God reveals himself to us (5)

by Father Ian

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

'It seems that many church members today lack a developed sense of God’s overwhelming holiness and divinity and majesty. Instead, their attitude is nonchalant, casual, indifferent. What this almost certainly means, unfortunately, is that they have not yet had a significant encounter with God in their lives. If they had, they would have begun to realise how inappropriate casualness, nonchalance and indifference are.'

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In a recent short book Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner 'reintroduces Christians 

to the true God: not the polite, easygoing, divine therapist who doesn't ask much of us, but 

the Almighty God who is unpredictable, awe-inspiring, and demands our entire lives.  

(Click on the picture for the book's Amazon UK page.)

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D. God’s true personality and character

Having looked at some trends in the modern spirituality industry we can move on to consider the character-traits of the real ‘living and true’ God (1 Thess 1:9). 

Here I just want to mention three particular aspects of God’s character. It’s not that these three dimensions somehow sum God up completely, which is impossible in any case. But they're important to have at the front of our mind in terms of our own personal relationship with God and our approach to him in prayer. They’re important also because they’re facets of God’s essential nature which Christians tend to underemphasise at present, for a variety of reasons.

(i) God is holy

This is probably the best single word to use to describe this particular aspect of God. ‘I am God and not man,’ he declared to the prophet Hosea, ‘I am the Holy One in your midst’ (Hos 9:11).

In the process of coming to know God better we learn that he is fundamentally and radically different from us - not only different but separate (the word meaning ‘holy’ in the Bible has its roots in the idea of separateness, inaccessibility) and superior.

God invites us into the closest possible union of life with him but this union is never a partnership of equals. God lives in another realm, on another plane, over, above, beyond our purely human realm. His nature is divine whereas ours is merely human; he is the Creator, the origin of everything that exists, and everything belongs to him, whereas we are creatures, God’s property even.

Men and women who encounter God in contemplative or mystical prayer always describe a growing awareness of God’s glory and divine majesty on the one hand and, on the other, an equally strong sense of our human, creaturely ‘smallness’ and inferiority.

One vivid illustration of God’s holiness occurs when he makes himself known to Moses for the first time, in the form of the burning bush (Exod 3:1-6). ‘Do not come near,’ he says. ‘Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground’.

God goes on to reveal his name as ‘I am’, meaning ‘he who exists’, ‘he who caused all that is to exist’.

The authors then report that Moses was so overwhelmed by this manifestation of God’s divinity that he ‘hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God’. And later, when Moses asked to see God more directly, God warned him: ‘you cannot see my face, for man cannot see me and live’ (Exod 33:20). 

It’s worth reflecting that the first three of the Ten Commandments reinforce this sense of the king-like majesty of God’s divine nature and holiness: in the requirement to worship God alone and avoid all forms of idolatry; in the law against swearing by God’s name; and in the command to keep the sabbath day holy, i.e. dedicated to God. 

Finally, we always need to keep in mind that the God who appeared to Moses and declared himself ‘I am’ is the same God who became incarnate in the person of Jesus. All four Gospels highlight Jesus’ divinity, as when the wise men bow down and offer homage to the child Jesus at the time of his birth; as when the disciples are struck with awe on the occasion of Jesus’ Transfiguration.  

Often it seems that many church members today lack a developed sense of God’s overwhelming holiness and divinity and majesty. Instead, their attitude is nonchalant, casual, indifferent. What this almost certainly means, unfortunately, is that they have not yet had a significant encounter with God in their lives. If they had, they would have begun to realise how inappropriate casualness, nonchalance and indifference are.

(ii) God is a person

God isn’t some form of cosmic energy without personality or character; he is a real, living person who invites us into a relationship which elicits attitudes that are recognisably personal: love, affection, commitment, but also respect, obedience, adoration, awe.

I would identify two common tendencies that hinder modern Christians from encountering God as a person. 

One is the tendency towards practical activism with little reflection and prayer, a faith based almost exclusively on moral-ideological commitments whether they be ‘liberal’ (social justice, alleviation of poverty, care for the environment, experimental liturgy) or ‘conservative’ (opposition to abortion, euthanasia, permissive morality, attachment to more traditional forms of worship). 

Debates among Catholics in recent decades can give the impression that our faith is little more than an ideology, the sort of commitment that accompanies membership of a political party or a pressure group. The sense of person-to-person relationship with God is often absent.

The second tendency is to treat God not as the real living person described in the pages of the Bible but as a kind of fictional character, usually, as already remarked, symbolising an attitude of permissive, sentimental ‘love’. 

Christians who in effect don’t see God as a real person inevitably lack awareness of how we can offend God and separate ourselves from him, by thoughtlessness or lack of devotion and reverence, or by breaking his moral commandments. (We should also remember that when we treat another person badly we not only offend against a fellow human being, we cause a rupture in our relationship with God.)

Both tendencies arise from a neglect of prayer in the sense of regular and frequent personal communication with God, and from ignorance of what God has revealed to us about himself. 

Without prayer and a commitment to come to know God as he is described in Scripture and in the Church’s Tradition, faith is understood as mainly a code of ethics, a guide to life (and these days, a fairly relaxed and undemanding guide), while God remains an abstraction, rather than a real person we can actually know and who engages our thoughts and feelings, our conscience and our will.

On the other hand, when God enters our life and we actually experience the impact of his love for us, and his paternal desire for our salvation and sanctification, we begin to understand how our sinfulness gives rise to displeasure and even anger towards us on God’s part and brings about a breach in a personal friendship.

Of course it’s true that God can’t take offence and lose his temper or experience hurt in the way human beings do. The divine ‘wrath’ attested to in the pages of the Bible, including by Jesus himself, is more an expression of an objective spiritual reality: that our various refusals to love, our thoughtlessness and our deliberate pursuit of self-seeking goals, can’t fail to bring about a loss of intimacy with a God who is all-good and all-loving.     

As this reality dawns on us we begin to feel an urgent need to make amends and to repair our damaged friendship. 

One reason, I believe, for the sharp decline in the recourse to sacramental Confession among Catholics is a weakened sense of God as a real person from whom we alienate ourselves by our sinful actions. A lack of awareness of God as real, an ignorance of prayer and an inability to understand the nature of sin and penitence is often particularly noticeable among Catholic children. 

(iii) God is moral

This third aspect of God’s nature follows on in a sense from the second. 

As all theologians of the Old Testament would agree, the most striking fact about God when he revealed himself to human beings is his strong moral character, his authorship of, and sovereignty over, the moral order of human society, and the summons he issues to all human beings to worship and serve him, not merely by way of religious ceremonies and rituals, but by living upright moral lives.

As I mentioned earlier, when God first communicated with Moses it was to declare his anger at the injustice of the Pharaoh’s treatment of the Hebrew slaves and to commission Moses to lead them, in his name, to freedom. God distinguished himself sharply from the pagan deities of other cultures by announcing binding moral principles, making clear that his people could only maintain friendship with him if they kept faithfully to his moral demands.

Moses with the tablets of the law (the Ten Commandments) by Gustave Doré (1832 - 1883)

He made his character and will known right at the outset with a set of edicts - the definitive ‘thou shalts’ and ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments - and in later years the prophets constantly reminded the Chosen People of the obligations God expected them to observe: to care generously for slaves, widows, orphans and debtors; to administer legal justice impartially and incorruptly; to eliminate motives of greed for money and property, sexual immorality, dishonesty in business dealings, bribery, and so on.

Jesus of course is this same God made human, and during his ministry he naturally followed the Father’s precedent, by issuing commandments inviting acceptance and obedience. He made faithfulness to his commandments the sign and proof of our love for him: having told his followers, ‘to have seen me is to have seen the Father,’ he immediately declared, ‘if you love me, you will keep my commandments’ (Jn 14:15). 

Jesus prophesied that his second coming at the end of time would involve a final judgement of each person, with the wicked being thrown into perdition and the righteous welcomed into eternal life. 

I draw attention to this facet of God’s nature because so many Christians now appear to believe (at least in their own case) that a merciful God can never send anyone to Hell and that good, innocent people like themselves can’t possibly deserve to be condemned in any way. They readily envisage God as a caring father and shepherd, but reject his role as judge: ‘If that’s what God is like, I don’t want anything to do with him’.

Here again the problem lies in constructing an image of God according to current ideological fashions rather than meeting the real God in prayer and meditation on revealed truths.

When we come to know the true God more deeply we learn that his forgiveness makes big demands on the forgiven - but we also start to want to meet those demands rather than resenting them. 

We become conscious of the contrast between God’s perfect goodness and our own susceptibility to selfishness and sin. We accept that love for God and the call to holiness commits us to purifying our inner motivations and strengthening our virtues and good habits, in openness and co-operation with the gift of God’s grace.