Who is God?
My ideas of “God” during different times in my life
6-yrs-old: Kind of distant “big Guy in the sky”.
14-yrs-old: Benevolant old grandpa.
23-yrs-old: Smiter. (quite a drastic change in a mere 10 years)
30-yrs-old: Moralist.
The present: Ultimate Reality God, a transcendental force I don’t completely understand, and probably never will on this earth. A God I’m excited about following. One that teaches us a “third way”.
What about you? How have your views of God changed over time?
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Jamie, as the old Jewish folks would describe what you are trying to describe, “Yahweh is the sea…we are the waves.”
What you are asking is soooo difficult to deal with
Growing up in a Greek Orthodox church in Romania, God was a mysterious, unapproachable old guy.
As a teenager I turned to a Baptist Church, so God became a baptist-loving God that would send anyone else to hell without any question. While listening to Communist propaganda at school I would literally pray for Jesus to come back and wipe them all out.
Coming to a baptist college here in the U.S. God became the “ready to return, judge and destroy” God - Left Behind style Christianity.
In the last five or six years I have ironically returned to the mysterious God as I saw him as a child, but now he is much more approachable, loving and lovable, reconciling all things to himself.
Virgil-
Yahweh is the sea…we are the waves. I love this.
It seems perhaps in some ways, you and i have followed a similar path….from a God who loves few–to a God who IS love and is about redemption.