PERCEIVING GOD

Perceiving God

I see a young man standing in the sun at a bus stop. He stands with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He has a pleasant face and he looks purposeful. He is of university age. He is travelling locally so he may attend a technical college. He is living in the moment. His mind may be on what lies ahead in his day, an assignment, a project, a person with whom he will spend some time. I surmise that he is not thinking, "How did I get into this world?" "Why am I here?" Big picture thinking for this fellow as the bus moves toward him, is probably concerned with nothing more extensive than what he will do after graduation? 

Yet, seated in my car, I pass him and my eyes are multi-tasking, observing the road ahead, vehicles attempting to merge, the speed I am travelling, the time on my car clock, and the blue sky that expands forever. I am projecting my thoughts into the frontiers of space and to the metaphysical reaches of origins. I am a man with a faith but fleetingly I seek to consider how a person without faith can imagine the genesis of all things.

I think of the other 7.125 billion humans on this planet, 2.1 billion of whom are overweight like me. Still we expect to live 70 years on average, and that's that. We will be gone. Others will take our place just as they presently are doing at a rate of 1.2% annually, which is why only twenty years ago we were 6.5 billion people. Forty years ago there were only 3.999 billion people on earth, and while we have almost doubled the world population, we still depend completely and solely upon this biosphere and minerals of this sphere. I marvel at my earth home being one of the four terrestrial planets in our Solar System, yet it is the densest planet and the third from the Sun, and earth is the only planet that is known to accommodate life. Mercury, Venus and Mars have not supported life. But why here on this earth and since when were we here, and who or what started this?

This is what my mind is doing as I drive to my gym to keep this body healthy for a few more years.

INTERSEX FISH & REASON FOR REDEMPTION

U.S. Geological Survey results of intersex fish in America were disclosed this week indicating that one out of five male black bass in American river basins have egg cells growing inside their sexual organs. It is a confirmation of widespread fish feminization that has been reported in recent years. The finding is linked to women's birth control pills and other hormone treatments that seep into rivers.

Before I offer further details I will shine an incomparable light on this news story. I need your momentary indulgence. The Bible provides the wattage with a fascinating statement.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Romans 8:18-27 (New International Version)

Humanity is frequently arrogant or inconsiderate with respect to treatment of creation. The 6% of 1500 male freshwater fish that have become feminized is just the latest evidence of our carelessness in creation. Endocrine-disrupting hormones such as estrogen from medicines are he current link to intersex fish which is a general warning about what some experts see as a wider problem of endocrine disruptors in the environment.

Aboriginal spirituality often demonstrates greater reverence for what God has made than do Christian faiths. The redemption spoken of earlier assumes that character and attitudes and actions change when God recreates a person through faith. Creation is frustrated by the blunders and faults of humanity, and the greatest expectation is that this redemption will one day be completed and then creation too will be liberated.

The apostle Paul writing to the Christians in first century Rome reminded them that their lives were not all about survival here. In fact their lives were future oriented and in order to posses that prospect each of them would experience the fulfillment of the spiritual transition that had already begun inside them by their faith. The word used for this process is ‘redemption.’ This redemption upon completion will include believers’ physical bodies and that event will be an indescribable liberation. That human emancipation will affect the welfare of all creatures and toward that hope all of creation yearns.

WHAT DO THE EFFECTS TELL US ABOUT THE CAUSE?

What would a God be like who was responsible for the created universe in which we creatures live. If God cannot be seen, it would be reasonable to think that we could understand God by examination of his creation. Creation would inform us that this God’s authority and power is not merely formidable but supreme. Further, this supremacy would be infinite which would infer that God stands alone without peer. Creation operates within cycles of time and parameters of space, so God would have to exist outside both space and time, that is, God would need to be super-natural. In other words, God would not be limited by space which God created, so God would be inexplicably present everywhere. Therefore, God would be immaterial, and God would be time-less. That would also insure that God would be change-less. The creation of personality insists that God is personal because the impersonal cannot produce personality. Creation speaks of purpose rather than randomness so God would have to be the deliberate cause. That would explain why moral law was integral to God’s creation because God loves what he has made.

MIND BEFORE MATTER

Dissimilar to other creatures, the human has capacity to reason that his very existence points to a supreme power or being. Beyond mere instinct, the human creature thinks. She thinks and concludes her own existence is reality rather than illusion. She is something, a something extant in a universe of planets and stars. The universe too, is something rather than nothing. Convinced by thinking that her existence is not an illusion, she can reason that she created herself, or she must choose to believe she exists as a creation of an eternal universe or an eternal power/God. An atheist cannot evade faith, since if he will not believe in eternal God, he must believe in eternal universe. With either alternative, mystery remains profound, unexplainable. Did matter simply always exist? Or, did a Mind exist before matter?

ATHEISTS & BELIEVERS CONTEST OVER GOD

Does God really exist? Is there proof? Is there truly a way of knowing? Is there a conclusive argument for God’s existence? Intelligent people are positioned on both sides of these questions. Atheists have become militant within the past one hundred years. Believers have become impassioned evangelists.
Atheists cannot help but to demean believers and to depreciate their beliefs. Disciples cannot help but to love non-believers and to pray for their conversions. Either atheists are correct and believers are irrational, delusional purveyors of wish fulfillment thinking, or Christians have placed their confidence in the supremely logical fact that God is the creator of something as remarkable as an expanding universe into which he has seeded a race of free creatures with whom he chooses to engage because he is love.

IMITATORS OF GOD SPEAKS NOT OF DRAMA BUT REDEMPTION

The Bible speaks about likeness to God as something which Christians desire and seek, expect and experience, and hope and live for. (Take a peek beyond this point)

PARADISE WAS LOST

The Bible tells the tale that something terrible happened within humanity. The Reflection Of God Became Impaired By Sin. That happened in the paradise lost story, when Adam and Eve got the whole ball rolling. Like a snowball on a hill, it got larger and large affecting us all. Mankind today is only remotely like the ideal humanity portrayed by the psalmist in Psalm 8. The original Adam and Eve was ideal humanity. The human possessed the God-given capacity of self-determination, which meant that he and she had freedom to choose to obey God or to disobey. To disobey would be a violation of the relationship with God. When the original humans from whom we came, chose to disobey God, that act of rebellion defaced the image of God in the human and has affected the entire race. Long after creation, Solomon observed the tragedy that man did not remain as he was created. "This only I have found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes" (Ecclesiastes 7:29).

HOW WHAT IS GOOD TURNS SOUR

Are you ever shocked by evening news broadcasts, specially to see that Armstrong used rugs. Some programmer blew it. Yet truthfully, perhaps when watching news, you are genuinely saddened by the repeating citation of deceit, dishonesty, thoughtlessness, selfishness, greed, immorality, anger, hatred, hostility, violence? All of this bad news comes to us after several thousand years of humanity learning how to be bad and mad and evil. But I am still thinking about God’s creation of first man and first woman and wondering how it could happen that humans brand new to life, would do such bad stuff?

Well, God wasn’t surprised. We cannot surprise God because he knows all things, but you and I still process information temporally and gradually, so consider this.

Within hours of the creation, what had been “good”, turned sour. The first man and first woman disobeyed an express commandment of God and as a result of that they were sentenced with eventual death and immediate separation from God. They now would surely die and humanity now forfeited the privilege of dwelling in the paradise known as Eden where everything was supplied. Their disobedience was called sin and understandably, God’s holiness was hypersensitive to sin. God would not dwell with sinners. Now forced to live outside the garden, humanity would find that it had to toil in order to obtain food yet the land and the climate would not easily cooperate. More distressing than that was the sense of abandonment that the first humans experienced, because they were effectively cut off from God, yet they wanted relationship with him, because relationship with God defines who you are.