Which God?

Many people have asked me if the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God? They seem to see that there appears to be some sort of behavior differences in the way that the writers of the books that make up the collection of the Old Testament and the writers of the books that make up the collection of the New Testaments. While this may sound as a strange question to some, biblical scholars have found themselves in the middle of this very question.

In her book, “A History of God: The 4,000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” author Karen Armstrong starts off by stating, “In the beginning …God who was the First Cause and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temples or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore. Eventually, He was said to have disappeared.”

The “Sky God” as Ms. Armstrong refers to is what some see in the God of Genesis chapter one, an all powerful God that creates all that there is, but has little interest in it. This Sky God then is replaced by a new and more “interested” God that takes a closer relationship with humans. So Ms. Armstrong argues that there must have existed more than one god and there may have been many different ones as well.

While to biblical scholars, this might appear to be an interesting proposition to try to answer a challenging question, it might, in my opinion, fail to give a quite fulfilling response. Someone once told me that the simplest answers are sometimes the best. We may find that the best answer lies under our very eyes.

In looking at our relationship with God, it does find comparison with a closer relationship that each of us participates in on a daily basis, this relationship being with our fellow human being and in this case our own parents. When we are very young, we come into a relationship with our close relatives, our parents. This relationship to us is with a being that has more abilities and more power over us. We learn shortly that we can rely on relation to provide food, warmth, and love for us. We soon learn through early interaction that these beings have names that we can relate to them through. They are called, Mom and Dad.

As time goes on, we discover more and more about our parents, our relationship slowly changes and more connections become established. We may, after some time, no longer refer to them as mom and dad, but take on a more formal name for them. However, while we are proceeding in this, the persons of mom and dad do not change. They are not replaced by someone else because we discovered some new attributes or new concept of them. They remain the same.

This is how I see human interaction with God. God is not replaced by some other god by the sudden realization of some new idea about God. The Sky God did not go away; we just learned that this powerful God is one and the same. The God of all creation is the same God that is very interested in the daily lives of the created. The more and more time that we spend in the presence of this God, we walk away with a more cleared and deeper understanding of God. The God of the Universe is the same God of the Cross.

Praying for you as I hope that you are praying for me.

-Pastor Craig