was addressed by the late renowned theologian and Bible translator J.B. Phillips in his thought-provoking book, Your God Is Too Small. The idea should at least give us pause.
I know that answers are a lot more comforting and appealing than questions … but, just for a few minutes would you be willing to mentally suspend judgement and step out of the security of all that you believe you know about God? Would you join me in a quest where we wrestle with perplexing issues and grapple with complex questions? The hope of a little better understanding of the Almighty Creator of all things should be worth the effort.
Think about it… our very limited human minds trying to encompass all of a limitless Creator… .the finite trying to understand the infinite! The person who believes they have this one pretty much figured out, must have a small God indeed.
Inherent in our finiteness is the great limitation of our comprehension. Even the furthermost stretches of our imaginations cannot come close to a full understanding of the Infinite. This is why faith is so vital to any understanding of God, and things eternal.
Reason can take us only so far; then Faith alone can help us span the incomprehensible gulf between the finite and the infinite. Even then, we must remember that, however great and grand our faith brings us to believe God to be, He will in reality always be greater than that concept.
My personal belief is that we have the joyful anticipation of spending all of eternity in the endless discovery of more and more of the unfathomable majesty and astounding creations of our Heavenly Father … most of which we have not yet even begun to suspect.
The book of Job, chapter 26, provides us with a helpful analogy. After cataloging a long list of things humans think they know about God, Job concludes with this piercing statement: “These are indeed but the outskirts of his ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”
Again we run headlong into this great expanse between the smallness of what we think we know of the infinite God and the inconceivable vastness of all that He really is!
The Bible tells us that God created man "in His image.” The history of mankind since seems a lot like the story of man trying to make God into a human image.
Even the Biblical writers struggle with the limitations of human language, using anthropomorphisms (depicting God with human attributes) to help us grasp even a little glimpse of our limitless Creator.
Good people of all faiths have many disagreements in this area, but I strongly believe we must be careful about taking these lofty but limited concepts too literally. The divide between God’s true infinity and eternal attributes is too wide for human language and comprehension to adequately span.
Faith must again come to our rescue here to assure us that our loftiest concepts of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness only foreshadow for us on earth, what our God is really like, both now and in Eternity.
Of course, we would all like to think that our own beliefs represent a personal leading from God to a certain conclusion — and hopefully that is true concerning most of our core beliefs. But what about all of our beliefs? Is it really likely that only the few who see a given topic the same way we do are right, thereby leaving billions of others wrong? Shouldn’t the audacity of such presumption trouble us just a little? Shouldn’t the finiteness of our humanity allow for some “surprises” from the Infinite Creator?
I hope that something I’ve written here has caused you to want to dig more into your own personal faith so that you will continually grow in your personal relationship with the great and majestic God who is the center of all things!
Don’t let the limitations of your humanity cause you to despair in your quest to understand your Heavenly Father. If you sincerely seek, know that it is because He has already sought you, and has indwelled you with his own Spirit to ever draw you closer to Him and His Eternal Realities. We now see but fragments and shadows of these realities during our fleeting time in this earthly dwelling place.
I personally would recommend that you conduct a serious study of the life of Jesus Christ to discover more about God the Father, because Jesus came into this world to shed the Father’s light into our darkness. He came to reveal all of the Infinite GOD that could be revealed in finite human form.
As you, by faith, come to know more of Jesus Christ, I believe you will find that you will know enough about God to take you calmly from time into Eternity — an eternity where the limitless discovery of the Infinite Creator and creation waits!
© 2003 Gary Dangerfield
© 2003 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
I am writing this for the person who is in a special place in their "Earthly Pilgrimage”… perhaps an uncomfortably vulnerable place… maybe a place with more questions than answers… a place where the easy solutions and old formulas are coming into serious question in your thinking.
If you are not at such a juncture in your life, just lay this brochure aside. Someday if life throws you an unexpected and unexplained curve, then you may pick this brochure up and hopefully find in it something useful upon which to ponder.
This could be a good place to begin. Do you see yourself mainly as a physical being, sometimes having a spiritual experience… or could you be a spiritual being, having a temporary physical experience? I personally have come to believe very strongly in the latter; however, since this physical world is all we have really ever seen, I can’t fault you for believing the former.
Suspend judgement with me for a moment and just consider the possibility that you really are mainly a spiritual being living a temporary physical experience. The idea of a temporary physical experience actually isn’t such a stretch when you remember that for all of human history, the “mortality rate” has been pretty much 100% ! Our exit will come someday. Life here in this “earthsuit” really can be viewed as a “Temp Assignment.” The “Permanent Assignment” is the Eternal Adventure that lies somewhere else… not on this earth!
For 13 years I was a consultant and seminar leader for management level people from many of America’s largest companies. In the process of counseling many hundreds through career transitions I learned a few things about perceived “control” and its illusion. Over those years I met with countless people who woke up that morning as important people of influence, power, and what they thought was “control” in their lives. Unfortunately, it was my job to meet with them moments after they had received the illusionshattering news that they had just lost their job. No more office; no more important title; no more people to manage; no more large salary. They discovered that their “permanent” job wasn’t actually permanent after all. It may have lasted 20 months or 20 years, but in the end it was in fact, a “temporary” assignment.
Life on this planet is a lot like that. We may get caught up in the “illusion of permanence” — but it’s really all temporary.
While our life on earth is transient, we are a part of something that is very enduring and timeless! To find out more about that is to begin to let go of the “illusion” and to see your life from a much better vantage point. The Apostle Paul captured its essence in his second letter to the church at Corinth (4:18) “We do not lose heart; though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day, because we focus our vision not on what can be seen, but on what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is only temporary, but that which cannot be seen is Eternal!”
That word from a tired, harassed, and persecuted old Apostle of Jesus Christ has become for me the cornerstone of a philosophy of life that works, even when everything else about my life may seem to be falling apart.
Paul preached no gospel of “health, wealth and prosperity.” He had felt the sting of too many whips; seen too many martyrs and the dismal inside of too many dungeons to believe in the illusion of control and ease during our temporary stay on this world.
But Paul was no grim fatalist either. He kept urging us to look beyond the fleeting moment to embrace the joy of something much larger which is always going on behind the scenes, just out of view. It is on an everlasting plan of such scope and grandeur that human limitations allow us to catch only glimpses of some of it — and then only once in awhile.
Give up trying to figure it all out and begin to simply rejoice in this Grand Adventure of Trust! Our need for some semblance of control causes us to want to totally understand it all — to systematize and categorize the workings of the unimaginably Infinite Creator God. Understandable, but foolish. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, that is just where you miss the point. Our minds are finite… He is INFINITE!!! Expect lots of surprises!
Faith, not understanding will always be the most integral part of the journey! That is why I call it the “Grand Adventure of Trust.” Our God is Trustworthy — it just takes us an eternity to plumb the depths of just how trustworthy He really is! I personally believe that even throughout eternity we will continue to be staggered by new understandings of His Person and His Trustworthiness!
Of all the lessons our Creator would like for us to learn during this earthly journey, I have come to believe that the most important to Him is that we finally, truly, deeply come to totally believe in Him to the point that we can trust Him with anything — and everything! Trust when the news is good — and when it is bad. Trust when your heart is soaring and when it is breaking. Absolute trust in our Father’s unseen loving care — even when life’s worst threatens to crush our fondest dreams.
There is no way I could overemphasize the importance of developing a long-distance view, an eternal perspective of our existence. Otherwise the ragged edges of daily life will often cloud our vision and drain our trust.
As I have mentioned in some of my other writings, the famed British scholar C.S. Lewis had a wonderful analogy in which he likened the story of our existence to a grand book of which, during our short earthly life we “only get through the preface.” “But,” said Lewis, “someday we will get to step into Chapter One… and then each succeeding chapter only keeps getting better.”
Why would it keep getting better, even in Eternity? I believe it is because we will continue to discover new and unexpected dimensions of just how much we can trust our Heavenly Father!
That kind of perspective will work wonders in helping you with the difficult circumstances we all face sooner or later. An eternal perspective of a journey of trust will greatly assist you in overlooking the trivial and petty, freeing you to live by faith, to gradually develop an unexplainably deep and abiding trust in a glorious final outworking of all life’s temporary problems by a loving Almighty God and Father who really is totally trustworthy! It will lead you to a strong, unshakable faith (like Paul’s in II Cor. 4:18) that our Creator and Father is always working behind the scenes on our behalf.
Gary Dangerfield brings to his writing and speaking a broad background including ten years as a local church Pastor and thirteen years as a Senior Career Management Consultant & Seminar Leader with Right/McKee Management Consultants. In this capacity, Gary led seminars for many of the Fortune 500 companies. Gary offers a considerable number of pamphlets, including titles such as: “Random Thoughts Regarding Prayer,” “What Children Need Most from Parents,” “After the Wedding comes the Marriage,” “The Grand Adventure of Becoming,” “Keeping Life in Balance,” “Wisdom and Destiny,” and “The Priceless Moment.” You may write Gary about obtaining free copies of these at:
Gary Dangerfield
34 Forest Lane
Eureka Springs, AR 72632