Who is God?

God is not the person you might think he is.  Many people read the Old Testament and see a picture of an angry and vengeful destroyer.  This is the God experience without the personal experience of God.  It is one thing to seek God intellectually, but God likes to come to us though personal experience, and so you have a grounding from which you can seek him with your intellect.  God came to me, gently and slowly.  First he sought me out, making circumstances in my life work out for the better, redeeming my suffering (I have a condition that cost me the first half of my 20's), and bringing beauty into my life.  He came to me bearing gifts of happenstance and serendipity that were too numerous and too life changing to be mere chance.  From chance meetings with people who changed my way of thinking, to circumstances in my life coming together to provide a much better path than I could have orchestrated on my own. At the same time, prompted by these unusual happenings in my life, I began to seek him out.  And the best way to do this was to find a good church and begin reading my bible.  (If you feel the nudge from him, I recommend starting with John because it is beautiful and because its pages lay out Jesus's place in Christian thought very well… But, as N.T. Wright puts it, John is a pool that is shallow enough for a beginner and deep enough to drown an elephant.)  I was personally drawn to the Gospel of Luke because Luke is believed to be a physician, and so he wrote a book that was very logical and matter-of-fact about things that defied logic.  Luke, Paul, John and modern writers alike, struggle to understand him with their whole intellect... and I found that Christians who are really practicing do not suspend logic and thinking to pursue him.  Rather, they chase after him with every faculty available to them, be they wise or simple.

In the New Testament, I found the God I had come to know through my experience. He was a loving creator God, who is working to restore and redeem the world and to redeem circumstances.  It is worth making a note here of what it means to redeem. Redeem means to compensate for the faults or bad aspects of something. When he redeemed my suffering from my illness, he created something new and good from the bad.  He used it to lead me to him, to find out who I was and what I was made of.  He started me on a path that would lead to loving myself, to loving people, the world, and the woman I was to marry.

Once I had a foundation in the New Testament, the Old Testament drew me in.  There I found the creator God, with a similarity to the God I had previously found in Native American Literature.  He was strong, wise, and creative, funny and intimate with the people he interacted with.  Time and time again, he created something new from the void of hope brought on by the human experience.  He was a strength to strong men and women, who did amazing things because they stopped and listened to him speak in his still, small voice and in circumstances in their lives.

That is God for me.  God who is at once a creator, a savior, a redeemer, and the cold chills I get on the back of my neck watching the sunset on my deck with my dog at the end of a long day.  I think that is the part I like most… the Holy Spirit, the Ruach. Ruach is a Hebrew word meaning simultaneously wind, breath, mind and spirit.  He is the third part of the Trinity, or the triune aspects of God. It is where the writers of the bible and extra-biblical literature get the “mighty rushing wind” or breath imagery for God.  And it is the God of my experience.  He is a spirit, a wind, with a personality.  He is a loving father.  He is a wise rabbi whom I follow with all of my heart because I love him.  She is wisdom.  She is beauty.  She is the apple of my eye.  And, so I am too, for him (or her, if you want - it is not without precedent in the bible.) Let him woo you, as a lover, as a friend, as a wise old man, or as an innocent child.  He is all of these things.  He created all of these things to show us a picture of himself.  And that picture is nothing short of beautiful.


Here is a resource on the female images of God in the bible.
http://www.womensordination.org/resources/female-images-of-god-in-the-bible/