The God of Many Faces

Don: God is the God of all mankind, and His body is the temple—the portal to God. How does this affect communal prayer in a humanity that manifestly holds multiple—perhaps thousands—of different views of God?

Men and women throughout history have believed in the existence of a supernatural force or entity. It follows that they have wanted to locate that entity, find out how it works, and use it to their advantage. The search for God is more than mere curiosity, however. It is hardwired into us, in the form of the inner light placed there by God. We become intoxicated at the mere thought of having God-like power at our beck and call.

In a way, Adam and Eve had God at their beck and call before the Fall. But they wanted to wield the power for themselves—they wanted to become like God and know what He knew. They wanted knowledge of Good and Evil in order to turn that knowledge to their advantage. The Babelonians wanted it as well, and built a tower to try to reach it. God apparently thought they might succeed in their singular common purpose, so he thwarted them by confusing their communications, thereby sowing misunderstanding among them and disuniting them.

Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)

Speech is the bedrock of community. A confusion of languages breaks up a hitherto singular society like Babel and causes a diaspora. It disperses not just people, but also people’s formerly singular view of God—which was what God apparently wanted. The singular view, the oneness with God that Adam and Eve experienced before the Fall, is replaced by disparate and competing views. It is the equivalent of death, as God warned Adam and Eve when he told them if they ate the forbidden fruit they would surely die. To lose oneness with God is to die a spiritual death.

Following the dispersal of the Babelonians, spiritual truth was a factor of birthplace and culture. I think this was deliberate on God’s part. It ensured that humankind would become so intoxicated with their God-like knowledge that they would use it to disastrous effect. Over the course of history, humankind has revealed this propensity several times by taking actions they believe for a certainty God would appreciate and condone. If all of humankind had the same view of God, such actions would prove catastrophic for all humanity because humanity just does not possess divinity and cannot therefore know what God thinks—as Isaiah also makes clear. God mitigated total catastrophe by dispersing our views of Him.

The way back to oneness with God is not therefore through seeking a better understanding of God, but through seeking a better understanding of ourselves. We have completely misjudged this, ever since the Fall.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:8-12)

Adam had lost the ability to assess himself and his needs. God’s assessment of Adam’s needs (Adam had no need for clothes) were diametrically opposite to Adam’s self-assessment (he needed clothes). We are in greater need of God’s grace than we think, but we also have more access to God’s grace than we think we deserve.

The message and the mission of Jesus was to reveal God’s goodness, grace, and mercy and expose our blindness of these attributes. Jesus repeatedly exposes us as sinners in need of God’s grace. Instead of seeking a more complete picture of God and seeking to turn His power to our advantage, which is our natural tendency, we need rather to seek a more complete picture of ourselves. When we see ourselves as God sees us, then we embrace the grace we so desperately need. God seeks and finds us; we don’t need to seek Him. The Parable of the Prodigal Son makes this very point, in the last sentence of the following passage:

And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living. Now when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him. But when he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough bread, but I am dying here with hunger! (Luke 15:13-17)

His way home, back to his father, depended on the son’s “coming to his senses”—assessing his true condition. The woman at the well, in the parable of that name, had a similar awakening of her sense of self, after Jesus led her to it by revealing her secret life and offering her never-ending grace in the metaphor of water. She said:

“Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is it?” (John 4:29)

As it was with the woman at the well, with Adam, and with the Prodigal Son, so it is with us: Only divinity can reveal our true selves. God seeks to take away our fig leaves, our filthy rags of supposed righteousness, and replace them with his robe of light. This is illustrated again in the story of a woman made self-aware, and thereby healed of her affliction, by touching the divine garment. The story also illustrates that even most casual encounter with Jesus—the mere touch of a garment, not a word exchanged—exposes the truth about ourselves:

A woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years, and had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was not helped at all, but rather had grown worse— after hearing about Jesus, she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she thought, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well.” Immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Immediately Jesus, perceiving in Himself that the power proceeding from Him had gone forth, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My garments?” And His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing in on You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” And He looked around to see the woman who had done this. But the woman fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your affliction.” (Mark 5:24-34)

The stories of Nicodemus, Zaccheus, the Ethiopian eunuch, and many more illustrate how brief and casual the encounter is. Perhaps the most poignant is the brief encounter with Jesus of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus, one of whom becomes self-aware and admits his sin. It shows us that accurate self-assessment and acceptance of God’s grace is never too ate, even at the 11th hour:

One of the criminals who were hanged there was hurling abuse at Him, saying, “Are You not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!” But the other answered, and rebuking him said, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!” And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)

The ultimate scriptural treatment of self-recognition was provided by the apostle Paul:

But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned before, but you lacked opportunity. Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. Nevertheless, you have done well to share with me in my affliction.

You yourselves also know, Philippians, that at the first preaching of the gospel, after I left Macedonia, no church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving but you alone; for even in Thessalonica you sent a gift more than once for my needs. Not that I seek the gift itself, but I seek for the profit which increases to your account. But I have received everything in full and have an abundance; I am amply supplied, having received from Epaphroditus what you have sent, a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well-pleasing to God. And my God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:10-19)

Are our multiple views of God His deliberate will, and are they essential to our spiritual wellbeing? Should we seek to know and understand God, or seek to know and understand ourselves instead? This is not New Age thinking about a God within to be worshiped; it is the opposite: Enhanced recognition of our deep-seated need for God’s grace and our comfort at knowing that it is available.

David: I am not so sure that we seek God as that we seek to understand life—our existence. Many of us may conclude that we exist because there is a God who created us, but I think there is a critical difference between seeking God and seeking to understand life; or, at least, between how we conduct our search. A search for a transcendent God is futile by definition: We wouldn’t know Him if we found Him! And in any case, he apparently doesn’t want us to try. So we are left with seeking to understand our own existence, but not its originator.

John: Abraham and David lived in relative isolation. Jonah was running away from God. So how did they find God? They didn’t: God found them.

Donald: I was reminded by a pastor last week that God is the one knocking on our door, waiting for us to open it. The only handle is on our side of the door. We’re the only ones who can open it. A relationship with God is not a team sport: It’s a personal matter. That being so, do we need to share a common language to address God?

Don: The idea that God would have a singular way of revealing Himself seems at odds with his deliberate lack of clarity about Himself. Scripture has a confusion of views of God, and we spend all our time trying to sort out the confusion, when that seems not to be what God wants.

John: We have a choice. God told me not to work on cars because I treat them as idols.

Robin: We have different cultures, nations, languages. Our relationship with God may be singular, yet we still have to serve, and we cannot do that alone—we cannot serve other people without other people! Other people help us to learn and refine our service. Our relationship with God is more than just at the one-on-one, personal interrelationship, level. We are told not to hoard God’s love and grace; and we must, therefore, interact with others. Some people may have closed their minds to Jesus because they are anti-Semitic. We must adapt our human interactions to take account of differences in culture and character.

John: To label someone is to create a stumbling block.

Kiran: The story of the Pharisee and the publican going to the temple can be tied to the idea of God knocking at the door of their hearts, but only one (the publican) recognized his need to respond to the knock and open the door. Like the Pharisee, we won’t open the door as long as we think we are righteous. To recognize one’s sinful state and one’s needs, and then to recognize one’s inability to deal with one’s sin and meet one’s needs alone, is what prompts one to open the door. The sin and the need are what units all of us.

Anonymous: The story of the widow who had tried unsuccessfully to be cured of her diseases illustrates how people will often try opening every other door before turning to the door with God behind it.

John: God knows when we are really sick and at the end of our tether.

David: Crisis is a driver of common humanity—of community. We congregate culturally and religiously, but God seems not to want that. Jesus talked only of “two or three people gathered together in His name”—he did not seem to envision stadiums filled with thousands of worshipers. The relationship with God is personal. The search for meaning in our lives is personal. There is no point in a church or a religion seeking a relationship with God or seeking a reason for its existence. The door on which Jesus knocks asking to be let in is not the door of the church. It is the door to one’s own heart. To open that door is to open it to love, mercy, compassion, justice, and grace. God wants us to pursue these attributes, not to pursue Him. All this is to say that religion has no part to play in our relationship with God, in my opinion.

Donald: The metaphor of Christ knocking on the door suggests that Christ wants to enter our soul, our being. But we flip that when we say we are going to go to His church to seek Him. We are trying to balance two things. Like the Amish, the Masai tribe of Africa have chosen to retain many of their primitive old ways, their culture; but the Masai have no problem balancing their way with the modern way of life—of holding two different viewpoints. “I have two hands,” one told me, “I can balance two things at one time.” We seem unwilling to try that—we want to focus on balancing one thing at a time—on just one viewpoint. And we expect the rest of the world to see things in our singular way.

John: Churches often treat outsiders with suspicion. There is no trust, yet trust—in God—is the whole point.

Don: Most of us hold our religious views based on our background and culture. A few come from other cultures to accept our religious views, but they are relatively a rarity, which is not surprising, since it is a huge change. More people may change denominations within a religion, but those are relatively small changes. The question is whether there is a “rightness” that must be maintained as certain? To pair (as we do) that certainty of the rightness of one’s viewpoint with salvation, is very unsettling. Religions and their institutions and denominations have never been shy about pronouncing the truth of their views. It’s not that I think we need to apologize for religion (indeed, I think it does much good), but I do think religions need to guard against arrogance, to be humble about striving to attain righteousness. In his talk with the woman at the well, Jesus ignored her religious questions—where to worship, etc.—and cut through to the heart of the matter (her self-awareness), but that does not mean there is no role for religion. I think it is legitimate and good to hold a viewpoint and offer it to others, but with humility, not arrogance. Not: “This is the only way”, but rather: “This is my way. It might not work for you, but it worked for me.”

David: The question then would be whether the grace and salvation that comes with a genuine conversion to belief in God comes from a church missionary, or from God? I think Jesus wants us all, each and individually, to be His missionaries, not church missionaries. Can they be both? Perhaps, but they only have to be one.

Robin: What we call the church is not what Jesus described as His church. He said that He would build a church on His own rock; He did not give it a name. When we say “the church,” we tend to mean our denomination, but that’s not what Jesus meant. Church is just people getting together to follow Jesus’s example and do good in the world.

Donald: A personal relationship is paramount.

David: The search for God is personal, but the search to understand existence is a communal endeavor, through the community of science.

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