GOD is an Undocumented Alien

Many years ago, I sat in a small apartment with a Russian family that was new to our country. In time, they would become precious members of our church. That day however, they were just confused and disoriented. The grandparents had been in prison for many years. The father had served time as well. They had been persecuted for their Pentecostal faith. Now, at last, they were allowed to go free – to America!

But the father was upset. As it turns out, the church here was not at all like church in Russia. This particular day, the divisive issue was our communion service.

“Everyone drank the wine from those little cups – like shot glasses that unbelievers drink whisky from. Why? Why was there no chalice?”

I explained how Protestant Christianity in America had continually changed the order of traditional worship and how this had affected the way we received communion in “low church Protestantism.”

I thought this might help: “Americans get grossed out with a chalice because it requires them to drink from the same cup.”

“But the alcohol content helps with germs and all, “he replied.

“Well, yes, but we used unfermented grape juice. It wasn’t real wine.”

When my words were translated, my new Russian brother become very agitated.

“What? What? The Lord Jesus used wine. Passover used wine. All Christians in every country and in every century have used wine. Why gave you the permission to change what Jesus used into what you think it ought to be?”

I explained about the Prohibition and how many American churches had decided then to use grape juice. I tried to say it didn’t matter. But this was a man who had gone to labor camps rather than to submit to Russian officials. He paid dearly for taking a stand for the faith and here he was in a new country where Christians seemed to be changing the faith to suit ourselves.

He wasn’t going to have any of it!

My Russian friend was an alien – not undocumented; he had permission to be here – but he was an alien to our country and its ways, including the ways of his fellow believers in this county.

Of course, we were alien to him as well. That is what culture shock is about; entering into a culture’s alien aspect. It can be an utterly disorienting experience.

This is one of the most important concepts a believer has about God. That He is alien, strange, and “other.”

And yes, God is indeed undocumented. He does not recognize or honor our borders because He was here before our government came into being.

Why is it important to recognize God’s “otherness?”

Let me explain.

Ancient Hebrews and Greeks would not have understood our English word “God.”

The reason we use that word to describe the Being we worship is simple: early English-speaking Christians employed their language’s traditional word that roughly corresponded to the Hebrew concept of “Yahweh,” or “Elohim.”

Unfortunately, modern English-speakers now use that same word, “god,” to refer to any deity of any religion. The result is that our word “god” does not communicate the same thing to everyone.

Socrates insisted that the first step of any profitable discussion is to define the terms to be used.

Since we don’t want to upset Socrates, let’s stop and define the word “God.”

First, Christians believe that God has a personality. He is not a borderless mist, or some undefined, impersonal force of nature.

God has a personality.

We can communicate with Him.

We can know Him.

Once we believe that God has a personality, we naturally want to know, “What is that personality like?”

The Bible says that the essence of God’s personality is a quality, called “holiness.”

Being holy means that God doesn't lie.

He doesn't cheat.

He doesn't go back on His word.

Even more importantly though, the Hebrew word kadosh, which translates into English a “holy,” actually means “other, or “alien.”

Saying that God is “Holy,” means that He is not like us. He is not like anything we can, or could ever, know.

God is beyond our comprehension.

He is “awe-inspiring.”

All we can know about God are those things He has revealed to us. However, even those things are often difficult to grasp.

Then, beyond all that we do know about God, there is infinitely more that we do not know and cannot know. Talking about God leads us into an encounter with mystery.

Acknowledging the mystery keeps us from forming a static mental image of God. Mystery stretches us toward God rather than limiting God to our level or mental comprehension.

When we deny that God is “beyond finding out,” we make a mental or even a physical image and then call that “god.”

The Bible calls this natural inclination idolatry and strictly forbids it.

The problem with this is that we all have idols. Walking with God involves a continual process of destroying our idols. We will never come to know the real God if we keep admiring all the substitutes we have made!

This brings us to worship.

Since we cannot figure God out, we must worship Him.

We worship God “in the beauty of holiness,” as the Bible puts it.

The "beauty of holiness" is our awareness that God’s otherness has ceased being a problem for us and has actually become attractive to us.

Jesus tells us (in Matthew 6:9) that recognizing God’s otherness is the first step in real communication with Him. That’s why we begin prayer by recognizing this aspect of God’s character: “Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed (Holy) be Thy Name!”

Loving God involves first acknowledging His otherness, then delighting in it, and finally moving toward it.

OMG: Jehovah is Intolerant

We are reading in the One Year Bible about how Moses persuaded Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. As the drama unfolds, it becomes obvious that the gods of Egypt are being humiliated. Each god is defeated in the area of his own specialty as Moses keeps on proclaiming God’s message.

At the end of the game, the score is:

Jehovah 10; Rah and Osiris 0.

Our scriptures tick off a lot of people. They don’t like the exclusivity that God demands. They think he should share the stage with Thor, Vishnu and Aphrodite.

He doesn’t care.

He demands a class by himself. He refuses to share the stage.

Why?

Because He claims that when He made everything, there was no one else around. He looked for Thor but Thor wasn’t there. So He had to make it all by Himself.

He’s the creator.

Alone, or ECHOD, as the Hebrew puts it.

When I think about how God created the world, I have a mental picture of this cosmic fountain spewing out quasars and photons, parrots and giraffes, oceans and meteorites. I think of creation as God’s nature overflowing itself, a mighty flood of being, pouring out from the Godhead to become the visible and invisible universe.

It’s a nice and inspiring picture, don’t you think?

However, before we get too carried away with my artistic imagination, we have to stop for a moment.

Christian faith teaches two vital truths about our Creator and about His creation.

First, Christians believe that the creation reveals the nature of God, much in the same way as a piece of art reveals the personality of the artist who creates it.

Secondly, Christians believe that although creation flows out from God, it is not, strictly speaking, a part of God.

These two points are extremely important for Christian theology.

“Why,” you ask?

Because these are precisely the points in which Judaism and Christianity differ from other religious and philosophical systems of the world. We define reality differently.

Some religions teach that all the pieces of creation are parts of God. This means that the created universe must be something like “God’s body.”

We call that belief pantheism.

(Greek again! The word pan means “everything.” Theos means God. Hence: Pantheism, meaning “God in everything.”)

Christians do not see reality in this way.

We believe that God has granted to each part of His creation the dignity of an independent existence.

That doesn’t mean that creation no longer needs God. It just means that God is not a great watchmaker who creates His machine, winds it up, and then leaves the scene.

Not at all!

God is not the type of a Father who abandons his household. God eternally and constantly upholds and sustains His creation. He keeps giving breath and being to all His creatures, even to those who do not follow Him.

When an artist paints a scene and hangs it on the wall, we know that the painting is not a part of her in the sense that her arm or foot is a part of her. But we do say, “she really put herself into this work” Or, “Look, that could only be hers!” That is what the Bible means when it says things like, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament His handiwork.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could stand at the edge of the universe and look at all of God’s handiwork from that vantage point! If we could look at all things, angels and archangels; all the company of heaven; at butterflies and even single-cell life forms, finally even to the non-living parts of creation; what exactly would we see?

We would see a manifestation of God’s character and personality.

St. Paul says this in Romans, chapter one.

In that passage Paul tells us that human beings can understand even God’s attributes, simply by observing His creation.

(Maybe you will want to stop and read that chapter. Its concepts are very important for Christian theology.)

A few years ago, I was praying on a Florida beach at midnight. As I looked out at the waves, bathed in silver moonlight, I was suddenly gripped with a great reverence for God. I began to pray something like this: “I have always known you as my Savior. From my childhood I have sang about how you walk with me, talk with me and tell me I am your own. But tonight I worship you as my Creator, my Father, and source of all that is.”

That night my intimacy with God deepened.

I came to know God in a new way.

As you can see, we keep returning to the subject of worship.

That’s what real theology does; it leads to intimacy with God. It helps us know Him. It leads us to worship Him.

For all these reasons, it is important to know God as Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

Today is the feast day of St. John Chrysostom. He was a great pastor and his age’s most famous preacher. Back in the fourth century, the emperors were very powerful people and Bishop John pastored the church where the emperor attended. When the emperor ordered a synagogue burned with people inside, the bishop publicly refused to serve him communion. This resulted in the bishop getting kicked out of his church.

Years later, the population rose up and demanded their pastor be returned. Bishop John agreed but said that he would still refuse the emperor communion until there had been a public repentance of his sins.

God is not our Heavenly buddy. He is the Sovereign Lord. He created all things, visible and invisible.

Knowing Him in this way fills us with awe and reverence. We stand before One who is incomprehensibly great.

When you know a God like that, Thor and Osiris are not very big deals.

Not to mention a mere pharaoh or emperor!

A Bride Named Zoe

In my last blog, I said that God creates by making things and by “begetting” children.

All human beings are God’s children in a certain sense, simply because he created them. However, when God “saves” a person, He puts into him or her something of His very nature. God creates all men and women. He makes “saved” man or women into sons and daughters. That’s how God “begets”.

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, reminds us that there are two Greek words for life, “Bios” and “Zoe.” The difference between these two words describe this difference between “making” and “begetting.”

All living human beings have Bios; only believers have Zoe.

God gives a human being Zoe, which the New Testament describes as life everlasting or life more abundantly. When that happens, we say that we are “born again.”

This is New Testament language.

1 Peter, 1:23, says that when we are born again, we are “begotten, not of corruptible seed, but the incorruptible, even the Word of God, which lives and abides forever.”

The Greek word for “seed” in that passage sperma.

Read that verse again, substituting the word “sperma” for the English word “seed.”

Now think of the new birth in this light: we are born again, not of corruptible, or earthly sperma, by of the Word of God, which endures forever.

Reading it that way drives home the fact that when the Word of God finds lodging in our hearts, it initiates a process of regeneration. It imparts the very life force, the very nature of God into us.

In his first epistle (1 John 3:2), St. John says this:


“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”


The apostle John seems to be saying that although believers know that they are God’s children, they do not yet fully grasp what this implies. We only know that in some way, and at some point in the future, we will be like Him!

Children often look like their fathers. God plans for us to look like Him because HE is our Father.

We have such crude ways of imagining this.

On today’s date, in 1858, Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" was played for the first time. The occasion was the wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Victoria, to the crown prince of Prussia. Since then, how many millions of brides have marched down the aisle to that music?

Do all those brides know what that their lives are drastically changing? Do they know that they will be a different person in twenty years that they would have been had they married someone else?

Yesterday, in the One Year Bible, we read how Jacob prophesied over each of his sons. He described what their descendants would be like after his death. How did he know these things? Because he was their father and had, for their entire lives, observed them carefully. He was concerned with the attitudes, characteristics and behaviors he had observed in each of them and how these would keep impact them and their descendants.

Jacob was fathering his elderly children, even though he was about to die. The reason for this is clear: covenant is about the people who come after us, about the quality of our descendants’ spiritual lives.

Jacob knew what millions of brides have not known, marching down the aisle to Mendelssohn’s music: our choices create huge shifts in the history of the world. As God’s children, we are responsible for those choices and for the impact of those choices. We are stewards and trustees of our family, the covenant and the power of God’s life within us.

Today, the Old Testament reading in the One Year Bible leaps ahead four hundred years, where we can observe the impact of the actions of Jacob’s sons upon the future.

How important it is for us to honor the beginning stages of things. As the music is playing and we are enthralled with the festivities, we must remember that the real work begins the following day, when we must remain true to the course of action we have committed ourselves to take.

In parenting, being disciples, taking up the responsibilities of citizenship – in all the joys and labor of adult life, a force moves through us that renews the world and “fits us for heaven.”

The Greeks called it ZOE; Jesus called it Eternal Life.