Bible 02 – Who or What Is God?

The first great truth the writers of the Bible wished to impart to us is that the universe is alive and intelligent and motivated by love.

“The Father and I are one.”

“I go to prepare a place for you.”

“We love because He first loved us.”

“In Him we live, move, and have our being,” said Paul the Apostle. God is a living, breathing, infinite being pulsating with life and unwaveringly attentive to our every thought. This is so different from seeing the universe as a pantheon of impersonal, natural forces at war with us and with each other, forces in whose path we are thrown like dice, our fates determined by chance or whim, our souls like rudderless boats tossed upon the waves of a stormy sea.

Instead, we are shown to be intimately connected with the All, sprung forth as offspring and not as things, created with goodness at our core and an affinity with the Most High, a microcosm within the macrocosm in Whose image we are formed. What is intrinsically us is that which is intrinsically God – not arms and legs, hair and teeth, flesh and bone, but heart and mind, love and caring, affinity and longing, faith and hope.

What makes us divine is our soul’s built-in trajectory toward the fulfillment of our potential, the realization of our oneness with each other and with God, and the resilience of our spirit, seemingly incapable of defeat and able to weather the driest of seasons.

The message of the Bible is that we are glory-bound, as in the words of William Wordsworth,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

It is this deep insight that we bring with us as we endeavor to know the mind and heart of God through reading and contemplating the Bible.