Can you ever truly know God, or is the divine a mystery?

We need to know God in many ways

The Rev. Randy Beeman, senior pastor, First Christian Church, 1000 Ky.:

There are many ways God has been made known to us. Through creation, we see evidence of God’s power, God’s wisdom, God’s care for detail and God’s own personality as reflected in ourselves.

The problem in the Garden of Eden in the beginning of time was that people wanted to eat of the tree of knowledge, to know everything that God knew.

There are many things about God we will never understand. I have a large pair of shoes in my office with a sign that reminds me: “These are God’s shoes, and you can’t fill them. God is God and I am not.” In this sense, God is a mystery to us.

We need to know God in many ways. In Genesis 1, God is an all-powerful God at a distance. In Genesis 2, God is intimately walking around on earth with Adam. The ultimate revelation of God to people is through Jesus. And the best way we can know the mind and will of Jesus is to know and understand the Bible.

Jesus and the Scriptures all reveal to us the ultimate will of God: absolute and unconditional love. Love, in the end, means relationship. That is what Jesus is all about. God desires a personal relationship with us. We don’t understand everything about God, but God’s will is to be in a loving relationship with all people that we might know God.

In the quest for knowing God, we must be careful not to confuse knowing God in a personal relationship with just knowing about God. We can easily become a Sgt. Friday of Faith wanting to know, “Just the facts.” That isn’t what it’s all about. A lot of people know things about God, but do they really know God in a personal way?

So what keeps us from knowing God? Our own free will to leave behind a God who loves us, for something else that would give little eternal satisfaction. Yes, we can know God. Yet we can only know those things about God that God chooses to reveal to us.

And God already has revealed that we are to love God and love others. When we get that part of the revealed God down, then we can move on to the other mysteries.

Send e-mail to the Rev. Randy Beeman at rbeeman@sunflower.com.

Voyage of discovery replaces certainty quest

The Rev. Peter Luckey, senior pastor, Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.:

There is a wonderful scene in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” in which the character named Emily, now dead and in the grave, is allowed to come back to earth for one day. Emily chooses her 12th birthday.

She discovers two things: how extraordinary life is; and how the living are clueless about this.

Emily cries out, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize … Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?”

In every iridescent blue flash of a bluebird’s wings, in every towering thunderhead, there is — if we have ears to hear — an “Emily voice” saying, “Behold, the mystery and the awesome wonder of life, of creation, of the Creator.”

One can go through life either believing there is no other reality beyond this material world. Or one can go through life believing each moment carries a divine spark, a glimmer of the beyond.

From time immemorial, we humans have sought to understand this beyond, to know God. The ancient Scriptures testify to this quest and its ultimate futility. The prophet Job pestered God so much that finally God relented and answered Job.

Maddeningly for humans, God’s “answers” came in the form of more questions. At last, Job realizes that what he had received from God was even better than an answer: He received God himself.

Job confesses, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know” (Job 42:3).

What Job confesses is what Emily proclaims: There are mysteries more wonderful still.

When it comes to certainty and mystery in our lives, I believe we are called to give up the quest for certainty and instead to go on a voyage of discovery.

Send e-mail to the Rev. Peter Luckey at peterluckey@sunflower.com.