Who Is God? Part 3

Living Relationship

            When you have a connection with someone what do you call it? You might say you have a friendship with that person. Or you have a relationship with them. My Fiancé and I have a relationship, but what does that mean? Well, we communicate, we spend time together, we hold each other, and we laugh together. We are in a growing, developing, and loving friendship. The concept of a relationship is an abstract idea. We use the word to refer to something that is alive, it can grow and die, it can feel, be strained, and hurt. Yet, it is not tangible. A relationship cannot be touched, or heard, or seen. However, it is an intangible description of something real, something that really does exist, but its existence is housed in our relationship with each other. If our relationship stumbles on rocky ground and we end up breaking up (God forbid) than that is the end, we have killed the relationship, it has died, it ceases to exist.

            I believe God gave us the ability to enter relationships with each other to reveal another layer or dimension of His character, a living, and growing experience between himself and the Son and himself and us. This is where the Holy Spirit is explained. The Spirit of God is not a person, or a created being, just as God is not a person or a created being. The Holy Spirit is a complex idea that represents something about the One True God. Bear with me as I walk through some scriptures that prove this point. Romans 5:5 says,

“And this hope will never disappoint us. We know this because God has poured out his love to fill our hearts through the Holy Spirit he gave us.”[1]

So God’s love is somehow tied together with the Holy Spirit. Now read Romans 8:16,

“And the Spirit himself speaks to our spirits and makes us sure that we are God's children.”[2]

The Spirit of God is a surety that we are connected to God in a way. It gives us confidence that we are not alone. 2 Corinthians 1:22 states,

“He put his mark on us to show that we are his. Yes, he put his Spirit in our hearts as the first payment that guarantees all that he will give us.”[3]

The Holy Spirit is a mark distinguishing a relationship. Now move to 1 John 5:14,15,

“We know that we have left death and have come into life. We know this because we love each other as brothers and sisters. Anyone who does not love is still in death. Anyone who hates a fellow believer is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life.”[4]

The Holy Spirit gives us the confidence that we are alive in God and not dead. And we know we have the Spirit when we have healthy relationships with other people! How did God teach this to us though? God taught it to us through His love, manifested in His Holy Spirit, just as Romans 5:5 said. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 13:14,

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”[5]

The Holy Ghost is communion with God! It is that living, growing, experiencing relationship between two individuals. This is where the Holy Spirit begins to exist in our own life, when we have a relationship with God. The Bible says in James 4:5,

“Do you think the Scriptures mean nothing? The Scriptures say, "The Spirit God made to live in us wants us only for himself."[6]

This doesn’t sound right. God made the Spirit to live in us? Does this mean that unless we allow a relationship with God, the Spirit does not exist? In a way, yes. The Spirit of God is not something to be grasped, or to be “poured” out per se. The Spirit of God is a living, breathing relationship. The Spirit has always existed in the universe because the Spirit is God. When Jesus was on earth, that relationship with His father was hampered by humanity. He was no longer in contact with the divine mind of God because the finite human body cannot house the infinite mind of God. Jesus had to rely on the finite human relationship He could develop with God. Thus Jesus spent time alone, and much time in prayer with His father, seeking to develop that relationship as closely as He could. Jesus was nurturing the Holy Spirit.

This was so because God was revealing to humanity how we can relate to Him, that though we have frail intellects and created existences, we can have a real relationship with God. Jesus was answering the charge of Satan. Satan assumed that God was being unfair, that He was withholding power from the created. Jesus came to reveal that God had indeed given to all of creation the ability to be one with Himself. It was most drastically seen in humanity since we had fallen and deserved it least. The Holy Spirit is friendship with God, what Jesus had with His father, is available to all.

This explains why a loving, forgiving God cannot forgive the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, because blasphemy against the Holy Spirit means, purposefully engaging in actions that destroy the relationship you have with God. Remember our discussion about Lucifer in the last section of this chapter? Satan could not be forgiven, not because God did not wish to forgive him, and not because God wanted him to suffer, but because Satan rejected the relationship he had with God, a relationship that was present since the dawn of creation.

            God cannot force. Force is against His character. Everything ever created was given the choice of being in a loving relationship with their maker, or choosing to reject that love and destroy the Spirit that existed between them and God. This is the truth of freewill. God cannot force individuals to love Him, for if love were forced, it would cease to be love. Love is given out of a willing heart. When Satan became jealous of God, and desired equality with the creator, he severed his relationship with God. It was not that God was withholding equality from Satan, but simply that God cannot make a creation in to himself, anymore than Steve jobs could have made his iPhone a clone of himself. By existing, Satan was already in the highest form of equality with God that a created being can attain, for existence is contained inside the intellect of God. Instead of recognizing this, Satan rejected the love of God. Of his own freewill, Lucifer killed the relationship, destroyed the Holy Spirit and sought to over throw the peace of heaven. God was forced to allow Satan to leave, because God could not force Satan to love.

            Can the unpardonable sin be rectified? Yes, you have no fear that you have committed the unpardonable sin. The sin is only unpardonable so long as you continue to reject the call of God to enter a relationship with Himself. God can do nothing until you give Him permission to work in your life. And for those of you praying that God would “pour” His spirit out on you, stop! God has already given it freely! He is waiting for you to develop what is already waiting. The Spirit is not something to all of a sudden be given, at which time you will be given power and ability. No! The Spirit is a relationship developed with a loving creator! You must see God as He is. You must discover Him for who He is. He is not a God to be appeased, or feared. If God exists, He is love, and by that revelation of His character, you will discover a friend, not an authority, a trusted confidant, not a judge.

            The story of Elijah illustrates this point very well in 1 Kings 18. Israel had turned their worship to ba’al, and thus, at the prayer of Elijah, God withheld the rain in all the Middle East for three years. “Why was the worship of ba’al such a bad thing?” I ask. “That’s easy!” you might think. “After all ba’al was a false God.” Let me explain to you who ba’al is. Ba’al, in Hebrew, means husband. God calls himself ba’al many times in the bible. Speaking of himself as Israel’s husband, God calls himself ba’al. Ba’al was the son of El, the almighty God, and creator of the universe. Ba’al fought with the great serpent, who was the father of death, destruction, and storm. In that fight with the serpent, ba’al was killed, but was raised to life by El, and brought with him healing and life to all. Does this sound familiar? What was wrong with the Israel essentially worshiping Jesus? It was this, the people had lost sight of the character of God. They began to see God as a God of anger, who was mad at the sin of the world and had to be appeased. Thus they offered sacrifices to appease god’s wrath and anger.

            Through Elijah, God says, “That is not me! I am not a God who must be appeased. I am not a God who requires death for sin.” God requires a relationship. He requires that you allow Him to give you the greatest gift of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of relationship. That is why God would not answer the prayers of the priests of ba’al on Mt. Carmel. He desired to show that what was required was the simple prayer of faith in a friend. Elijah prayed to God as though he had a relationship with Him. He was not seeking to appease the wrath of an angry God, he simply spoke to God as a friend, and fire came down from heaven and consumed Elijah’s sacrifices. So I ask you once more, to put aside your misconceptions of God, throw out the idea of a wrathful, vengeful God, and discover with me the character, not of something imaginary, but of the real, loving, creator.

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[1] Romans 5:5 ERV

[2] Romans 8:16 ERV

[3] 2 Corinthians 1:22 ERV

[4] 1 John 3:14,15 ERV

[5] 2 Corinthians 13:14 ERV

[6] James 4:5 ERV

Who Is God? Part 2

Can Two Equal One?

            “Let us make man in our image.”[1] God states. So what of it? We just went through a study showing that God is one, and we even discussed why God would reveal himself as 3 separate individuals, but how do these three separate individuals reveal to me who God is?

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”[2]

Jesus Himself says, “I and my Father are one.”[3] How does this make sense? How can you be separate and apart of the same at the same time. Timothy calls this the great mystery of God,

“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”[4]

Paul says that Jesus,

“Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”[5]

This is the craziest of all doctrines in the entire bible. Follow me very closely as I try to unfold this amazing God into our dimension, in a way we can understand. For all eternity, God has existed. God’s existence is not like we understand existence, He has just been. There was nothing before God because He causes all things to be. For all eternity passed Love has been the experience of God. “…God is love.”[6] God’s character is so multidimensional that He cannot be explained by just stating He is one.

When God created His first creation, He was faced with a problem. How does He relate to His creation when He himself is not created? How could He bring his creation into a loving friendship with Himself if His creation could have no grasp of what He is? God made a decision before creation began that He would “create” Himself in a way to relate to the created. And so, as God created marvel after marvel, Jesus was made the representation of God to His creation. The angels knew Jesus as Michael the Arc Angel.[7] You see, it is because it is relationship that God desires. He wanted friendship with His creation. God did not create beings because He needed something to worship Him, God created beings for communion, for friendship and love. Jesus embodies that character of God that desires intimacy with all of creation. To the Angels, God revealed is Michael, to Humanity, He is Jesus, to the unfallen worlds…Well I’ll leave it up to your imagination to picture what He may be. This is the mystery of God, that while relating to us in our creation, He remains God.

I like to use the analogy of a computer. You can take a computer and copy the hard drive exactly, so that it is the exact same computer, but as soon as someone uses the original or the new one, it becomes separate, while still having the same information as the original. Yet, to keep these computers the same, updates must be made regularly so that they will not become out of sync with each other. Jesus is an extension of God into humanity, He is fully God, but made into the likeness of humanity. This is why Jesus was in constant communion with His father, because that connection had to be maintained in order that the will of God could remain one. The act of prayer brought Jesus back into the collective mind of God. Jesus did something special with Humanity that He did not do with the angels He became fully human. Why? Because of one creation in particular.  

The First Of All Creation

            Lucifer, Son of the morning. Not just A son of the morning, THE son of the morning. Lucifer was the beginning of all creation, the first of God’s creative acts. The Bible gives a startling picture of Lucifer,

“You have been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was yout covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of your tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in you in the day that you were created. You are the anointed cherub that covers; and I have set thee so: you were upon the holy mountain of God; you have walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. You were perfect in your ways from the day that you were created, till iniquity was found in you.”[8]

            Lucifer was perfect, created by God to be the most beautiful of all created beings. And when he came into existence what was the first thing to meet him? It was Jesus, Michael, God. Lucifer was created to be the friend of God, the crowning act of all creation up to that point. So Lucifer became the friend of God, continually standing in the presence of the almighty. He knew the character of God better than anything ever created. He led the angels and all of heaven into praises to Him. If Lucifer was all that, how did he fall? How did something that knew the character of God so well, fall? He was daily in communion with God, if any angel in the universe knew who God was, it was Lucifer, how could he be so wrong? That no doubt is the very question angels asked themselves the day Lucifer fell. Isaiah asked the same question. He stated,

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”[9]

The Bible says that Iniquity was found in him. What was this iniquity that was found in Lucifer? How it happened will forever remain a mystery because sin has no logical cause, but Lucifer became jealous of Michael, the arc angel, the presider over the congregation of heaven, God himself. Lucifer saw Michael entering the presence of God the father. He saw God leave created form and re-enter at will as he went back and forth in communication with His Father, and Lucifer desired that position. He saw that he had been there at the foundation of creation. He watched as worlds, creatures, galaxies, and possibly universes were created, and he began to question the foundational understanding of God. He no longer saw God as giving him everything possible for his pleasure, but began to imagine that God was withholding a dimension of reality from him. Lucifer did not realize that to enter the reality of God would be to cease to exist since God does not exist inside a created universe. Lucifer some how missed the point that his very existence was housed inside the intellect of God, and that to be outside of the presence of God would be to not exist at all. For instance, if I asked God to take my body and remove every particle of energy from it, I would cease to exist entirely because my body is made entirely of energy. It is the same with desiring to be outside the presence of God. To do so would cause me to no longer be since all of reality is constructed by the energy that flows from God himself.

Yet Lucifer, who became Satan, began to view God as a part of his creation. He misconstrued the friendship he had with Jesus and started to view the greatest gift of God as weakness. God became something that he could attain to. No longer was he satisfied with being the friend of God, continually standing the presence of the almighty, and always in communion with Michael, the image of God in created flesh. Lucifer made the same mistake many make today, he made God in to his own likeness and started to see God as nothing more than a created entity. He attributed to the creator created attributions. As we will see throughout the remainder of this book, this is precisely what humanity does on a daily biases, constantly construing God as something to be grasped and attained to. The Bible documents his fall in this sad account:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”[10]

            Lucifer committed the unpardonable sin, a sin that not even a forgiving God could forgive. Lucifer blasphemed the Holy Spirit. Jesus says,

“Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.”[11]

What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and why is it so bad that God cannot forgive it? To answer that question we have to find out who the Holy Spirit is. This is one of the most amazing truths about the God I believe exists. Hold on as we explore the next dimension of God’s character.

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[1] Genesis 1:26

[2] 1 John 5:7

[3] John 10:30

[4] 1 Timothy 3:16

[5] Philippians 2:6-7

[6] 1 John 4:8

[7] Daniel 10:13, 21; Jude 1:9; Revelation 12:7

[8] Ezekiel 28:13-15

[9] Isaiah 14:12

[10] Isaiah 14: 12-14

[11] Mark 3:28-29

Why I Believe the Bible is Necessary

          

          Why would we need the Bible at all? That is a question in many peoples minds these days, including my own. I have struggled in the past with questions about the bible and how it is applicable to us today. For reasons such as the Bible was written over 2,000 years ago in times and cultures vastly different from our own today, it contains pictures of God that are not coherent with our understanding today from both scientific thought and philosophy and even developments in our understanding if theology. Yet again another reason to discredit the Bible is that it was in fact written by real people with their own understandings of God and their own interpretations, so why should I subject myself to the understanding of others? I have answered these questions in my own way and I will attempt to share with you why I still use the Bible today. 

          Truth is relative. Though this statement has a very negative connotation that people often label in a sneer as postmodern, it is never the less pretty accurate. Yes it is a post modern thought, but you know what, the idea that truth is not relative but absolute and concrete, that was a modern idea, you only believe that today because of the culture of modernism you were brought up in. It is not a divine commandment of God that reality and knowledge are absolutes. Those are man made concepts to explain the world around them. Inaccurate concepts I might add. We think today that reality around us is actually relative to the individual who happens to observe it. As Immanuel Kant would put it, we never experience anything in reality directly. Everything that we experience is an interpretation of our logical mind. 

          I have a very narrow view of the world around me. My eyes can capture about 260 degrees or so if I am lucky, once something leaves my peripheral vision, in my mind it is gone, I mighty be able to imagine it as still there, but if I cannot see it then to me it does not exist. I was sitting in the library studying the boring science of microbiology and inevitably my mind started to wander to more interesting subjects as I gazed out the 3rd story windows of the library. The cars where passing out in front of my vision and then disappearing behind the wall as the window ended. I watched as a runner ran down the street, so long as I could see her she was real to me, but as soon as she passed out of my sight she was no longer real but entered my imagination as I tried to imagine the trajectory she would continue to travel. Now, she didn't just simply cease to exist obviously, she has her own intellect and her own experiences, so she continued on existing inside her own frame of reference, but in my frame of reference she no longer existed. 

          That entire dialog might sound like a bunch of hogwash to you, and that's ok, it made sense in my mind, it doesn't have to make sense in yours. However, the experiment that first alerted us to quantum physics revealed for the first time how our perceptions of reality change by the simple action of observation. If you read the chapter in my book on quantum physics you can get the full story, but suffice it to say, in this experiment a beam of electrons was shot through a double slit and it behaved as was expected, as a wave, projecting on the film behind the slits as an interference pattern, then we decided to find out how the electrons can split themselves in two and still remain the same packet of energy, so we set up a detector to measure which slit the electrons actually went through, you know what happened? As soon as we pinpointed the exact slit the electron went through it instantly changed properties and behaved as a particle, showing a projection of 2 single lines as though it had gone through only one or the other slits, and not both. The profound understanding of this experiment was this, the very act of our observations of reality changes it's very nature. 

         Does this sound incredible and to strange too be real? Then you would not be alone, Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to disprove this experiment, but it has withstood thousands upon thousands of subsequent experiments while never being proven wrong. What it means for us is that yes indeed reality, and therefor knowledge, is relative to the individual. Humanity makes up their own reality, we cannot know if anything is actually the way it truly is because we have no way to know whether or not our own minds have deceived us in to thinking a certain way. So where does the Bible come in to this?

          Humanities perspective as a whole is relative to our collective understanding, the individual is not isolated alone, we all have minds that are constructed similarly and it is important to have a collective mind to help point our logic in the right direction. The double slit experiment does not change from one person to the other, it is he same for each person that tries it, that is because as humans our brains are constructed in a similar maner. We all think more or less alike. So although everything is indeed relative, when it comes to the reality of humanity in general, things stay the same. Grass is green to everyone, music sounds similar to everyone, mountains look the same, logic works they same way, and reason leads to the same things. If this was not true then society would crumble around us as if we all suddenly spoke different languages and could not understand each other's sentences.

          It is more than this however, we actually need each other in order to know what is truth. Here is the reason, reality I believe, is constructed by humanity as a whole, no person is in their own world, with arguably a select few individuals, but we usually put them in psych wards however. The human intellect operates as a collective whole, with each individual contributing to the understanding of the next. Granted some people, such as Kant, or Aristotle, or Einstein, or Mozart have contributed more than others, but each individual is needed for a complete understanding of reality to exist. We build off each other, no one man contributed solely to the knowledge of one idea. This is why I am very skeptical of isolated instances of miracles happening to single individuals alone, or on a more sever level, religions who have at their head a single founder that supplies their entire understanding. We need each other, not only that but we need those who came before as we will need the ones that will come after. This is where the Bible comes in.

          I do not believe the Bible to be the express revelation of the word of God, but before you write me off, hear me out. Humans wrote the Bible as they were moved by their relationship with God, and if you keep up with my chapters for he next couple weeks this will be made clear.  The Bible is important because it records humanities experience with God from the dawn of time. It reveals interpretations built on times and culture. It reveals the progression of truth, and I believe it holds the key to our understanding of God as we progress into a very confusing, very relative postmodern world. Not that the Bible is the end all of truth, we have found truth today not contained in the bible and we will find truth in the future that is not found in the Bible either, but as we review the trajectory of knowledge as it has increased throughout the centuries, we began to see a path headed toward a certain destination. What that destination is I believe I am just beginning to find out, but that is something you should study out for yourself. 

          The Bible, along with the theories and ideas of everyone that can possibly be studied, combined with your own logical mind and understanding, cannot help but lead you to a deeper understanding of the universe in which you live and of the God whom you claim created it. The Bible is special to me because it is the experiences of dozens of individuals spread over more than a thousand years. I do not hold it as an absolute, or as the final say in debate, but rather as one of the most complete and comprehensive works on God ever written. It is special because it reveals to me the trajectory of my own life as I grow in to an abiding relationship with the creator, the essence of Love, the one who's thought this universe is.