On God

         For my first attempt at this idea of stating my beliefs, I chose a rather hard topic. Or, I should say, it chose me. I was going to go for one a little less…lengthy, in-depth, touchy, controversial, you choose what adjective to put to it. But it became evident that I would need to start with God since He is the foundation for everything else that I hold to be true.

         I already know that God cannot be covered in one essay. He is a bit large for that. So I shall try and cover some of the salient points on what I believe to be true when concerning God. Some of these beliefs are still rather new to me since I only recently had one of those view-changing experiences. That experience is not something I’ll go into here but hope to at another time.

On God

         I am a Christian. Please do not ask what denomination. I believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I believe that Christ is the Son of God. I believe that He was crucified and that His sacrifice forgave all sins past, present and future and that it is only up to us to accept Him and this fact to be His child. I believe in heaven and I believe in hell. I believe in the absoluteness of God.

         Allow me to expand upon what I mean by that. By the absoluteness of God, I mean that He is there and true and real whether you believe it or not. He is there no matter what your own personal beliefs are. Or, on the other side of the coin, if He is not real, than no matter how much I believe it, He is not there. I am praying to a figment of my imagination and am completely in the wrong. So when I say the absoluteness of God, what I mean is, He is absolutely there, or absolutely absent. No in-between. True or false, right or wrong.

         I believe in the Trinity. I believe in the resurrection. I believe that Jesus was the only sinless person to ever breathe. I believe that Jesus was a man who was tempted, who laughed, who loved, who cried, who had rough times and good times. I believe that God created the universe.

         I am aware that there are theories out there that state that God used evolution to bring about creation. I am also aware that there are many Christians out there highly offended by this. To me, this seems a pointless thing to get upset over. My faith in God cannot be shaken by some scientific theory. God very well is and was able to bring about creation in seven days. What a miracle! To form every solid, liquid, gas, living and un-living thing in a period of 168 hours! Truly, God is great. God also was and is able to bring about creation over a period of several million years. What a miracle! He began an endeavor and allowed it to grow and form and change until it was a fully formed universe! Truly, God is great.

         The point is, it doesn’t matter. God is God no matter how we came about. Personally, I believe in the seven-day creation. Not for any scientific reason or belief that the Bible never speaks allegorically. No, I believe in the seven days of creation because that is how I was raised plus, I really like the idea. But, if it is ever, unequivocally, proven wrong, that’s ok.

         I believe in the rightness of God. This is rather larger than it might appear since it is so often the reason why people rail against Him in the first place. “If God is so good, than how can He allow the world to be the way it is?!”

         Here I’m going to steal a quote from C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, since he states it so much better than I.

“God is such that if His power could vanish and His other attributes remain, so that the Supreme Right were forever robbed of the Supreme Might, we should still owe Him precisely the same kind and degree of allegiance as we now do.“

         Meaning that while God is to be feared, it is not just because of His power, but because He is Right. I realize that this doesn’t answer the question of why the world is the way it is. I never meant to attempt to answer that question. What I am saying is that God does know the reason, He created the reason as He created everything else.

         In the Bible, in the book of Exodus, the Israelis are allowed to see the glory of God but not actually HIM. They were warned to stay away from the mountain or they would die. I had always thought that the reason for that would be that they would die from the very power of God. Now I think differently. If they, or any of us, were actually faced with the absolute, unequivocal Rightness of God, we would have to fully face our own Wrongness. And the horror of seeing the Wrongness of ourselves without mask, excuses or illusion, would cause us to die. Look back to Adam and Eve. After eating the forbidden fruit, they hid from God in the garden because they were ashamed of their nakedness. They were now Wrong, where God was still Right.

         Now don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying that we are so miserable and horrible that we should put on the sackcloth and ashes and go around beating ourselves for our sins. That’s ridiculous. What I am saying is that while we are all (and I do mean all. Myself, the rest of Christianity, the world) are of terrible sin natures, we need to take joy in the fact that God loves us anyway.

         This is a point I really want to get across; if only because it is so important to me. I was raised in a Christian home. I grew up on the stories in the Bible and the belief that Jesus loves me this I know. God was love and I would go to heaven if I believed in Him. It is such a pat answer, easy to believe and comfortable to relax into. I grew up on a huggable God.

         While love is a mammoth element to our relationship with Him, how are we to truly appreciate that love unless we understand where and Who it is coming from? So while yes, God is love, it is important to understand that love is not God. See the difference?

         The ‘Who’ I am talking about here is I AM. This is the God who needs no other introduction than that. No name, no explanation, no past history, no comparisons to other gods, I AM THAT I AM.

         Which means that every other thing is but a shadow to Him. I AM right. I AM the only reality and everything else is but a shallow reflection off of the absoluteness of the existence of I AM.

         Being born into Christianity, I knew of God’s love, but not of the terrible and awesome Rightness of God. Now that I do know of that Rightness, I can be that much more thankful, and joyful in the fact that I AM THAT I AM loves me.

         Next to this, so much else of what often consumes the religious world fades in comparison. There are a great many religious beliefs I think are true. They are unimportant. Literally. In every sense of the word, unimportant. I AM is an awesome Being. So much so, that to contemplate the vastness of His Rightness all the time, would drive me insane. So, to protect myself, I need the organization, the comfort of religious beliefs. They give my mind something smaller to cling to. Some of these things I believe may even be true, some are probably false. In the larger picture, it really just doesn’t matter. I have faith in God and in His mercy.

         Please understand that I am not embracing an all worldview of God. Above, I said that some of those beliefs were true and false, but there is a true and a false. I am not saying that God is in every religion. Rather that every religion, in some small way, will point a way to God if the follower is willing to listen to the Voice of God and not that of man. This is a hard bit of belief to express because I know it so closely seems to follow the idea that all religions are right. But that is absolutely not what I’m saying!

         God is bigger than any religious strictures that we can put Him into. If a person is earnestly seeking Him, but does not know the (what we would call) proper name to name Him, do you actually believe that God would turn His back? He looks at the heart, the soul, not the words or the sect. In the same way, just because a person names Him ‘properly’ and lives his life outwardly the way his religion tells him to; yet inwardly has no heart for God, do you actually believe that God will name him His own?

         If it hasn’t become obvious by now, mine is a belief of faith and not of works. Though I do follow James’ exhortations that “Faith without works is dead.”

         Now I think that I will stop on this topic. There is more, so much more to cover and perhaps I will try again later. I hope that what I meant to say was said in an understandable manner. It is easy to think that because something is so clear to me, it will come across clearly to others. When, if fact, it is blurry and misstated. This dance of words is not always easy to master.