Skip to main content

A God Who Reaches Out

Years ago I was guest speaker at a conference of a group of churches in a remote part of SW Uganda. One of the delegates I met there had walked for a couple of days to attend, sleeping out in the bush under the stars, and drinking water from whatever muddy pool he came across. I've been back several times since, but I've never forgotten the remarkable dedication of that one individual.

It's been widely acknowledged, and I've written here previously, that the universe seems to speak to us of an architect - a creator of everything we see around us. If that's true, it would require similar dedication on their part for us to have any chance of knowing and understanding them.

The innumerable religions and concepts of God that we find around the world today, not to mention throughout history, and the many other theories of origins, are testimony to this. Left to ourselves we are incapable of figuring out definitively, to everyone's agreement and satisfaction, who or what gave birth to the universe and to ourselves. For us to know them, they would have to reach out to us.

In the Bible we find a description of a God who does just that. In the imagery of the book of Genesis, even before the emergence of civilisation we find God walking the earth like a gardener in a garden. God appears at crucial times and makes himself known to key influencers like Abraham and Moses. God speaks through people known as 'seers' or 'prophets' and appears in dreams and visions.

It is true that this God does not make himself particularly obvious. If you wonder why, just watch the prayer scene in Bruce Almighty! Research backs it up - most people only pray when they want something. Why would God expose himself (or herself) to that? But he reveals himself to those who sincerely want to know him for who he is, not just for what they can get out of him.

Finally, in Jesus, we find a God who not only reaches out to us but who fully identified with us - to the extent of experiencing human life, suffering and death for himself. One who offers solutions to the very worst aspects of the human condition. Who, on surrendering his human flesh, remained with us in spirit - literally the very breath or life of God, with all the accumulated memories of life lived as a human being, continuing among us and working in us.

Surely that's a God worth responding to and reaching out towards?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robbing The Poor To Feed The Rich?

Now that cuts in spending seem to be on the agenda of all the main political parties, the big questions still to be answered are: how much? And where will the axe fall? According to a recent poll by Ipsos MORI, published by the BBC ( http://bit.ly/d168R ), the most popular candidate with most people is overseas aid. That’s not really surprising. It’s understandable that during severe financial crisis most people want our government to look after our own affairs first. Charity, as the saying goes, begins at home. But is it really right for the poorest nations of the world to be penalised for a crisis that was brought on by the rich? The developing world already spends $1.3 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants (Source: World Centric, http://bit.ly/b5C7f ). Every day at least $100 million flows from the poor of the world into the pockets of the rich. Existing problems like drought and famine will not go away just because there is a worldwide recession, and the poor are mo...
2 comments
Read more

God the Omnipotent and Stupid?

One of the questions you will often hear raised about God goes along the lines, "If there is an omnipotent God why doesn't he do X?", where X may be anything from stopping wars or preventing earthquakes to curing cancer. Often there is a deeply personal reason behind the question, which makes a purely rational answer wholly unsatisfying. All the same, it's a rational question and some kind of rational answer is deserved. But two things make it a complex question to which no simple answer is possible. One is the extraordinary diversity of the things that 'X' may represent, all of them having different causes with different and completely unrelated solutions. The other is the sole focus on God's omnipotence. Because God, if he exists, must be so much more than just that. There is an old philosophical conundrum on the same subject, of the kind that philosphers love to pose and to ponder. If God is omnipotent, can he create an object so massive that he himself...
Post a Comment
Read more