Tale of Four Gods
Psalm 4 (NRSV): Answer me when I call, O God of my right!
You gave me room when I was in distress.
Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.
How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame?
How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?
But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself;
The Lord hears when I call to him.
When you are disturbed, do not sin;
ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord.
There are many who say, “O that we might see some good!
Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!”
You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound.
I will both lie down and sleep in peace;
for you alone, O Lord, make me life down in safety.
It didn’t take me long to find a Psalm that exemplified the notion that God can seem different at different moments in our lives. This Psalm is more meant as a bit of drama, a series of short scenes acting out a particularly rough time in the psalmist’s life.
The psalmist is being persecuted, so God becomes very distant when being wrongly accused.
But then, the writer realizes that the faithful have been set aside and that each will receive their reward in time…a critical view of God’s withheld judgment.
And how does the psalmist know who’s faithful? By following the rules that our authoritative God has set out for us.
Because in the end, no one brings as much benevolence and good as God does to the psalmist’s life.
You may think, “Al, you’re stretching a bit,” but this type of waffling back and forth in Psalms is very common. In one Psalm the psalmist is praising God for all the good in their life while in the next they’re wondering where God is. And this is why I chose Psalms as an example, because it deals less with the stories of the Bible and more with the individual emotion of the believer. When we deal with the emotion and experiences of our relationship with God, we get a clearer picture of what we believe about who God is and what God does.
Two Gods or Four?
There is a common conspiracy (not the FBI, super spy kind of conspiracy – just a plain old second explanation) that God is different between the Old Testament and the New Testament. A wrathful, easily angered, and quick to dispense justice God in the Old Testament and a loving, forgiving, and tempered God in the New Testament (namely, Jesus).
And no wonder: In the Old Testament, God burns cities to the ground, floods the world, sends armies down on the “chosen people”, and boots his first two kids out of the house for eating one of his prized apples.
While in the New Testament, Jesus performs miracles, sits with the lowest of lows, breaks down all the barriers to God, then gives himself up to save even those who imprisoned and beat him.
So how can we say, “God is unchanging,” when we have this obvious and blatant disparity
between the two divisions in the Bible?
Is the difference in God, or in ourselves?
Now, conventional Christian thought says, “God is unchanging, so it must be our interpretation.” But, is it necessarily our interpretation or that of the authors of the Bible, or both?
Take, for instance, the book of Amos. Its nine chapters and repeats itself, JUST READ IT!: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos+1&version=MSG)
For a little back story, the two kingdoms of Israel (it was split into two after King Solomon) at this point enjoyed peace and prosperity because the neighboring countries, Assyria and Damascus, were at war. This left Israel to grow its borders to almost the largest it had been in the days of David.
With this prosperity came greed and lack of adherence to their values. This took the form of wealthy Israelites exploiting the poor subsistent farmers that rented their land to increase their own wealth.
So, Amos comes along during a “bull market” for Israel to tell them they’re doing wrong against the order God set up for them.
While we have Amos’s preaching in text which clearly shows an authoritative God, who is ready to judge and punish Israel for their disobedience, what kind of God did the rest of Israel see?
How about the peasant farmers who were being exploited? What would their response to Amos be?
What about the wealthy and the king’s priest, Amaziah (Amos 7:10-13)? What would their response be to all the doom and gloom Amos was bringing in the midst of one of the most profitable times in Israel’s history?
In the same instance of time, three groups could have completely different views of God and all be right! God did provide prosperity to Israel, God is angry with where Israel is going, God will avenge the wrongs brought about on the down-and-out.
Again, I come back to the question: Did God change? Did the writers of the Bible have one view of God? Did other people of the time have other views of God? Do our interpretations of the Bible affect what God looks like?
And we can ask these questions about any and every piece of scripture we find:
- Moses and the Exodus
- Noah and the Ark
- Jonah and the…REALLY BIG FISH
- Jesus and the Storm
- Saul (Paul) and the Blindness
- John and the Revelation
If we can honestly say that God is unchanging, then we have to look at how the authors of the Bible (and we) interpreted God’s engagement and judgment.
If we believe that God does change, then we need to evaluate how that changing nature is revealed to us today as it changed for the people of Israel back then.
Two Gods? Four Gods? How About ONE!
As Christians, a core belief is that God is one (in three). In most cases, (although some do believe otherwise) God is also unchanging. So, if this God does not change, than our ideas, conceptions, beliefs, and faith have changed based on the circumstances and events that shaped who we are today.
However, those ideas should be viewed through a fraction of who God is rather than multiple versions of the same God. God was the same God who burned Sodom and raised Israel from the ashes, the same God who flooded the Earth for all of humanity’s issues only to deal graciously with the same problems centuries later, the same God who banished his first creations to eventually send his only son to restore creation’s relationship.
This is the same God that is worshiped at Connections and churches around the Triangle, North Carolina, and the world. When we stop looking for God to be easily summed up and revealed in one teaching, one piece of scripture, one moment in our lives and start to look for the many fractions of who God is through the relationships we have and create, the diverse and sometimes troublesome images from others with different views, and the ways the events and moments of our lives interact with our understanding, we start to create bigger visions, ideas, concepts, and faith about who God is.
