Lie #10 – God Is Unrecognizable

from Helena Sorensen Aman:

Lie #10: “God is unrecognizable.”

I’m hesitant to invoke specific verses in this series. I once heard someone say that, “Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and ye shall find.” was as true in the Bible as anywhere else. If you approach it looking for something specific, you’ll probably find it. And most of the lies I’m addressing connect and overlap, so it’s difficult to cut them out and line them up one by one. The lie that “God is unrecognizable” is connected to the lie that “I am untrustworthy.” It’s a way of saying that without the help of church-sanctioned authority, I cannot distinguish God’s voice from other voices. I don’t know goodness and beauty when I see them.

But this places the burden of revelation on me, on us. Here’s where the verses come in. In a careful reading of the New Testament, you’ll notice passages drawn out of the Old Testament and repeated. Some are brought forward to be set in context. Others to be contradicted. (Jesus said, “Your ancestors told you this, but I’m telling you the opposite.”) And other passages are repeated for emphasis or reinforcement. Take Jeremiah 31:34:

No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.

These words are repeated almost verbatim in Hebrews 8:11. Which is doubly hard to swallow if you’re a great believer in the need for “spiritual authority.” These passages place the burden of revelation on God, and in my experience God is not only concerned with self-revelation but endlessly delighted by it. In my experience, God is not standing at a distance, demanding we follow a series of theological stepping stones to reach a single, fixed reality, but rather active and alive, flexible and adaptable, capable of meeting us (all of us) where we are and offering exactly what we most need and can best receive.

When I take a moment to breathe and quiet my mind, when I close my eyes and sink down inside myself with the truth that God is recognizable, that God is capable of revealing God’s self, I feel like weeping. With joy, relief. The certainty of uncertainty evaporates, and suddenly I see God everywhere: in birdsong and old trees, in art and literature, in my neighbors and my enemies, in my gladness and my doubt.

But how do I express that feeling? It’s so light, so expansive.
It feels like God-with-us.
It feels like hope.