Episode 54: Who is God?

Without Works

Show Notes

Not Necessarily the Good News

https://www.jesuitscentralsouthern.org/stories/fr-rafael-garcia-sj-fulfills-vocation-in-ministry-with-migrants/

https://kfoxtv.com/news/local/sacred-heart-church-provides-shelter-to-all-migrants-regardless-of-legal-status-immigration-el-paso-texas-border

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HPOPYrilw

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/24/1145245308/el-paso-migrants-church-shelters-christmas-freezing

The More You Know

Christianity has borrowed God from earlier sources, Judaism of course, and that sourced several more ancient religious ideas. The Creation cycle and the Story of Noah exist in other Near Easter beliefs, but their purpose is different. Those stories are filled with elements that would seem strange to a modern Chrisitian; The gods that these stories borrow from are vulnerable, and they exist in a world of powerful demons, and can be fooled by magic spells or simple human ingenuity. This is a world of difference from the idea of Jehovah, all wise, all knowing, all powerful.

The most obvious example of the creation story. God makes a garden and dresses it. He creates a gardener to tend it, a man in his own image. Unlike God, Adam cannot be alone, so God creates a woman from Man’s side, telling both of his new creations that they are forbidden from eating the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, which grows there.

Eve is tempted by the serpent, and she convinces her husband to eat of it as well. That leads to this odd passage:

“And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever. So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.” - Genesis 3:23

This seems to suggest a rivalry between God and human beings, something unfamiliar to modern Christianity. There are other ways in which this God seems unfamiliar to modern Christianity. He is a tribal God, who plays favorites. He repents of having made man, so he floods the earth to wipe out all of mankind.

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” - Genesis 6: 5-7

This God also demands absolute obedience. Later, when God chooses the patriarch Abraham for an exclusive pact:

Reading from - Genesis 22: 1-15

Contrast this with the vision of God presented later, in the New Testament.

“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” - 1 John 1:5

“The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” - 1 John 4:8

Is this the same God? It suggests a few things, that either the nature of God is dynamic, and can change, or the nature of God is immutable than these are stories about him, someone from the outside making assumptions about what he saw and understood.

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