Who is this God and how do we know what we think we know about God?
In their 1971 album "Aqualung" the group Jethro Tull (I know that this is probably the first time in a while anyone has talked about Jethro Tull in church) focused the second side of the record entirely to an examination of how the church and society talk about God. In the song "My God" the lyrics read, "People -- what have you done -- locked Him in His golden cage. Made Him bend to your religion --Him resurrected from the grave. He is the god of nothing -- if that's all that you can see." In more recent times Alanis Morissette in her song "What if God were One of Us" sung "What if god was one of us? Just a slob like one of us just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home."
Last week we looked at monotheism as one of the defining characteristics of our faith. As the lyrics noted above show us however simply believing in one God as opposed to many gods still leaves a very wide open playing field in terms of who is this one God? Is this one God the one who wants to welcome everyone into heaven? Is this one God the one who gives us permission to kill our enemies? Is this one God a distant and remote power who has little interaction with humanity? Is this one God a tyrant who punishes those who do not perfectly obey? I ask these questions because they each describe how God has been interpreted by the church across time. So who is this God and how do we know what we know about God?
For those of us in the Reformed Tradition (meaning Presbyterians and Reformed churches) the answer to how we know about this God we worship is scripture. Though tradition, culture and experience always play a part in how we understand God, our central focus is to be on mining the Bible for clues to knowing and understanding God. While that might appear to make the task of discovering God easier, in some ways it makes it more difficult. It makes it more difficult because the scriptures, spanning more than a thousand years, written by dozens of different individuals, in dozens of different cultural environments, composed of multiple kinds of literature does not give us a single definitive vision of God. Thus it has been easy for the church and individuals to create God in their own image. We can pick and choose the images we like while discarding those we do not appreciate. As Ian Anderson put it, we lock God in his golden cage (a cage of our own making).
So who is this God? As I said a few weeks ago I am going to argue that the Biblical story while offering a variety of perspectives on God gives us, in the end, a cohesive image from which to work. That cohesive image is of a God who wants to bless humanity and creation. From the opening words of Genesis (God makes a good creation), to the prophets (God desires to restore that creation), to the life and work of Jesus (proclaiming the new Kingdom in which relationships with God and neighbor are restored) to the final words of Revelation (where there is a new heaven and earth in which pain and death have been destroyed) we are shown a picture of a God who desires humans to live in right relationship with God, with one another and with the creation that God has made.
This vision of a God who desires to bless humanity (and has come personally to bless us…more about that later) helps us see that God is: interactive, personal, loving, purposeful, judging, forgiving and creative. Realizing that this language is not the traditional language we have used to speak of God (omnipresent, etc.) I will spend some time next week discussing why I believe the language I will use is closer to the Biblical vision than the traditional descriptions many of us were taught.
Next week: where did the Omnis go?
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