And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:1-3)
Who is your God? That question is not something that an atheist can get out of with ‘I don’t believe in God’ because right there and then there’s some sort of assumption made about God – usually the Christian version – the one with lots of rules, etc. The mega one in charge of everything that people opt out of since we’ve all been enlightened.
Yet dig a little deeper and the concept of God isn’t just about something that looks like a grand fatherly figure dispensing lightening when He gets angry. When you think about God it can be about something far deeper.
So who is your God? Notice the question isn’t what is your God, but who. I can imagine that relations to deity figures is very personal and relational. You can imagine back in the day the moods of gods determined crops that was the livelihood for families. Complete ways of life revolved around the god and identities and cultures based around these beings that held such sway.
Times are different now, though aren’t they? We’re more sophisticated now aren’t we? Science has let us know so much about the world around us and the more we know, the more sceptical we become about the effort of these deity beings to have big stories that explain everything until we come across something that makes us doubt them that bit more. So we’re over the god delusion now and we realise that although there are forces at work greater than us, we are still fairly in control of how we engage with the universe around us. Those who carry on with this god thing need to snap out of it now, or at least acknowledge that it’s just to soothe some area of the conscience.
Yet … yet … this god thing doesn’t go away so easily. Those unexplained phenomena yet to be answered by science fact or science fiction does not fill in all the gaps. Not only that, but beyond the philosophical or scientific, there’s something about the human experience that suggests deity – that suggests what we mean by god. So the question remains – who is your God?
Such is the evangelical zeal of atheist rejection that it’s almost as though that quest against god is a god in itself. Secular humanists have already gladly accepted the role of human beings as whatever gods their imaginations come up with – what our minds can conceive one way or another through effort and patience we will somehow bring about. Beyond even that there are those who worship people and things as gods with their own built in rituals and sacred cows, customs and ceremonies from sports to fashion, work to sex – we have made gods of these all and believe that with a little bit of rationality here and a bit of psychology there it can escape the god concept. It does not.
This is why this question is so significant. That is why I reckon the Bible doesn’t seek to answer whether there is a god or not. That is why in conversations with the people of the Lord God Joshua framed it around the gods that their fathers had worshipped over the sea when Abram broke away to follow this mono-deity. That is why even to this day the question of who is your God is so important. Then in the light of the demonstration of deity in the cultural experience not just in nature, but the actual social, political and economic affairs of a people that question becomes of paramount importance – more than any other question, because the answer to that question determines life itself in all of its parameters.
In His loving words to the people He has rescued, the Lord establishes quite clearly not only who He is, but the exclusivity of the position He holds not just in the cultural and recent historical experience of a people, but in the larger picture of life. He is God – there is no other.
Who is your God?
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
Life With CD 