Yawning At Tigers

I made sure to sit by the airplane window during some recent travel around the pacific northwest. I knew the scenery would be spectacular – made even more so by the sunrises of my early departures – and I wasn’t disappointed. Though my small window I could see Rainier, Hood, and other mountains rise to their snowy peaks, spectacular in the early morning sunlight. It was awe-inspiring.

The woman next to me wasn’t impressed. Her attention was kept by the game on her tablet. Doesn’t she know what she’s missing? I wondered.  I silently judged her until realizing that I’d been looking more intently at her tablet, trying to figure out the game she was playing, than the landscape below. How quickly the amazing becomes mundane.

In his new book, Drew Dyck pushes hard against this tendency to turn away from the spectacular for bells and whistles of our own making. Yawning at Tigers is Drew’s successful attempt to remind American Christians that the God we claim to follow cannot be domesticated. Theologically nuanced and very accessible, the book repeatedly puts forward a vision of God that elicits awe: holiness, love, transcendence, and immanence are all clearly articulated. Hardly a page goes by where Drew doesn’t fill in these potentially fuzzy words with stories that bring them to life.

This is a serious book in the way any attempt to describe a holy God must be. “God’s holiness is deadly, incompatible with life, especially for sinful mortals like us.” Yet Yawning at Tigers avoids heavy-handedness because Drew is more interested in describing God than in defending him.

There’s an important assumption running throughout the book: “Rarely do we hear about God’s mystery and majesty, let alone whisper a word about his wrath.” Of course, depending on the reader’s experience this assumption will ring more or less true. There are plenty of congregations with a high view of God’s transcendence and righteousness. Even so, I think Drew is right to point out this broader tendency within much of American Christianity and those who’ve avoided this pendulum swing away from certain of God’s characteristics will benefit from the well-rounded vision of God found in these pages.

The Christian’s hope is tied to a holy God becoming like us for our salvation and the world’s rescue. In Jesus we have the ability to consider and worship this righteous God without being overcome. Yawning at Tigers is an invitation to consider again our dangerous God. His perfection and holiness stands ready to provoke awe and wonder within a people who’ve become bored by bells and whistles.