We have been going over Revelation during our Wednesday night youth time. Last Wednesday (April 22), we covered chapter 4. If you're not sure what is in that chapter, it is where John has a vision of the throne room of God in Heaven. He describes God in terms of color and sound rather than with shapes and forms. I had never thought about God like that before.
We seem to get caught up rather often on God being not just a man, but a white man, or an old man or a man in the clouds, or the man upstairs. Really when you think about some of those things they are kind of limiting. We tend to make God in our own image rather than realize that we are made in His image. When we start putting all these terms on God it can begin to put limits on what we allow Him to do in our lives.
(Now, don’t misunderstand me on this. For our minds to be able to understand and grasp God we have to use terms that we can understand in order to comprehend Him [by the way the male pronoun is really more generic than anything]. We refer to God in terms of gender I believe more from a relational aspect than from an actual gender designation. If we referred to God as It, that would take all the relationship out of things. Think about it, when we refer to our possessions, we call them “It”, when we refer to a person, we use a descriptive gender pronoun. That has as much to do with our relationship to that person as it does anything else. Granted we will call an unborn baby an it when we don’t know the sex, but that is due more to the fact that we don’t yet have a relationship with that baby. Once we know the sex, we refer to the baby as he or she him or her.)
Ok, I say all of that to say that in order for us to understand God, we first have to personify God in our minds. However God is not limited by the ways that we personify Him. It should be our goal to realize that even though we have a need to think of God in such ways, God is actually beyond those limits, and if we try to confine him to just those limits that is where we begin to have problems in our relationships with both God and others.
So here is my challenge to you: Begin to think of God, as John says in 1 John 4, as Love rather than as just a personification and remember that Love, as it is laid out in 1 Corinthians 13, is limitless and really has no set form or boundary or gender. When we can do this we will begin to see our relationships differently and we can change begin to change the world. Peace and Love y’all.
