Doreen Virtue’s Weekly Oracle Card Reading for this week ended with the ‘God’ card. Doreen explained that we are reminded to see God in everyone including ourselves – to look past the ego of the person to God’s essence which resides in every one of us. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, God can be found in all of his creation, if we look at it with an open mind and an open heart.
But who or what is God?
I am reminded of one of Abraham-Hicks’ daily quotes:
“When that which is God – or that which is that which man calls “God” – is being understood by man, man has to translate it into the format he understands. But this Energy—this Source that man is giving the label of “God”, cannot be quantified in any thing that man understands. And as man attempts to do it, the distortions are enormous.”
In his book, How To Know God, Deepak Chopra explains that the God that we seek and experience in our seven stages of spiritual development is firstly dependent on how we see ourselves. If the main focus of our lives is about survival, then we need a God who can provide us with that. As we see our survival as assured, we focus more on competition and power, and look to a God of power to help us. With each stage, our focus and our God changes, such that by the seventh stage in our development, we find God in pure being, in the state of “I am”.
I have no doubt that we might find examples of each one of these stages of God in the Bible. Many people have looked to the Bible for answers to their questions about God, expecting to find the one true God described there. They assume that the God who is talked about in Genesis is the same one discussed in the Psalms, the Gospels, Revelation and every book in between. If you examined all of the conduct of God in the Bible, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the different books describe many different gods. Could it be that God is in the eye of the beholder?
In Sunday School, I remember learning rote-style that “God is love”, and yet if we look back through the Old Testament, that God of love is hard to find. Instead, a wrathful God is prominent in those stories. If we consider that God encompasses everything from the Alpha to the Omega, could it be that those who experienced and wrote about God in the days of the Old Testament could only perceive one end of the spectrum? Could it be that they only saw a God which reflected their own way of being?
If we follow this line of thought, we find that when God introduced himself to Moses, he virtually told him as much. When Moses asked God his name, God told him: “I am who I am” and to tell the people of Israel that: “I am has sent me to you”, and that “this is my name for ever” (Exodus 3:14-15). Although in the Jewish religion, the name of God has often been seen as too sacred to be voiced, could it be that we are declaring who we believe God to be every time we utter the words “I am”?
Jesus also used the words “I am” in the New Testament. Could it be that people have misunderstood his meaning in John 14:6-7, when he said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also”? Is it possible that he wasn’t saying that the only way to find God is through Jesus, the man, or even the son of God, but that the way, the truth, and the life, and the path to God lies in knowing that each one of us is declaring who God is? Could it be that we will only come to know the truest form of God, when we attain the state of being which Jesus had attained? Was Jesus showing us how to be God?
I believe that in each of our earthly lives, we are attempting to be more God-like. We are each evolving. It makes sense, then, that as we are demonstrating who we are in each of these lives, we are demonstrating who we believe God to be, although often not consciously.
If God’s reason for creation of the universe was that It might know Itself in Its entirety, could it be that It experiences Itself through us? As we evolve spiritually in each life, we are believing ourselves, and God, to be greater than we did before, and therefore demonstrating that.
I believe we need to ask ourselves: “If I want to be a demonstration of God, what would I do? What would I be?”
Would I be a demonstration of God as displayed in the Old Testament – a God of wrath, or a demonstration of the God, of which Jesus was a true reflection?
If I were to consciously aim to be a demonstration of God, I believe I would like to demonstrate an aspect of the God talked about in “Tomorrow’s God” by Neale Donald Walsch. I would like to be “unconditionally loving, nonjudgmental, noncondemning, and nonpunishing”.
I would like to follow the way, the truth, and the life which Jesus demonstrated. I would like to come to know the true God, the God of love that I learned about in Sunday School.
I would like to develop spiritually to the point, when asked “Who or what is God?” that I could answer with conviction: “I am”.
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