I’ve known God for around forty years now, but can anyone ever really know God?
God is unfathomable, in many ways unknowable, at least by humanity, at least as we are now. In this life we’re all just trying to figure God out as best we can, to know God as best we can.
But God wants a relationship with us, wants to be known by us. God wants to be known by us enough to give up all the glory of heaven, all the majesty of being God, to become one of us. We can’t raise ourselves to God-level so God humbly stooped down to human level. How amazing is that? The incarnation is likewise unfathomable, but in the person of Jesus we have the opportunity to meet with the living God. We can know God a little more, through Jesus and Jesus’ teachings.
Yet we still don’t “get it” because God is so majestic, so much bigger than we can get our heads around, there is so much God to know. We can spend a lifetime getting to know God and still we will only be scratching the surface. But let’s keep doing that, because the more we know God, the better, or at least that’s my experience anyway.
In my lifetime I have come to know, through the bible; through contemplation and meditation; through personal revelation; through the salvific work of God in my life; through creeds and traditions; through art and song; through other people, a God who is love itself. My God is the very fabric of everything that is good and pure and holy and righteous and just. The God I have been getting to know for forty years or so is abounding in grace and mercy, is slow to anger; in fact, in all my sin and stupidity I have never felt myself on the receiving end of God’s wrath, rather I have been lovingly and gently nurtured and corrected so that I have grown in confidence and faith. The God I meet with is unfailing in kindness, patience, righteousness, justice. My God fills me with peace and joy, and loves me, and indeed the whole human race beyond measure. My God heals the brokenhearted, perfectly, restores and will reconcile even the worst conflicts. My God has defeated death and will eventually be all things to every human who ever existed, God will be all in all.
And when I talk about my God, about my relationship with God, some people believe it’s “too good to be true” they tell me that I’ve made God in my own image.
They tell me that this majestic, perfect, all-loving, merciful, just God is simply an extension of little old me….
What high esteem those people must hold me in.
It never ceases to amaze me when men who worship a hyper-masculine, violent, vengeful god who hates gays and subjugates women, say that I am the one who has made a god in my own image.
