God in the highest does not mean someone quite other, who has nothing to do with us, who does not concern us, who is eternally alien to us; God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours. God in the highest is the God who shows Himself to be the real God, and so the One who is in no way in our control and who none the less and just because of that has taken us to Himself.
~Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, p. 37
Karl Barth is a helpful corrective to modern conceptions of God. What Barth accomplished so admirably was to expose faulty and small perceptions of God by reminding the theological world that when we utter the word “God,” we had better get straight in our head what that monosyllabic word means. As Barth said elsewhere, “God is not simply beyond existence; he’s beyond all our ideas about his being beyond existence!” The enduring lesson from Barth teaches us to keep things in perspective.
But in the above quote, we have the truly astonishing tenet of the Christian faith—in Christ, the entirely Other has condescended himself to us. Without this accommodation to us, we could never know God. Yet, in Christ, we have the perfect image of God (Col 1:15).