Truth VI

Don: Our discussion of the truth about god seems to have led us to conclude that it has elements both of knowledge (“data points”) and of faith. On the one hand, if the truth about god is to be a timeless truth, it cannot be bound by culture or by age; as we read in Romans last week, it can be seen and understood clearly through observation of everything that has been created. As well, Mankind’s mere existence, from the beginning of time, must have somehow allowed some sort of recognition of the truth about god.

On the other hand, if “clearly seeing” what has been made is a criterion for knowing the truth about god, then what we know about god must have increased in line with the science-driven increase in our observation and understanding of nature and how the world works.

It seems, nevertheless, that the truth about god must be approached with great humility. Furthermore, our physical fragility and mortality limits our ability to apprehend something which, being immortal and indestructible, is beyond the realm of our physical experience and beyond the realm of observation and data. It is not, however, beyond the realm of spiritual experience. John 4:24: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

It seems that spiritual experience does not depend on data, but that truth can be apprached at least in part through data. I would argue that if god wanted the knowledge of him to be data-driven alone, he would have established a dataset pointing unambiguously to the truth about him that would have been accessible in all ages and all cultures. The fact that this does not exist leaves us with the dichotomy of discerning how much can be known spiritually and how much can be known physically, scientifically.

The whole of the Book of Job deals essentially with this dichotomy, and it ends with god passing judgment on human views of the truth about him. It confirms that Job’s view is correct, while the views held by Job’s three friends is incorrect. Job 42:7: It came about after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, that the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has.”

A careful examination of the Book of Job might therefore reveal some insights into the truth about god, as well as about the untruth about god. Although god said Job’s view was correct, it seems far from complete, as we shall discuss. In essence, the difference between the two views is that Job acknowledged, the transcendent, omnipotent nature of god while his friends held god to a god of “cause and effect” who could therefore be understood through observation of causes and effects—through data.

Job’s dilemma is that the data often seem to be at odds with such preconceived notions.  It troubled Job greatly and indeed is at the core of his discourse with his friends about the truth about god. His friends insist that the data just needed adjusting so that god would fit their preconceived image of him. Job’s insight was that it was impossible for humans to conceive an image of god; that god was not bound by our notions of cause and effect and could do whatever he wants to do; that in the end, god is goodness but his ways are not Man’s ways and god is thus at strong risk of being misunderstood.

Job’s defiant proclamation is that even though he cannot understand god and even though he feels he is being oppressed by god, yet he will trust in him. In Job 42 god lays down the important concept that the greatest obstacle to discovery of the truth about him is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

In Job 38 and 39, god answers Job with questions of his own (as is typical of god throughout the scriptures). God’s questions to Job are not intended to be answered but are designed to give him insight. And it works. Job 38:1-2:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said,

“Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?”

This is the problem with Job’s friends: They sought to counsel Job but their knowledge of the truth about god was illusory and therefore nonexistent. God went on to ask Job a series of specific questions (Job 38:3-9):

“Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
“On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?

“Or who enclosed the sea with doors
When, bursting forth, it went out from the womb;
When I made a cloud its garment
And thick darkness its swaddling band,…

This goes on for many, many more verses (through the end of the chapter then the whole of chapters 39 through 41). Job’s response, in chapter 42, is total surrender to the will of god.

Job shows us that the truth about god is a paradox that we can never fully understand; a truth too wonderful to be fully known, yet not so wonderful that it cannot be known in part. This reminds us of 1 Corinthians 13, where we are told (verses 9-12):

For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.

We cannot know the whole truth, but we can have a “working knowledge” of it. Job said in 42:2-6:

“I know that You can do all things,
And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.
‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
‘Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask You, and You instruct me.’
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
But now my eye sees You;
Therefore I retract,
And I repent in dust and ashes.”

Job seems to be saying that there is a truth about god that can be appreciated by the senses, can be seen by the eye and heard by the ear, but that insight about god requires retraction of preconceived notions, and it needs repentance—meaning turning in a new direction. To “repent in dust and ashes” evokes the part in Job 2 where Job is found by his friends to be sitting in ashes, a sign of humiliation but also a time of silence. Indeed, he and his friends sit there for a week in silence.

Thus, this statement by Job contains several key elements necessary for understanding the truth about god: (1) Retraction of preconceived notions; (2) Repentance—turning into a new direction; and (3) Humble silence before god, allowing instruction to occur.

What do these concepts from the Book of Job—the humble embrace of an uncertain and incomplete Truth of a transcendent god great beyond imagining, the willingness to abandon preconceived notions about god and be silent to receive god’s instruction—suggest with respect to our apparent need to define the truth about god with such clarity that it can be shared with or even imposed upon others?

Charles: On the one hand, we have the limited and finite world as we human beings can know it—that is to say, the world as a time-bound, perishable dataset collected via the senses of sight, smell touch, taste and sound and then collated and analyzed with respect to cause and effect in the “sixth sense” of the thinking mind (which I distinguish from our aware, conscious, mind). On the other hand, in contrast, we have the world of the spirit, the home of our awareness, our consciousness, and concepts for which we lack natural terms to describe and lack data to define. I include in that god’s spirit, the I Am-ness.

Central to the world of the spirit (and Job alluded to it) is quietness. To have the truth about god revealed to us requires quietness of the physical senses as well as a quietness of the thinking mind. It is manifested in the Abrahamic religions as prayer and in Eastern religions as mediation.

The common theme is that to experience god, one must become quiet. Throughout the bible, images of isolation and quietness abound. not least in the story of Jesus who frequently stepped aside to pray in quiet solitude, presumably to open himself to communion with god. To me, this is the world of the spirit, of inner peace, of nirvana; the world where we experience—but don’t necessarily understand—god. And it is the world of repentance, of turning aside from our worship of the finite physical world and surrendering to the will and the way of god.

Don: Is it troubling to conclude that god is to be experienced but not understood? To realize that many of our questions about god will never be answered? It seems that religion is designed to provide answers. We human beings are unsettled by uncertainty. We are naturally prone to seek resolution, finality, certainty; and religion has always been willing to fill that gap, to provide the answers, to reduce the uncertainty, for us. Yet god does just the opposite: If you ask him a question, he fires ten more back at you.

Charles: In my own spiritual journey, my personal conclusion that I cannot let that contradiction disturb me has helped me to recognize that god’s plan is to be unintelligible, certainly using the tools we use to make sense of the natural world. I think the more we understand of the natural world, the more it leads us to the revelation of an unintelligible god. So I find the issue, rather than troubling, to be reassuring and even enlightening. It makes us more conscious of our own limitations and that much more open to and desirous of the world of the spirit and to pursue it through our own spiritual journeys.

David: Many of the questions god asked Job have either been answered or seem likely to be answered by science. Certainly science has answers to the questions in Job 38, about the creation of the universe and the evolution of the Earth and its creatures. God asked: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Well, actually, we’re about 13.1 billion years late, but we are within 380,000 years (spitting distance, in cosmic terms) of arriving at the Big Bang. That is when god said “Let there be light” and the cosmic microwave backgound radiation, which we have now detected, began. As one astronomer puts it: “So, technically, we’ve seen all the way back.”

So if god were to come today and give Jay a hard time, as he did Job, and ask him the same questions, the Book of Jay would be very different from the Book of Job, I suspect!

Of course there is always recourse to the Final Question, one that science can never answer, is the origin of the Creation.

Michael: I think god asked Job if he knew when a leaf on a tree would turn yellow. I don’t think it’s a scientific question; I think god is simply suggesting that we did not control the process.

Robin: I agree. God is making the point that merely understanding the mechanics of nature does not mean that we can control it. God spent a great deal of time on these questions, when he could simply have said: You don’t understand. In this way, he is engaging the mind of Job (and us) to stop and think about the characteristics and the character of god.

Kiran: In a way, I feel like one of Job’s friends! I arrived at Christianity by way of Hinduism. Christian teaching helped me to overcome my former wrong beliefs. For instance, I used to be afraid of ghosts, so I would rush past any cemetery that was on my way to somewhere. Christianity relieved me of that fear by teaching that ghosts did not exist, and I was then able to walk calmly past a graveyard even at midnight.

I thought I had “arrived” at the Truth, but now I am learning that I have not arrived after all! To grow spiritually from here, it seems I must embrace this uncertainty and be willing to be tested as Job was tested. M. Scott-Peck wrote in the Road Less Traveled that we are scared to embrace uncertainty, we are afraid to grow in this way, so we make excuses and say (as Job’s friends might have said) “I’m happy with where I am at with my spirituality; I don’t need to go any further.” The moment we say that, we become a stumbling block not only to ourselves but to others around us. It is a humbling thought.

Robin: Do we have to understand in order to accept? Spouses often fail to understand one another yet can accept one another and have happy marriages. Is not understanding someone or something a valid reason for not accepting her, him, or it?

One thing still perplexes me: The state of death. In Job 3, Job asked why he could not have been born dead and thus spared the misery of life. King David also noted that the dead do not sorrow (but do not rejoice, also). I seem to recall Paul saying somewhere that to be absent from the body is to be present with god. And today there is a great literature about “near-death experiences” or “NDEs” which may be real or may be imaginary. The fact that the truth about NDEs is not really known is hardly reason to join the atheists.

Jay: To me, the truth about god is not a destination to be reached. That bothers many people, including myself sometimes, because if we could “arrive”, as Kiran put it, then we would indeed be right all the time. We need to get past our fear of being wrong, because being wrong is part and parcel of the process of learning and growth.

Religions are set up to lead us to a point where we feel we have arrived, that we have arrived. Job teaches us otherwise. He teaches that quietness and meditation, not one’s life experiences and knowledge, are the way to true spiritual learning and growth. Job also shows that this is not easy. Job is perhaps a deliberate example of just how hard it can be to arrive at some semblance of spiritual order.

In my opinion, spiritual growth is not a matter of moving from a “wrong” position or perspective or interpretation to a “right” one. It is not about right and wrong. It is simply growth. It is like working one’s way through school, developing one’s understanding. One’s understanding at an early stage of education is necessarily less rich than at later stages. Even the understanding of love (which I regard as an essential truth about god) is not static, but changes over time as we develop.

Don: Is this about the difference between my understanding of god and his understanding of me? Is it about the grace of god more than with developing “rightness”? A major message god seems to be trying to get across is that no matter how much “rightness” one accumulates, one is never going to get it right! There is always going to be some limitation, some lacuna in one’s understanding, knowledge, and viewpoint about god.

Therefore our relationship with god is not about us. It is about god, his graciousness and goodness and his understanding of the way things work. Perhaps there is a subtle message here that we have subverted in our effort to assemble a knowledge base about god.

Jay: Somewhere in the gospels there is a concept that it is more important that god recognizes and knows us than that we recognize and know god.

Robin: In 2 Corinthians 12:8-9, Paul says:

Concerning this [the “thorn in his flesh”] I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”

This reflects Job and other scripture where god says the foolish are wise, the weak are strong, and other counter-intuitive statements.

Don: Is there room for a church that has no doctrine, no certainty? Would it be able to attract people with the message “We’re not sure what the truth is, and our knowledge keeps changing”?

Michael: If they added: “But we are very accepting” then I might be attracted to such a church!

David: Such a church already exists, though it is not called such. It is Daoism. The dao—the way—god—cannot be understood, yet you must either take it or leave it. Sylvester said a couple of weeks ago that we need to define the term “the truth of god.” Jay likes the definition of truth as love. I like the definition as goodness, but I am now veering toward Chuck’s oft-stated definition of the truth as I Am—as the Being of god. The capital T Truth is that god exists. That seems to me to be the fundamental message of Job. To try to refine that definition further is futile and we should not waste time worrying about it. All god wants is that we accept his existence. The Daoist message is the same: Accept the way. Period. This also, to me, sounds like the surrender to the will of god that Chuck has talked about.

Charles: It seems to me instructive to reflect upon the ultimate point of letting go of our worldly attachments to the finite and physical; the point of ultimate transcendence to the infinite and the spiritual; the point of final quietness; of relinquishing the limitations of the physical body and of complete emptying the thinking mind.   It is instructive to contemplate the non-negotiable point of openness to the consciousness and spirit of God; of penultimate repentance and supplication of man’s “free” will and unconditional surrender to the will of God is precisely the moment of physical death… that moment when every“body” will “repent in dust and ashes”.

Michael: It’s hard to accumulate knowledge of the spirit. I don’t think the knowledge comes to us through our own efforts, except our efforts to meditate and achieve quietness. But simple as they sound, those are not easy.

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