PART 1 | WHAT IS GOD LIKE?
Two of life’s most fundamental questions that I’ve found to be true in my own faith journey are,
What is God (or whatever name you use for the Supreme Being) like? and Who am I?
What we do or don’t do in life is foundationally governed by our answers to these two questions. How we answer these questions sets our life’s trajectory and translates to our daily behaviors.
That is, until we are so thoroughly deconstructed or disordered (as Richard Rohr likes to call it), meaning the “box” we created for value and meaning does not work anymore, that we are completely befuddled and confounded. Not one of us has a perfect “box” that doesn’t need some form of deconstruction. I’ll unpack the topic of deconstruction at a later time.
Back to the questions. I’ve found that these two questions are intimately intertwined. But first, I’m going to unpack the first question…
The shape of
“the Supreme Being,” the Consciousness, or God determines how we ultimately view ourselves. For some, this God is an orderly rule enforcer ready to pounce and forcibly meddle in life when needed. For some, this God is powerful and zealous in maintaining His glory, that everything else pales in comparison. For some, this God is absent, uninvolved, and detached, leaving everything up to us to figure out. For some, this God is compassionate, caring, and kind. Whatever the shape (or combination of different shapes in different time) of who our God is like, we all “dimly” see God.
Nobody can say God is this or that in absolute terms. God can never be confined to our concept of God. God and our concept of God is not the same! When we say God, we mean our limited and incomplete view and experience of God rather than God Himself. One can even say that God refuses to be confined to our concept of God. Thus, our answer to the question of What is God like? keeps evolving and hopefully getting closer to who God truly is.
As alluded above, this process of knowing God is more experience based than cognition based. My “knowledge” of God when I look back is mostly about how God came to my rescue in desperate situations, answered my prayers both in clear answers and in silence, showered me with unearned grace, etc. In other words, it is God I have personally experienced in real life context. Often times, I admit that the God I have experienced is the God of the Bible that I met and thus confirms what I have learned about God through scripture. At the same time, we can think all we want regarding what we think or even believe (cognitively) God is like, no less from the Bible, but that is not as sufficient as we once thought. It doesn’t automatically translate into our personal working knowledge of God.
And then there is the Bible, given to us to understand what God is like. But why does it seem like God in the Old Testament is radically different or inconsistent to the God in the New Testament? What do we do with seeming contradictions and discrepancies?
For years, I racked my brain trying to understand the God of the Old Testament who seemed to be the author of unspeakable violence, anger, and malice in the name of maintaining His justice and order. Over time, I saw myself (my soul to be precise) refusing to believe this God. It just didn’t resonate with my experience of God. Why the Old Testament then? (This is a significant rabbit trail. I will further reflect on this very topic in the near future. But for now, among others, three recent books address the question and I would recommend these books. Peter Enns’ How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers―and Why That's Great News and Richard Rohr’s What Do We Do With the Bible? There is also Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again.)
One of the questions that is a natural by-product of the question, what God is like? is this: How big is our God? By big, I mean magnificent, radically generous and inclusive, and unfathomably immense in His scale and reach. As soon as we make God to fit into our concept and image of Him and restrict His activities to justify our actions, we turn our God into a small-minded-feeble-tribalistic God. This is not the God Jesus proclaimed and taught us to follow and love!
Whether we are aware of it or not, we define our existence based on our understanding of what God is like. Thus, the question, who am I?
I will continue my blog with what to do with Jesus and the question of who I am next week. (There will be two more blog entries.) This post was already getting too long. :)