DECEMBER 15 2021
ALL ABOUT GOD.
Dr. Paul Tournier, medical doctor/ psychologist /Christian, in his The Meaning of Persons (bought in 1974) urged me that “the supreme and universal need for us humans is to find God.”
Finding God is all the more pressing today, as the environmental news becomes ever more alarming. In the December 12 ARCTIC NEWS the heading was: Terrifying Arctic methane levels. Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2, suggesting that our demise is accelerating.
So, where do we find God?
Not in heaven. Paul told us that, “God lives in inapproachable light: Nobody has seen God and nobody can see God”, (1 Timothy 6: 16). Jesus said to the Samaritan woman he met at the well there, that God is a spirit. He should know. Jesus also mentioned to Nicodemus, as recorded in John 3: 13, that nobody ever had gone to heaven, So, if we won’t go to heaven where God dwells in whatever form, where on earth is he?
For me, the matter of finding God took a different turn when I finished reading Dr. Sabine Dramm’s, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an introduction to his thought.”
On page 230 of her 232 pages book, she writes, “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and proceeds from this world back again to God.”
As I see it, God can best be understood – and found – when we equate God with his creation, giving us the holy duty to live in symbiosis with creation.
Thus, our life truly has meaning only, when we recognize creation as God-given and see it as totally divinely originated, as God is basically revealed to all of us only in his creation.
J. H. Bavinck, professor of missions, wrote that Paul, the great missionary, always started his message to the pagan world with, “The God who made the world and everything in it, is the Lord of heaven and earth.” (Acts 17:24). We know and find God when we believe him to be the Creator.
Perhaps a theologian should also be a geologist, an ‘earth-knower’, which Teilhard de Chardin was, a priest turned paleontologist. However, the church condemned his findings.
Another source.
The Belgic Confession expresses the God concept, beautifully. It poses the question, “How do we know God?”, and the answer – sadly often neglected by the church – is:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
So, what does Paul write in Romans 1: 20?
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from was has been made, so that men and women are without excuse.
A similar thought I found in a book Wisdom of Elders, by Peter Knudson and David Suzuki.
It starts with a quote from Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize winner neurobiologist, echoing Bonhoeffer, “The Creator and Creation cannot be separated. The two of necessity become intimately interfused and evolve together in a relation of mutual interdependence. Thus, what destroys, degrades or enhances one does the same to the other.”
Does that mean that, rather than finding God, we have destroyed him?
Yes, I sincerely believe that our God-consciousness has been destroyed and degraded because we have done the same to creation. We have to return to see creation as divine, and thus holy.
Lately, I have been reading two books by the indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
For far too long we have seen the culture of the First People as inferior. When Columbus arrived on America’s shores in 1492, he found a native population, now estimated at between 50-70 million, living sustainably in symbiosis with the land. In God’s name we destroyed them, just as we now are busy destroying creation.
Lament is in order:
O, Holy Earth, receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears
We now are aliens in our land
Oh where, Oh where your healing hand?
I deeply believe that very soon Jesus, the Christ, will return. He will fulfill the promise that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations, of the entire cosmos.” (Revelation 22: 1-2). There is where we will find God.