God

What’s in a name?

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Words, the glorified sounds we use to describe our thoughts, are always a matter of interpretation.  For the most part we are able to communicate our ideas accurately enough to have meaningful conversation.  However, language also changes over time, definitions evolve and words find new uses from their original uses.  Language is seldom (if ever) as simple as black and white.

Things get especially complex when we take ideas written in one language and try to translate them into another language.  It is exponentially more difficult when the original language is now archaic and the exact inflection or intentions of the words lost to time.  Certainly there are clues, languages follow patterns or hints from context and translators follow these leads like detectives.  But there’s always that left which remains open to interpretation.

Is it a description or is it a name?

Biblical descriptions of “God” present a challenge.  Here’s the attempts of various translators to take writing in an ancient Hebrew book and convert it to English that illustrate the point:

“And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret?”  (Judges 13:18 KJV)

“He replied, “Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.“  (Judges 13:18 NIV)

“Why do you ask my name?” the angel of the lord replied. “It is too wonderful for you to understand.“  (Judges 13:18 NLT)

“And the angel of the Lord said to him, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?”  (Judges 13:18 ESV)

“The angel of God said, “What’s this? You ask for my name? You wouldn’t understand—it’s sheer wonder.“  (Judges 13:18 MSG)

So, according to the King James translation, we either have an angel named “secret” or an ‘angel’ with a name that is beyond our words.  I would go with the latter judging by the context as I see it.

Taken together different translations give us wonderful, too wonderful to understand, beyond understanding, secret and means “incomprehensible” according to Strong’s concordance.  I do get the impression the meaning is truly incomprehensible, truly something beyond words or human naming and mysterious.

Can God be properly named?

The three letters ‘G’ and ‘o’ and ‘d’ have come to represent the supreme being and divine entity of the Christian Bible.  It is a noun, used like a proper name and a word loaded down with preconceived ideas.  One of those ideas is that something that is the secret mysterious beyond comprehension power behind the entire universe is something that can actually be named.  It is certainly useful to have a placeholder name or common description, but any word used is an infinite understatement.

This is why God was not named openly.  Naming potentially lowers this dimensionally unlimited and timeless being that can be understood with our finite minds.  But it is not blasphemy that concerns me.  What bothers me is that words evolve, words can begin to carry new meaning or different assumptions and be misconstrued.  It seems better that we leave God something beyond comprehension than to ignorantly ‘box in’ the infinite.  At very least we would be wise to see a God beyond our own understanding of a three letter word.

God is not a noun, not a verb or a man…

“God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”  (Numbers 23:19 NIV)

That “not human” in verse above is rendered “not a man” in another common translation and ome have taken issue with the New International Version for the departure from gender specific descriptions of God.  But that’s straining on gnats (Matt. 23:24) and making God the equivalent of a homo sapien male is giving men infinitely too much credit and God way too little. 

No, not that I’m saying the Spirit (or Word) of God could not fill the form of a man like a hand in a glove or an avatar becomes a representation of a human being on an internet forum.  But making God just a man is also a vast understatement.  Humanity may bear the “image of God” (Gen. 1:27) and yet we aren’t the beginning and the end, omniscient, sovereign or infinite.

God of the paradox...

Western thinking likes binaries.  The logic of this is true thus that can’t be true is natural for us.  A person can either be alive or dead from our perspective and never both.  Yet, as science takes us to the furthermost ends of the universe, to realms of the almost incomprehensibly large to the infinitesimally small, our normal scientific assumptions break down.

The most brilliant scientific minds of our time have established with convincing theory that both logic and reason taper into oblivion at the bookends of time and space.  On one end a brilliant flash of light, energy and expansion from a source beyond human comprehension.  On the other end black holes both infinitely massive and infinitely small.  At either end there is what appears to be irrationality of something from nothing returning to nothingness.

Matter itself is a mysterious and seemingly impossible duality when brought into focus.  Not only is there is less and less as we zoom in to the level of quantum mechanics, but what is left that remains is a seemingly impossible duality where clearly distinct categories of particle and wave merge into a seemingly irrational both.  It is a paradoxical dualism that demands we look beyond normal scientific assumptions.

There is something incomprehensible.  There is something beyond my understanding and beyond the collective understanding of humanity.  We try to name, explain, categorize the universe.  We attempt to peer around the corner of space-time with theories, mathematics, scientific instruments, reason and logic.  But in the end we live in the mystery of our own existence and we also can live beyond it.

God who is both/and…

Both skeptics of religion and the religious are guilty of creating a God in their own image.  If you’re concept of God is an equivalent to a ‘flying spaghetti monster‘ then you have a small god perspective.  If your idea of God is limited to descriptions and language found in the Bible then you too have a small God perspective.  God is more than the information used to attempt to define God.  God cannot be reduced to mere attributes or human moral constructs.

God is incomprehensible.  Yet, God’s work is also personal, knowable and…

“Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.  Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names…”  (Philippians 2:6-9 NLT)

…a sheer wonder of a paradox beyond mere human words.

What is God?

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“The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can’t understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science ‘God’, but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.”  (Stephen Hawking)

Professor Hawking is one of the most intriguing men of our time.  He is known for his work in the field of physics and was popularized by a book, “A Brief History of Time,” that reached a broad audience.  He is undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician, he can reconstruct the universe in his mind using numbers and formulas, and has basically proved that the universe (including time) had a definite beginning.  But Hawking is agnostic, he sees a big impersonal ‘God’ when he looks into the expanse of space and is probably right about what he sees.

A Small View of God

Many people (religious fundamentalists and atheists especially) subscribe to a small view of God.  They confine God to simple ‘black and white’ human moral or logical thinking (theirs) and essentially demand a God on their level.  But if God is the creative force behind the entire universe, then God is bigger than the universe and also bigger than any of the concepts of morality or logic in the universe.  A big concept of God is a God that transcends universal moral categories and exists above or beyond all human reasoning.  A God bigger than scientific law or religion.

Finding God in Our Humility

Picture humanity as an infant, this earth as our playpen and the universe the house over our heads.  We can see the room, we can speculate about other rooms and theorize about some sort of reality beyond house.  We know house is predictable, the temperatures fall between certain parameters, schedules are somewhat consistent and yet we see through a foggy window that there could possibly be more than the house we are in.  God is like the parent who can come and go, lives beyond the playpen and our childish mind.

Finding God Beyond Our Own Dimensionality

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But my concept and understanding of God goes beyond that have a celestial parent or personality.  I believe Biblical personification of God is simply an attempt to explain what is inexplicable.  Still, I do believe God can give himself personality to relate to us and is more than some vague life force or abstraction.  I believe God is a spirit or mind, but one that dwells beyond the rules of science that govern the dimensions of this universe.  In other words, God sees the Tesseract of our limited dimensionality and exists beyond all dimensionality.

Finding God Beyond Material Reality

I know this might not appeal to those with the materialism perspective who do not feel inclined to accept reality beyond their ability (or the ability of their scientific instruments, mathematics and logic) to see.  But science has many limits.  We cannot scientifically prove our own consciousness exists and still accept it as reality.  Not everything of our reality is provable by experiment or calculations, some things we must just know and accept as reality, the reality of our consciousness one of those things and the idea of greater consciousness another.

Finding God Beyond Cold Calculation

“Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.”  (Stephen Hawking)

Professor Hawking and other theoretical physicists seek a ‘unified theory’ for their science, an explanation for the paradoxical discoveries that upset a simpler idea of the universe, but the day it is found (if these ‘dice’ were left within our reach) there will be more questions unanswerable by science.  Questions of why, of purpose and morality are probably beyond math.  Why we do not believe it is immoral for a cat to eat a mouse, both sentient beings, the cat remorseless, and yet to kill becomes an issue of morality for us.  Why care if the weak are exploited?

A Unified Theory of God

We are sentient, we are also moral creatures and our morality needs to enter the grand equation or we are left with little more than cold calculus that starts with star dust then ends with the heat death of the universe.  We know there is something more just as we know we consciously exist and therefore we need a bigger view of God than Hawking’s.  We need a God so big he can be personally involved or, in other words, a unified theory of an intimate and big God.  Consciousness, morality and science offer us a place to start a pursuit of God, but we need to pursue further…

The Personal and Intimate God

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”  “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”  The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”  Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”  (John 4:19-26 NIV)

Looking Backwards and Beyond the Universe for God

Many search for God, but do they look in the right place to find God?  The religious are like this woman who met Jesus, they seek God in physical objects like places, rituals or books.  The scientific mind looks further out, they search the universe for answers down to the tiniest particles and up to the lights of the sky.  But both are looking outward to find God and truth.  Could it be our mind is the closest possible connection we could ever have to the realities beyond the material, mathematical and time universe?

Finding God in the Moral Mind

If the entire universe can be compressed to the size of a point as small as the period at the end of this sentence, then a God big enough to be simultaneously small is not such a big leap.  So perhaps Hawking, like that woman talking to Jesus, is looking in the wrong direction to find the person of God?

Promises of better things to come…

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It has been an interesting year and a year of many firsts.  I suffered my first torn anterior cruciate ligament (and hopefully my last) in May and spent most of the year rehabbing it.

I am the proud owner of my first brand new car.  It is a handsome black 2014 Ford Fusion sedan with a five speed manual transmission and represents a vast improvement over my prior every day vehicles.

I have started my first real blog (unless a Xanga foray counts) and you are reading it.

Besides that, I have a first chapter to a book in rough draft form which is also a first for me.  I hope that effort will eventually lead to a first of writing a book if I can find the time to research for the second chapter.

It has been a year of intense feeling, both trials and triumphs, both of deep doubt and deeper faith, with many prayers answered with one that still waits.  Because the work is not finished, my theme from this past year will continue into the next year: With God (or faith) all things are possible.

I have faith God will continue to answer my prayers in amazing ways.  Apparently fortune favors the bold, so I will be bold in faith and boldly predict next year to be my best ever.  I do not expect all sunshine and roses, because bad days happen even in the best of circumstances, but I hope big regardless.

For next year I plan to continue doing what I am doing and improve at it.  I want to continue writing with a goal of improving my ability to communicate ideas.  I want to offer solutions where I can, to help encourage other people and strengthen the good side of things.

I want to continue to exercise regularly and remain physically fit despite a demanding schedule.  I realize good health can’t be taken for granted.  I know fitness, like all good things, isn’t something that happens accidentally, it is a result of initiative, work and God’s grace.

Speaking of work, I plan to continue driving, but will continue exploring options and hope to find something else by next year.  I am still unclear where, what or when I will find the next opportunity.  I have ruled nothing out.  I pray for God’s guidance.

I also want to be more meditative and prayerful.  I hope to read more, stay involved in spiritual development and active in the lives of others.  I pray to be a voice for faith, hope and love.  I want to grow stronger in all areas of life, be confident and live without excuses.

It is our bigger fights of faith that we have the most opportunity to grow and that is what I take into next year.  And, you can be a part of that, I do invite your input and about this blog in particular.  I would love feedback about the content and clarity of my writing.

Are there any topics you prefer of those I have posted on or suggestions of things I should discuss less or more?

Anyways, my work is nearly done for this year, a new year (even if just an arbitrary boundary) is a few hours away, and it is definitely an opportunity to reflect.  So, as I sit here with my tuna fritters and miracle whip ready to eat, anticipating a night full of activity, let me first thank you all for being a part of my life in 2014 and wish a happy new year…

God bless!