Transcendence, Inc

My children and I were heading home after a swim, when a work van caught my eye. It had “Transcendence, Inc” written across its side, but honestly, it didn’t look very transcendent. It was parked on the footpath between the hotel and the road, just like any regular old non-transcendent work van would be. A closer look at the smaller print confirmed that “Transcendence, Inc” was the name of a company offering high-end decorating and furnishing services.

That’s a clever name for that kind of business. And perhaps it’s true, in the very lowest sense of the word, of merely “transcending” our normal expectations with something a bit beyond them. I’ve seen furniture and decorating that really has gone beyond expectations, leaving me genuinely impressed. For a while.

No matter how high-end Transcendence, Inc is, no matter how luxurious their furnishing are or other-worldly their decorating is, it’s still, at the end of the day, stuff. Nice stuff, made of good wood and soft fabrics and all the best, I’m sure, but stuff all the same. After an initial feeling of being impressed, people will sit on the couches and ignore the pictures and move on with their lives. Eventually, the chairs will wear out and the paint will chip and the fresh, trendy newness will fade.

True transcendence is a glimpse of something greater, something beyond—but if the world was only material and nothing more, that glimpse would only be a lie. In that case, every transcendent thing and experience would eventually fade into the same non-transcendent oblivion. But the fact that we have a word like this at all shows that we know there is more to reality than meets the eye. You may not be able to sell real transcendence out of a van, but it does exist, and that’s why we need a word for it. It exists beyond the van, beyond the decorating, beyond the best of everything we have, because the best of everything we have is only a glimpse of Someone who is truly, ultimately, overwhelmingly transcendent.

“This is what the Lord says:
‘Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?
Has not my hand made all these things,
and so they came into being?’” – Isaiah 66:1-2

It doesn’t matter if you have Transcendence, Inc decorate the greatest temple of all time—none of the materials of earth could ever contain God. He is beyond them all. He created everything we see, including ourselves, and his kind of being is completely different than our own. As A.W. Tozer put it in The Knowledge Of The Holy,

“We must not think of God as highest in an ascending order of beings, starting with the single cell and going on up from the fish to the bird to the animal to man to angel to cherub to God. This would be to grant God eminence, even pre-eminence, but that is not enough; we must grant him transcendence in the fullest meaning of that word. Forever God stands apart, in light unapproachable. He is as high above an archangel as above a caterpillar, for the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is but finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite. The caterpillar and the archangel, though far removed from each other in the scale of created things, are nevertheless one in that they are alike created. They both belong in the category of that-which-is-not-God and are separated from God by infinitude itself.”

When we think of God, we must recognise that although we are made in his image, he still belongs to a different category altogether. He alone is completely independent. Every breath we take is a gift from him, but he doesn’t need any gifts like that—he exists by his own power, without beginning or end. When we speak of God, we are speaking of the One who exists not only at the extreme end of every category, but far beyond every category we can conceive of. You can’t measure God, or anything about him—his power, wisdom, love, justice, his timeless, infinite being—there is no end to any of it. There are no categorical boxes big enough to fit him or anything about him. God is absolutely, infinitely, transcendent.

Which makes it even more amazing that he came, himself, to save us.

Happy Easter!