Repainting the Christian Faith

"Our words aren't absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the people that when they encountered God, they 'heard the sounds of words but saw no form'.

No form, no shape.

Nothing you could see.

In Moses' day, the way you honored and respected whatever gods you followed was by making carvings or sculptures of them and then bowing down to what you had made. These were the gods you could get your mind around. Moses is confronting people with an entirely new concept of what the true God is like. He is claiming that no statue or carving could ever capture this God, because this God has no shape or form.

This was a revolutionary idea in the history of religion.

You are holding a book in your hands. It has shape and volume and weight and all the stuff that makes it a thing.

It has thingness.

This book has edges and boundaries that define it as a finite thing. It is a book and nothing else.

But the writers of the Bible go to great lengths to describe God as a being with no edges or boundaries or limits. God has no thingness because there's no end to God.

Or as the question goes in the book of Job: 'Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?'

It makes sense, then, in a strange sort of way, that when Moses asks God for his name, God replies, 'I am.'

Doesn't really clear things up, does it?

Moses is looking for a being he can wrap his mind around. Is this the god of water or power or soil or fertility? All the other gods made sense; you could understand them - who they were and what they did and what they stood for. But this God is different. Mysterious. Unfathomable.

'I am.'

The name's origins come from the verb to be, so some read it as 'I will be who I will be.'

Others suggest it should be read like this: 'I always have been, I am, and I always will be.'

Perhaps this is God's way of saying, 'If your goal is to figure me out and totally understand me, it's not going to happen. Even my name is more than you can comprehend.'

Later Moses says to God, 'Now show me your glory.'

Which is our way of saying, 'I need more. I need something I can see. Something tangible.'

God's response? He tells Moses to go stand on a rock, because he's going to pass by. He explains to Moses that no one can see him and live, so he'll cover Moses with his hand (God's hand?) as he passes by, and then he says, 'I will remove my hand and you will see my back.'

The ancient rabbis has all sorts of things to say about this passage, but one of the most fascinating things they picked up on is the part about God's back. They argued that in the original Hebrew language, the word back should be understood as a euphemism for 'where I just was'.

It is as if God is saying, 'The best you're going to do, the most you are capable of, is seeing where I... just... was.'

That's the closest you are going to get."

~ Excerpt taken from Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell ~