Too often our (Christians’s) relationship with God is expressed in metaphors and similes. We are poked, prodded, and corralled into a "better" understanding of our relationship with God Almighty. I have struggled, and struggle still, to grasp that relationship. I have tried to liken it to earthly relationships, and failed. I have tried to imagine it as a wholly other kind of relationship, and failed again (I guess I am not that imaginative). In all of this I still wrestle to get a grasp on my relationship with God, but I have learned a few things.
I would guess that every Christian has at some point been frustrated by God’s seeming lack of communication. In my experience this frustration has shown itself in my prayer life. I have always found it hard to have a conversation with God, as many preachers have encouraged, because God has never talked back (indeed, I would be scared out of my mind if He did audibly converse with me!). This has always been a source of great frustration, anger, and angst when I hear preachers liken my prayer life, or my entire relationship with God, to any variety of earthly relationships. I have heard it compared with my relationship with a governmental figure, a parent, a best friend, and even a spouse. I can sit down with most of these people and talk with them, and get an almost immediate response. I can write letters to them and get a response. When I pray to God I don’t get those kind of responses.
As I was thinking on this subject yesterday (our preacher used the spouse metaphor) a negative metaphor could be presented. Our relationship with God can be likened to our relationship with past figures. We learn of them through books and testimonies (auto-biographies and biographies), we can follow their teaching, we can even talk to them as if they could hear us. I suspect many of us have had times where, in desperation, we thought we were no better than conversing with a dead president. Thanks to our faith in a living God we were wrong and we passed the trial.
While puzzling over my relationship with God it strikes me that communication with Him is asynchronous. I talk to him with words, and He "talks" back by some other means (isn’t that nice an vague?) This concept is not foreign to us, for we can receive a greeting card in the mail (written communication) and respond with a phone call to say thank-you (oral communication). Even in computers we could send a signal to a computer using one protocol and receive the response on a different protocol (see network computer games).
The point I want to make is our relationship with God is unique and complex. When I pray to God nothing seems to happen. Eventually (sometimes sooner than later) a prayer is answered and I can rejoice knowing God intervened, and that He heard my prayer. It is not fair to say our relationship with Him is like anything we know. There are aspects and similarities, and we should draw those out, to help us better understand, but even then God has ways of communicating with us that defy our experience. His Holy Spirit lives within us and I daresay He has means of communicating with me I cannot put into words.
It is a mistake to teach, lead, or corral people into a simple-minded view of our relationship with God. It is richer than any other, more complex, more rewarding, and more demanding.
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I'm sorry to have to admit that Sunday's sermon was so boring I had to find things to keep me awake. Three things came to me and I made notes about them, one of which I I'm sorry to have to admit that Sunday's sermon was so boring I had to find things to keep me awake. Three things came to me and I made notes about them, one of which I [Read More]
Comments
Seth — I think we use the metaphors and anthropomorphic means to try to explain God BECAUSE God seems so wholly “other” sometimes — People often seem comforted by those comparisons, because they help us connect to something we can relate to. Jesus tried to help people get closer to God by using language of familial love, among other things. Agape (unconditional, all-encompassing) love is closer to reality, but often too foreign or far removed from human experience of love (conditional, specifically-focused) to help us with that sense of being connected!
I agree with you — God is far more complex than we can grasp fully with our limits of understanding. If we use only historical definitions or descriptions, then we wipe out the current “living” aspect that we claim to also believe.
God is certainly greater than any one person, or any one denomination’s definition or understanding, or even experience! I think Christians need to stop fighting over who “owns” God, and start following Jesus’ commandment as laid out in the Gospel of John: Love one another, as I have loved you. By this the world will know you are my disciples, by your love for one another.”
The Holy Spirit certainly plays a key role here - - for that is the aspect of God that communicates with us on a daily basis (and as you say, in various ways, and most often not in the mode we initiate), lives within us as well as surrounds us, and is that which guides, exhorts, comforts and challenges us in our daily walk. For this gift I am eternally grateful.
Blessings to you, nephew!
I certainly understand why we have used familiar means to teach about our God, in fact I encourage it for that is a great way to learn: build a bridge from the known to the unknown. What scares and bothers me is when people fail to differentiate the two lands the bridge connects. God is and is not like my relationship with my father, is and is not like my relationship with my wife, et cetera. Using the comparisons do not bother me, it’s when the differences are ignored. My biggest concern (fear?) is to think and teach wrongly about God and have to be corrected when I meet Him on the other side of death. This is why I ask more questions than I give answers for; my hope is I will not accept an answer without a reasonable argument, and I will not be complacent in my Faith.