The God conundrum

 

The Infinite Intelligence religion and science refer to as God is way beyond description. His worth cannot be quantified and His limit can neither be proclaimed nor be pronounced. The curiosity to understand God by means of His name started with Moses’ experience with the burning bush captured in the book of Exodus of the Hebrew Scriptures.

When Moses approached God with the question of identity, God scanned through His eternal and unsearchable mind and came up with the name: I am that I am! This, however, is more than a name and sums up all the attributes of God as can be read in hundreds of spiritual writings and sacred texts, and of course, as are personal to each and every one of us. Of truth, God does not have a specific name; rather His name is personal and to one man it could mean helper and to another it could means a provider.

What name will perfectly describe a force that can accomplish anything, achieve anything anytime and anywhere, and can equally mastermind what to men is impossible? Indeed there is no such name, except the one pronounced by God Himself: I am that I am!

Moses upon hearing such a name must have thought within himself, “What could He possibly mean by that?”, because in his own human wisdom he had expected a long name, one with a long pronunciation to accommodate the huge personality that is God. But just how filthy human wisdom can be!

The ways of God are higher than the ways of men. But blessed is he who has come to the recognition of this!

It does not matter what your religion refer to as God or what your culture teaches represent God. There is no denying that the name of God is personal and is therefore unique to each individual. To the human mind God will forever remain a mystery. This is a God that there was never a time that anything was too hard for, or a situation too late to change. Here we make mention of a God that defies logic and common sense and that man will never be able to comprehend in full. That man will never be able to grasp aright the personality that is God does not in any way means that he should not strive to know Him at least, and to understand how He animates life and sustain the vast creation.

To know God means drawing close to Him through His Word which is mediated to mankind in the Scriptures and has been taught to different cultures and civilizations at different times. The mentality and attitude people have and show towards the Word of God define the level of their spiritual life and just how they have evolved spiritually with the passing time.

Some 2000 years ago the Word of God became flesh and incarnated in a matured animal body (the physical body of man), thereby taking on the human cloak. Then those who made close and personal acquaintances with the Son of God during His time on earth could boast as at that time of having met God in person, in human form! And this is something, a privilege, that even the great Abraham who at one time was referred to as a friend of God, could only long to experience.

During the time in which the Son of God was on earth, God was indeed dwelling among men! But God did not depart the earth with the ascension to Heaven of the Son of God, because His spirit animates or keeps alive everything, sustaining and furthering Creation.

The earth is only but a large school for the development of the human spirit. For this reason, there was never a time in the development of mankind on earth that God did not send an envoy, a teacher out of the Light, to guide and lead men into the knowledge of what was important to their existence and spiritual development and maturity as at that time! Thus until the day of Christ, God’s people were at one time or the other led by Judges and guided by the Prophets. However, in the post-Christ era, in our own generation, God is revealing Himself to us through the power of the Holy Spirit, doing this directly to each man provided that he opens himself to it!

Today, unlike in the days of Moses and Elijah when God manifested Himself by the hands of the Prophets and the message from the Above interpreted by a chosen prophet as at of the time, God is speaking directly to man through the ever –flowing stream of power of the Holy Spirit. This is the time and era of the Holy Spirit.

In the era of the Holy Spirit, in the time when God is speaking directly to the soul, man longer need the services of a seer, a prophet or a fortune-teller, because God is speaking to his soul and good enough he can hear God speaks, provided that he does not close himself to it!

Inwardly the Holy Spirit is experienced differently by each man; and while one man could sense the power of the Holy Spirit as a subtle inner sensation revitalizing and reviving everything in his life, another man could experience the same power as a faint or luminous blue light accompanied by a mysterious sound that itself comes with a melody that soothes and heals! The sound of the Holy Spirit, a life-animating power of God, can still be heard even in the midst of chaos, and even as man is consumed and weighed down by his hatred for another and occupied with care and concerns for worldly gains!

Any man can hear this sound and experience this subtle luminous blue and sometimes purple light anytime and anywhere. As man draws closer to God through personal fellowship with the Word, he provokes open heaven after which he begins to invoke the streaming of the life-animating current, which is the power of the Holy Spirit. The Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit are all one with God, forming the often misunderstood concept of the Holy Trinity!

The Holy Spirit is God’s power in motion! Thus through the activeness in creation of the Holy Spirit from the time of the creation of man till date, the Word of God is ever alive, thus the name the ever living Word.

The subject of God is conceptual and personal to each individual. There is no universally accepted name for the One who made the Heaven and the earth and formed man in His own image and after His glorious likeness! Men did not sit down in a universally recognized assembly of divine authority to establish which name was more fitting and descriptive of God! So God does not have a universally accepted name, except the ones formulated and thought of by man! What man chooses to call God is personally to him, and it cannot be right or wrong.

God is in the air. He is everywhere. His name makes sense only in instances where you can easily identify it with your situation! But if it does not then God will only remain an abstract idea that makes little or no sense!Let’s use some analogies to buttress the point we are trying to raise. In the first analogy we will be looking at the experiences of a boiling egg and potato in the hands of boiling or hot water. From personal experience we know that boiling water hardens egg and softens potato.

Because of their individual experiences with hot or boiling water, it is likely that both potato and egg will come up with two different names for boiling water because it hardens one much in the same way it softens the other.

Let us assume that God is that boiling or hot water and both potato and egg are two human beings enjoying different experiences. One will refer to God as a hardener and the other will proclaim Him a softener! Both are right because their partial experiences do not sum up the whole of truth and are not lies either! They call God names that relate with their experiences and easily to be identified with!

Again let’s look at a legendary story: the story of the blind men and the elephant. This other analogy and example would most likely elucidate your understanding of the message.

The moral lesson from that story is that human beings have a tendency to always regard partial knowledge as the whole truth.

No man has ever seen God and interestingly none ever will! How then will man be able to describe God, much less with a word? Each man can only conceptualize what God looks like based on what he can make of his encounter and experience with the light and sound of God.

A word alone cannot describe God in clear term. An individual’s experiences in life only constitute a partial knowledge of God which is not enough to establish a proof or substantiate a claim. In the story of the elephant and the blind men, each of the men only touched a part of that large creature, but yet they sought to describe it on the basis of the parts they touched. Their descriptions of what an elephant looks like were in total disagreement on what an elephant is.

Only Jesus Christ has seen the Father; only the Son of God understands what God looks like and what He thinks of creation and man. No other human has and will ever see God; for God represents the pinnacle of existence, the highest level of life, while man is of a little rank than the Angels. Both God and man are of two different species that cannot mate, and that cannot merge with one another. So glaring a truth that man can only stand in awe of the majesty of God!

Man learns of his immediate environment with the aid of his senses which are programmed to capture only that which relates with the physical world. Thus understanding God is a task that is a way too big for the human brain with which man thinks and conceptualizes.

The difference too, between man and God, will never be resolved for God is divine and man is a spirit. On the pyramid of creation, divine is higher and at the apex and the spiritual is way lower and down. Whatever is on upper suppresses and dominates everything on the lower. The thought of God alone is enough to suppress the mind of men!

While man will run out of words to describe God with perfection and clarity, there are three attributes or qualities that sum up the nature of God. These qualities are:

1. God is Omnipotent

2. God is Omniscient

3. God is Omnipresent

As omnipotent Being, God is all-powerful, having unlimited power and able to do anything. By this we mean to say that there is nothing too hard for God to do. All power belongs to Him because God is the specialist of impossibility, one to whom nothing is too hard. No situation is too late for God to change or cause a change to take place.

As omniscient, God is all-knowing, having unlimited knowledge and understanding of life, nature and creation. He is the all-knowing God! By this we mean to say that there is nothing beyond the understanding and knowledge of the Most High God. In other words, God knows all things.

And as omnipresent, God is present everywhere and at the same time. This is indeed remarkable and at the same time awe-inspiring. To be present everywhere means that man can encounter God anywhere at any time, and God’s presence can be felt anywhere at any time. Nothing could be more thought-provoking! Understanding this ( that God is everywhere and not just within the walls of a temple or sanctuary) holds for man a form of spiritual help and support. It also grows one’s confidence, build up faith knowing that God is everywhere and can hear you no matter where you are, and most interestingly, whatever the hour. This is all possible because God is not bound by space or time. God is limitless. Above all, God is consistent, for He does not change with time and civilisation.

He is the same God that caused manna to fall from the sky; that God that parted the red sea so that the Israelite could walk through a dry land. He is that same God that caused water to spring forth from a rock. He stilled the storm in the past.  Fire fell from heaven at His command. He brought forth a soul without the normal and usual biological protocols. He did things that marvelled the greatest of magicians and called to question the importance of astrology and science as a whole. He has been rendering useless the theories and postulations of science and mysticism. He can still do what He could do and He will still be able to do what He has done!

Walking in the knowledge of the greatness of God, means walking in spiritual freedom and prosperity. When one understands the greatness of God and the fact that He is not bound by space or time, one also understands that God has ears everywhere and is ever attentive to the calls and cries of those who recognize Him in all that they do, for whoever seeks God finds Him! This is not just saying something to fill up a blank space. It is rather a fundamental principle of life.

Jesus Christ Himself said, “Seek and you shall find…” The Scriptures also admonish us to seek God while He may be found, which means that while it may not be too late for God to reach us, it may be too late for us to reach God! There is time for everything, according to the Holy Book.

There is an unseen barrier between God and subsequent creation of which man is a part. This barrier reflects the prevailing atmosphere around the human soul, and depending on what he does, a man’s barrier is either dark or transparent, in which God’s help may or may not reach him at the point when his need is great!

In the Bible book of Isaiah this is explained in a much clear manner, in that it is said that God is made unreachable by sin. Sin therefore causes our barrier to be dark, thereby preventing penetration from the luminous distances.

Life is programmed, if I may, to follow a certain pattern, and has been designed such that a man can only receive what he gives out willingly. God does not interfere in how life goes about its normal and natural course. And that God does not interfere in life but sustains it, only means that He is a perfect God who does not enjoy  suppressing free thinking! Freedom for man to do as it pleases him was first granted to man by God at the time of creation, and every society must respect above all others, the freedom of speech and movement. Tyranny, for this reason, is a devilish movement that must be resisted by those who have good conscience! Tyranny anywhere is tyranny everywhere.

Oppressive government has become illegitimate with time and should be considered as such, otherwise people have given up their rights without even a protest. Man was created to be free from suppressive and oppressive government, and any society that does not encourage freedom of speech and movement, should not exist. God does not seek slaves but those who can make use of their minds without the constraint of necessity or fate.

God is a wonderful wonder, a beauty of the beautiful. One who has conquered time and eternity cannot be described in one word alone.