the God in our midst

The Lord said to Moses, “Soon you will lie down with your ancestors. Then this people will begin to prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in their midst, the gods of the land into which they are going; they will forsake me, breaking my covenant that I have made with them. My anger will be kindled against them in that day. I will forsake them and hide my face from them; they will become easy prey, and many terrible troubles will come upon them.

In that day they will say, ‘Have not these troubles come upon us because our God is not in our midst?’ On that day I will surely hide my face on account of all the evil they have done by turning to other gods. Deuteronomy 31:16-18 (NRSV)

We are firmly embraced in the arms of a world crisis, and many a Christian pundit will try to convince us that “. . . these troubles [have] come upon us because our God is not in our midst.” True, I firmly believe with others that many of our problems would vanish if we all carried a God-consciousness into our everyday, i.e. that there are over-arching principles of love, compassion, justice, mercy, patience, kindness which don’t brook compromise . . . well, you get the point. (Apostle Paul’s list includes: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22).

I don’t know what image Moses had in his mind when he contemplated his god. Or Abraham, or Jacob, or Malachi and Isaiah, for that matter. We might add the apostles, Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of Jesus, Pontius Pilate or Billy Graham. What seems clear from the Old Testament is that its writers believed that God was capable of presence “on the ground,” as it were, or could turn his back and walk away. Perhaps it’s already in that sensibility that the anthropomorphic (human-like) god conception was born.

In any case, the faith that descended from Abraham to us, somewhere, somehow punted God up to a distant heaven and made of him a character like the gods of the Greeks and the Romans in mythology. But is humanity a chessboard on which a bearded superhuman amuses himself from up above? I don’t think so.

“ . . . that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthew 5:45, KJV).” This passage from the Sermon on the Mount and other references (See for instance John 4:24) as well as our observations and our science tell us that God is not of the type that hurls lightning bolts from Mount Olympus.

What we do know that Moses, the prophets, the apostles and most people generally didn’t, or don’t, is that when we say that we see the Christ in others, or that there’s a bit of the image of God in everyone, we are far closer to the truth than we had imagined. The incarnation of Christ as a human being seems sometimes to be lost on us. It profoundly affects my image of God so that I tend more to see God as dwelling in a segment of human consciousness that is the knowledge of good and evil, and which creates in us the template for a life patterned by Christ, a life that echoes Paul’s “Fruits of the Spirit.” We choose to live in that consciousness or not. It’s not measured by going to church on Sunday; we know that but aren’t sure what Paul’s measurement of “good” means in our time and in our short lives.

Both testaments refer to the objects of idol worship as “Gods.” If we had decided not to use that term but to speak about YHWH, or ADONAI, or ELOHIM or an English, French, German, or whatever equivalent, maybe the “God as Spirit,” dwelling in the personal and collective consciousness of our fellow humans would be clearer to us.

Just a guess.

And now for one of the scariest passages in all scripture: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

(I Corinthians 6:19)”