For my dear Abba\ You are indescribable\ No one is like You!
This book began with a question I could not shake. But before I lay that question before you, I must tell you something about myself — for this 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 the book of Micah — a song of praise that opens with five Hebrew words: mi-El kamocha, "who is a God like You?" I had expected to study a text. Instead, I was studied by a text. For the answer the prophet gives to his own question ran straight against everything I had, without knowing it, believed about God. Incomparable, he sang — and not for His power, not for His height, not for His unapproachability. Incomparable because He carries the guilt, because He returns, because He delights in faithfulness. The greatest God turned out to be the God who stoops the deepest.
But the road that followed was not the road I had pictured for myself. Around the time I spoke my yes, a chronic illness took hold of my body, one that would last fourteen 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. It felt as though my prayers never reached the ceiling. I felt lost, forsaken, hollowed out; there were nights when the illness lay like a hand around my throat and I felt my life evaporating.
And yet — like Joseph, who held on to God's promise in a pit and in a prison, even when all hope seemed lost — I kept clinging to His word. I did not always feel that God was near. But I held fast to what I did not see: that He is faithful, even when He is silent.
And then, God. Exactly fourteen years to the day after the illness began, He intervened. Not with a blow that took it all away at once, but as a turning point on which the Father Himself had laid His hand: from that day on, the illness could no longer keep its grip on me, and my health recovered gradually over the years that followed. My life was given back to me, and I received a second chance to live.
Across the whole of my life I have seen one thing: that God is faithful. And I have learned that the God I sometimes feared as strict and distant — the God whose ceiling my prayers never seemed to reach — was never that God at all. All along He was the Father who carried me through the storm, one whisper away, never early but always on time. It has been good for me to have been pressed by such loving hands; and with everything in me I can now say: it is well with my soul.
That is why I wrote this book. I set out to follow the question "who is like You?" through the whole of the Bible — from the song of a handful of freed slaves by the sea, over the mountain where God cried out His own Name, through the psalms and the prophets, to a Child who slept in a boat and died on a cross, and on to the wedding with which everything ends. Each time the same question, and each time the same, ever-louder answer: there is no one like Him. I deliberately did not write this as a reference work, but as a song of praise — a book meant to reach the whole person, mind and heart alike, the scholar and whoever has never seen a source text. That is why the tone is raw and cinematic where the story calls for it, and full of hushed awe where silence is fitting.
For this is my deepest wish: that the Creator of heaven and earth would be better understood, and seen as He truly is — as the loving God that He is. He deserves so much better than how He is often portrayed. This God is matchless. I believe we were made for this God, and that much of what went wrong between God and humanity has to do with a damaged bond — a picture of God that somewhere along the way 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 as He truly is, and that it brings you not to a conclusion but to your knees — and then into His arms.
Noordoostpolder, 2026
Henk Visser
A note on method
Something about how this book was made.
The source text has been leading throughout. For the Old Testament, the Masoretic text has been the starting point; for the New Testament, the Greek tradition. The Bible quotations are the author's own working translation, in the spirit of modern translations but without archaisms — meant to let the text sound as close as possible to its original color and force.
The divine Name is rendered consistently as YHWH, not as "the LORD." This is not irreverence, but the opposite: it seeks to give back its full weight to the personal name by which God made Himself known to His people, rather than letting it dissolve into a title. This is not a rejection of the venerable tradition that leaves the Name unspoken out of reverence and renders it as "the LORD" — a custom rooted in the synagogue that has guarded the holiness of the Name for centuries. It is the same reverence, by a different road: where the source text carries the four-letter Name, this book lets it sound as a personal name.
Each chapter consists of two layers. The main text narrates — cinematically, with image and emotion; here the book wants to carry you along, not instruct you. The boxes go deeper: a Scholar box for those who want to see the source text and the grammar; an Excursus for the wider lines running through Scripture; a Heart box for what the text does to you personally; and here and there a Dossier for the architecture of the text. The boxes aim to deepen and to weigh, not to have the last word: where they propose a way of reading — especially the Heart boxes — that is always a weighed reading, meant to enrich, not to prove. Whoever reads only the main text misses nothing of the story; whoever also reads the boxes sees the foundation beneath it.
One more thing about how to read. This book often approaches the history between God and humanity from its relational side — as a story of a bond that broke and that God patiently restores. That is a deliberate, pastoral approach, meant to reach the heart; it stands alongside the classic biblical categories of covenant, election, and sin, not in their place. Where the text itself speaks of covenant and rebellion, that remains the load-bearing frame; the relational reading lays a warm, recognizable layer over it.
Finally, a promise of restraint. Where this book points to striking patterns in the text — the meter of a song of praise, a word that stands precisely in the middle — that is never meant as conclusive proof. Some things can be counted and verified; others remain a weighed conjecture; and the deepest things cannot be proven at all in any case, only worshiped. This book does not want to win a case. It wants to ask one question in such a way that it becomes, of itself, a song of praise.
For my dear Abba\ You are indescribable\ No one is like You!
This book began with a question I could not shake. But before I lay that question before you, I must tell you something about myself — for this 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 the book of Micah — a song of praise that opens with five Hebrew words: mi-El kamocha, "who is a God like You?" I had expected to study a text. Instead, I was studied by a text. For the answer the prophet gives to his own question ran straight against everything I had, without knowing it, believed about God. Incomparable, he sang — and not for His power, not for His height, not for His unapproachability. Incomparable because He carries the guilt, because He returns, because He delights in faithfulness. The greatest God turned out to be the God who stoops the deepest.
But the road that followed was not the road I had pictured for myself. Around the time I spoke my yes, a chronic illness took hold of my body, one that would last fourteen 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. It felt as though my prayers never reached the ceiling. I felt lost, forsaken, hollowed out; there were nights when the illness lay like a hand around my throat and I felt my life evaporating.
And yet — like Joseph, who held on to God's promise in a pit and in a prison, even when all hope seemed lost — I kept clinging to His word. I did not always feel that God was near. But I held fast to what I did not see: that He is faithful, even when He is silent.
And then, God. Exactly fourteen years to the day after the illness began, He intervened. Not with a blow that took it all away at once, but as a turning point on which the Father Himself had laid His hand: from that day on, the illness could no longer keep its grip on me, and my health recovered gradually over the years that followed. My life was given back to me, and I received a second chance to live.
Across the whole of my life I have seen one thing: that God is faithful. And I have learned that the God I sometimes feared as strict and distant — the God whose ceiling my prayers never seemed to reach — was never that God at all. All along He was the Father who carried me through the storm, one whisper away, never early but always on time. It has been good for me to have been pressed by such loving hands; and with everything in me I can now say: it is well with my soul.
That is why I wrote this book. I set out to follow the question "who is like You?" through the whole of the Bible — from the song of a handful of freed slaves by the sea, over the mountain where God cried out His own Name, through the psalms and the prophets, to a Child who slept in a boat and died on a cross, and on to the wedding with which everything ends. Each time the same question, and each time the same, ever-louder answer: there is no one like Him. I deliberately did not write this as a reference work, but as a song of praise — a book meant to reach the whole person, mind and heart alike, the scholar and whoever has never seen a source text. That is why the tone is raw and cinematic where the story calls for it, and full of hushed awe where silence is fitting.
For this is my deepest wish: that the Creator of heaven and earth would be better understood, and seen as He truly is — as the loving God that He is. He deserves so much better than how He is often portrayed. This God is matchless. I believe we were made for this God, and that much of what went wrong between God and humanity has to do with a damaged bond — a picture of God that somewhere along the way 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 as He truly is, and that it brings you not to a conclusion but to your knees — and then into His arms.
Noordoostpolder, 2026
Henk Visser
A note on method
Something about how this book was made.
The source text has been leading throughout. For the Old Testament, the Masoretic text has been the starting point; for the New Testament, the Greek tradition. The Bible quotations are the author's own working translation, in the spirit of modern translations but without archaisms — meant to let the text sound as close as possible to its original color and force.
The divine Name is rendered consistently as YHWH, not as "the LORD." This is not irreverence, but the opposite: it seeks to give back its full weight to the personal name by which God made Himself known to His people, rather than letting it dissolve into a title. This is not a rejection of the venerable tradition that leaves the Name unspoken out of reverence and renders it as "the LORD" — a custom rooted in the synagogue that has guarded the holiness of the Name for centuries. It is the same reverence, by a different road: where the source text carries the four-letter Name, this book lets it sound as a personal name.
Each chapter consists of two layers. The main text narrates — cinematically, with image and emotion; here the book wants to carry you along, not instruct you. The boxes go deeper: a Scholar box for those who want to see the source text and the grammar; an Excursus for the wider lines running through Scripture; a Heart box for what the text does to you personally; and here and there a Dossier for the architecture of the text. The boxes aim to deepen and to weigh, not to have the last word: where they propose a way of reading — especially the Heart boxes — that is always a weighed reading, meant to enrich, not to prove. Whoever reads only the main text misses nothing of the story; whoever also reads the boxes sees the foundation beneath it.
One more thing about how to read. This book often approaches the history between God and humanity from its relational side — as a story of a bond that broke and that God patiently restores. That is a deliberate, pastoral approach, meant to reach the heart; it stands alongside the classic biblical categories of covenant, election, and sin, not in their place. Where the text itself speaks of covenant and rebellion, that remains the load-bearing frame; the relational reading lays a warm, recognizable layer over it.
Finally, a promise of restraint. Where this book points to striking patterns in the text — the meter of a song of praise, a word that stands precisely in the middle — that is never meant as conclusive proof. Some things can be counted and verified; others remain a weighed conjecture; and the deepest things cannot be proven at all in any case, only worshiped. This book does not want to win a case. It wants to ask one question in such a way that it becomes, of itself, a song of praise.