For my dear Abba\ You are indescribable\ No one is like You!
This book began with a question I could not shake, and it is not a book I wrote from a distance.
I spent a long time running from God. As Jonah fled the calling he did not want, so for years I sidestepped the call I knew deep inside all along. When I finally said yes and went to study theology, I bent over a graduation thesis on three verses at the close of Micah, a song of praise that opens with mi-El kamocha, "who is a God like You?" I had expected to study a text. Instead, I was studied by a text. Incomparable, the prophet sang, and then not for God's power or height, but because He carries the guilt, returns, and delights in faithfulness. The greatest God turned out to be the God who stoops the deepest.
Around that same time a chronic illness took hold of my body, one that would last 14 years. I woke every morning with less strength than the morning before. I fought the battle largely alone, tried to be brave for my wife, and screamed my "why?" on the inside. Still I kept clinging to His word, even when I could not feel Him. And then, God. Exactly 14 years to the day after the illness began, He intervened, and my life was given back to me. The God I sometimes feared as strict and distant was never that God at all. All along He was the Father who carried me through the storm, one whisper away, never early, always on time. With everything in me I can now say: it is well with my soul.
That is why this book follows the question "who is like You?" through the whole of the Bible, from a handful of freed slaves by the sea to the wedding with which everything ends. It is a song of praise, not a reference work. Whoever reads only the main text misses nothing of the story. Whoever wants to dig deeper will find the source text and the deeper layers in the Expert, Excursus, and Heart boxes, and at the back the Dossiers on the architecture of the text, a reading map of the threads that run through the book, and a note on the choices made, including why the divine Name sounds here as YHWH.
My deepest wish is that the Creator of heaven and earth would be seen as He truly is. Somewhere along the way the picture of God came to resemble a strict, never-satisfied father, while the real God comes running down the road. If this book can do one thing, let it be this: that you come to know Him anew, and that it brings you not to a conclusion but to your knees, and then into His arms.
For my dear Abba\ You are indescribable\ No one is like You!
This book began with a question I could not shake, and it is not a book I wrote from a distance.
I spent a long time running from God. As Jonah fled the calling he did not want, so for years I sidestepped the call I knew deep inside all along. When I finally said yes and went to study theology, I bent over a graduation thesis on three verses at the close of Micah, a song of praise that opens with mi-El kamocha, "who is a God like You?" I had expected to study a text. Instead, I was studied by a text. Incomparable, the prophet sang, and then not for God's power or height, but because He carries the guilt, returns, and delights in faithfulness. The greatest God turned out to be the God who stoops the deepest.
Around that same time a chronic illness took hold of my body, one that would last 14 years. I woke every morning with less strength than the morning before. I fought the battle largely alone, tried to be brave for my wife, and screamed my "why?" on the inside. Still I kept clinging to His word, even when I could not feel Him. And then, God. Exactly 14 years to the day after the illness began, He intervened, and my life was given back to me. The God I sometimes feared as strict and distant was never that God at all. All along He was the Father who carried me through the storm, one whisper away, never early, always on time. With everything in me I can now say: it is well with my soul.
That is why this book follows the question "who is like You?" through the whole of the Bible, from a handful of freed slaves by the sea to the wedding with which everything ends. It is a song of praise, not a reference work. Whoever reads only the main text misses nothing of the story. Whoever wants to dig deeper will find the source text and the deeper layers in the Expert, Excursus, and Heart boxes, and at the back the Dossiers on the architecture of the text, a reading map of the threads that run through the book, and a note on the choices made, including why the divine Name sounds here as YHWH.
My deepest wish is that the Creator of heaven and earth would be seen as He truly is. Somewhere along the way the picture of God came to resemble a strict, never-satisfied father, while the real God comes running down the road. If this book can do one thing, let it be this: that you come to know Him anew, and that it brings you not to a conclusion but to your knees, and then into His arms.
Noordoostpolder, 2026
Henk Visser