The "Personification" of God

I love to meet people who recognize the limitations of our own intelligence and our own insignificance in this vast universe. But can that humility go too far when it comes to knowing our Creator?

A young man named Paul described this when he told me that one of the main reasons he left the faith he had grown up in is the tendency for people to personify God. He believes the Bible was written by people as a way to explain and describe God, rather than inspired by God as a way to reveal Himself to people.

There is a big difference between these two approaches.

A constant theme in the Bible is God’s commands against idolatry. An “idol” is defined as “an image or representation of a god used as an object of worship”. Early idols were often in the form of statues, such as the golden calf that reminded the Israelites in the wilderness of the more familiar gods they had left behind in Egypt.

As physical objects, these idols are made by human hands, and are very convenient because they don’t talk back, and they stay in one place if you want the freedom to go somewhere else to do things that might displease it. Or you can take it with you and bring it out when needed, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp or like a good luck charm.

But as an “image” of a god, idols don’t have to be limited to physical objects. The can also exist in our imagination. We can pick and choose what we want to believe and what we want to reject about our version of “God”, and in so doing we are forming an idol just as real as any golden calf. I didn’t blame Paul for rejecting what he sees as a very arbitrary version of God based on human whims and tradition.

This is just what we are left with if the Bible is indeed just the product of human imagination. But nowhere in this library of books that form the Bible do we find it referring to itself as simply the word of man. Rather, it is the revelation of God throughout human history, and in reading it we gain a much better understanding not only of our Creator, but also of who we are in relation to Him.

So why didn’t God just state up front who He is and what He expects of us? Why the gradual self-revealing and the many lessons and examples along the way? Why choose one people, the Israelites, for Himself and allow such conflict to occur, and why allow evil people to prosper at times? Why allow suffering, and war, and horrible atrocities? What do we learn about ourselves and God in all this?

Because words without actions are just words. Ideas untested are just ideas. Love needs context, and that context needs to include sacrifice and compassion, which can’t exist without the presence of suffering or loss. The Bible shows God relating to us in a wide variety of circumstances, and through it all shows us how we can have a relationship with our Creator.

In Exodus 13, Moses asked God to “show me your glory”. In Exodus 34:6-7, God answered – “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Now imagine if God had just left it at that, and we didn’t have the rest of the Bible for reference. Imagine that each of us had to learn all the lessons of the Bible the hard way, by experiencing them for ourselves rather than learn from the experiences of others? What about all the times we have to learn hard lessons over and over again until we get it right? We wouldn’t get very far.

In our grocery aisle conversation, Paul told me about his own version of God after having abandoned the Bible’s version as being too “personified”. Paul’s preferred version of God seemed to me to have many of the conveniences of those early golden calves. As more of an impersonal “power” it didn’t dictate moral preferences or hold him accountable. It seemed ready to receive his soul energy after this life but promised to leave him alone until then.

Without the rest of the Bible, or in Paul’s case, without reference to the Bible, we are left up to our own imaginations to fill in the blanks, and all we end up with is a worthless idol.