The God concept is at the root of all religions and it is important that we get this right if we are to have a real recovery from the modern world which seeks to diminish or ignore God altogether. As I listen to religious preachers I am often reminded of their attempts to diminish God’s role in the affairs of the world. This is a dangerous and poisonous trend which has distracted many Christian believers from focusing on the one factor that has always been present in all cultures and societies God.
The God concept is not an intellectualism or metaphysics but a simple and direct statement of truth. According to the Bible God is totally unbound from all things both physical and spiritual and is present in everything. The classical arguments used to prove that God is omnipresent and omnipotent in all regards is based on the fact that no part of the universe is static or stationary while all parts constantly change.
This means that we have an intellect which operates in constant change and takes the whole picture into consideration before it makes any judgements or offers advice. God is perfect in every aspect and that includes His perfection in the intellect. We should therefore be in constant dialogue with God and understand that the intellect which God has given us is innately unlimited. In this way we will always be guided by His voice and our actions will always align with His desires.
It is often said that man is an intellectual being and that his thoughts determine his actions. This is not quite so and the concept of man being an intellectual was certainly a creation of Renaissance thought. In fact the concept has been around much longer than most people would think. The problem arises when humans begin to define and limit the attributes of God. This leads to a situation where the more limited a human’s view of God, the more limited his or her ability to participate in the workings of God’s plan.
God’s voice is also heard when man understands the limitations of his own knowledge and tries to enter the presence of God. Through this process of opening our eyes to the limitations of our own knowledge, we come to appreciate the divinity within all things including ourselves. What we find out in this process is that all things possess a divinity. This divine presence is what makes everything that we see and experience sacred.
The idea of the divine is expressed most obviously in the Christian religion, and when you read through all of the New Testament, you will note that the authors are almost all repeating the same themes. When we accept the fact that the ideas expressed in the New Testament are based on ancient philosophies which date back hundreds of years, it becomes possible to understand how the writers of the New Testament held to such belief. We must also remember that the Christian religion was extremely popular during the time of the Roman Empire and that many of the most important documents were written in Greek. Therefore we can see the very roots of the Christian god concept in the philosophy of the Romans. This is not to say that the idea of God was unknown to the ancient Greeks or to the Egyptians but it is merely acknowledging the fact that the ideas expressed by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians did not bear any resemblance to those found in Christianity.
We need to look beyond the religious implications of God and start using the New Testament to process other thoughts about the nature of God. It is not necessary to believe in a personal God to process these thoughts because the process itself is itself a process of spiritual evolution. When we examine the New Testament and other ancient spiritual traditions, we find that what started as a small group of minds holding to a simple set of ideas eventually developed into what is known today as “the big picture”. Every individual’s life is a part of the bigger picture and when we get ourselves wrapped up in our own little world, we are really missing out on the opportunity to look at the whole picture and to be thankful for the presence of God.
Today, many people feel that they have a personal God and if you ask them if they think that God cares about them, they will say yes, however, what they don’t realize is that they are not seeing the true face of God. If we can come to a place where we see the face of God and recognize his power for salvation, then we will have found our personal God and that makes all the difference in the world. To get to that point requires that we go through a process where we allow God to work through us so that we can reach the point of no return and then understand that everything that we do in life is to help move him towards reaching that final destination. This allows for true peace within our hearts and a stronger sense of divinity, because the real God is now in charge.