Continued: Our God is too small by Susan Westall

After millennia there arose a people in what we now call the Middle East who came to believe that the true God had been revealed to them. Of course, they suffered from the human weakness of self-interest and therefore claimed that this was their God and that they were therefore God's chosen people. They were not the only people to believe this of their own particular god, but it stuck.

What was this god like? Well, to start with "he" was a very natural, human god; he enjoyed taking a stroll around his garden in the cool of the evening looking for the creatures that he had created. His self-interested creatures promptly decided that their god looked like them and proclaimed that they were made in the image of this god. In actual fact the created creatures had created their god in their own image because that was the only "thing" with which they could compare the godhead.

This was not good enough for God, who was (and still is) trying to reveal the Godhead to the Creation. Early in the Old Testament God reveals himself in human form to Abraham and Lot, where God may be confused with the accompanying angels. As humanity becomes more sophisticated God's appearance changes and, by the time that Moses comes into the picture, God is revealed as something much more powerful. The Godhead is now fire as revealed in the Burning Bush — a fire so powerful that the very ground is holy and yet the bush is not destroyed.

God's relationship with fire continues in the Old Testament, as witness the pillar of fire that led the Israelites into the desert by night and the pillar of cloud that led them by day. the chariot in which Elijah is carried away into heaven, but as time passes and as the Children of Israel learn of other ways of picturing the Divine as the result of their exile in Babylon, God is transcended into a heaven full of cherubim and seraphim. Cherubim may be seen in the ancient statues of Babylonia and they are no innocent little cherubs as seen in mediaeval paintings. By the time of the Book of Daniel, God has become the "Ancient of Days" on a throne of fiery flames and "a stream of fire issued and came forth from before him" (Daniel 7:10)

When we enter New Testament times the image of God changes again as Jesus opens up a vision of Love and of Light, which is further developed in the Gospel of John. God is now the Light of the World — a light that had previously been seen in the so-called heresy of Akhenaton, a Pharoah of Egypt, who had tried to turn the whole religious system of Egypt upside down by proclaiming a monotheistic religion represented by the symbol of the sun

Where are we going? Our God has been revealed as human in form, carried to extremes by Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The Godhead has been portrayed as Fire, as the Sun and as Light. Jesus is portrayed as bringing Light into the world, the knowledge of God. What are all these but examples of pure energy? From whence comes our strength? God is all-encompassing.

Surely, St. Paul had a revelation when he proclaimed the god remembered as "unknown" on an altar in Athens is indeed the God In (whom) we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:22-28). Our God encompasses everything, that is, all of Creation, our Universe and others that may yet be revealed. Our human nature finds such a concept beyond our comprehension, but in this 21st Century, with all the recent discoveries since the Renaissance (re-birth), the Industrial Revolution and the recent Scientific Revolution, have we not learned that God is everywhere — the Godhead's energy is even in the rocks, for there we have discovered radio-activity? The atom was considered indivisible when I was born; today we study nuclear physics.

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Continued: Our God is too small by Susan Westall

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