WHAT IS GOD:TOP TEN IDEAS ABOUT THE NATURE OF GOD:COSMIC ENERGY,FATHER,RATIONAL ORDER

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	WHO/WHAT IS GOD?
	God is less similar to us, than similar
	GOD IS UNKNOWABLE - Book of Judith 'Listen to me, rulers of the people. What you have said to the people today is not right; you have sworn this oath, promising to surrender the town to our enemies unless the Lord turns and helps us within so many days. Who are you to put God to the test? You will never learn anything! You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart or understand the workings of the human mind; how do you expect to search out God, who made all these things, and find out his mind or comprehend his thought? No, my brothers. Do not try to bind the Lord our God; for God is not like a human being, to be threatened, or like a mere mortal, to be won over by pleading. Therefore while we wait for his deliverance, let us call upon him to help us, and he will hear our voice, if it pleases him.' Book of Judith 8:11-14		The first thing you do when you try to work out what God is, is shoot yourself in the foot by saying that God is unknowable. Judith admitted as much in the passage opposite. The question she asks is this: how can we possibly know what is in God's mind when we don't even really know what is in the mind of the person sitting beside us? The trouble is, we ask the question all the same. We can't help ourselves. And the answers keep shifting, because our ideas about what God is have developed over the centuries, as part of an emerging revelation.
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	GOD IS FATHER - Matthew's gospel Jesus said: 'Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name. You kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.' Matthew 6: 9-13		The 'Our Father' is a statement of Christian belief about what God is. Christians see God as a benign all-powerful parent who protects us, provides for us, and at the same time sets limits for us.
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	GOD IS COSMIC ENERGY - Genesis 'In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.' Book of Genesis 1:1-5		God IS the energy that created everything in the universe - and goes on creating it. Nothing, not one jot of matter, is the same from one second to the next. Even solid things like rock are constantly worn and eroded by the forces of wind and rain. Creation is a continuing event.
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	GOD IS RATIONAL ORDER: LAW AND JUSTICE 'Then Judah acknowledged them and said "She is more in the right than I...." Genesis 38		God is Order - the idea that Order will eventually triumph appears constantly in the stories of the Old Testament. Take the story of Tamar in Genesis 1:38. She is a most unlikely heroine, but she fixes her direction on Law and Justice, and like a bull-dog will not let go. She knows that justice should be hers, and fights for it. God is on her side, and rewards her in the best way possible, by giving her her heart's desire - not just one son, but two.
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	GOD IS UNPREDICTABLE CHANGE/CREATIVE CHAOS Genesis 1:26-27 Women and Men created in God’s image “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God s/he created them; male and female God created them.”		The danger is that we turn that sentence around, that we domesticate God into something like ourselves - something with human characteristics and emotions. If that happens, we've slipped over the edge of the question of what God is. God is not made in our image. So what does it mean that we are made in God's image? God is intrinsically creative, and for better or worse so are we. We cannot help ourselves imagining the new, experimenting, changing the world around us. It is in our nature. Like Eve, we don't know if the change will be for the better.
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	GOD IS ONE 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.' Deuteronomy 6:4 'And Ahab son of Omri took as his wife Jezebel daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him. He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. Ahab also made a sacred pole.'		In the story of Jezebel we are presented with two ways of seeing God. Jezebel sees God as many - in a range of manifestations in all the different forces of Nature and Creation. One force, and her particular favorite, was Baal, the power of water in all its forms particularly as it affects agriculture and crops. This concept of God was male, since rain planted life within the Earth. Another force was the goddess/essence of the family, who embodied the power of woman to create life within her body and protect her young ones, and indeed all the members of her family. These two examples show how Jezebel separated different forces of Nature. The Jahwist priests like Elijah saw God as One - one unified power that breathed life and continuing energy into everything that existed. This God was not like a human being, and did not behave on a human scale. Rather, human beings at their best aimed to resemble God in some way.
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	GOD IS TRINITY 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' (Matthew 28:19) 'May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.' (2 Corinthians 13:14). 'To God’s elect. . .who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood.' (1 Peter 1:1-2).		St Augustine and the boy on the beach (the Golden Legend, written in 1275AD) St Augustine was one of the greatest Christian theologians, but even he had trouble trying to understand what the Trinity was. One day he was walking on a beach when he saw a little boy with a spoon in his hand. The boy had made a hollow in the sand and was walking to the water, scooping up a spoon of water, then emptying it into the hollow in the sand. St Augustine asked the boy what he was doing. "I am going to put all the water from the sea into the hole in the sand" said the boy. With that, he emptied another spoonful of water into the sand. St Augustine felt sorry for him. "What you are trying to do is impossible" he said. "The sea is immense, and your spoon is so little." The boy turned and looked at St Augustine. "I will more easily do that, however, than you will understand the mystery of what the Trinity is" said the boy. And with that, the boy vanished.
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	GOD IS POSSIBILITY, RENEWAL Luke 15:8-10 God as the possibility of a new start Jesus: “Or what woman having ten silver coins, is she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
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	GOD IS GUIDE Deuteronomy 32:11-12 God described as a mother eagle “As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young as it spreads its wings, takes them up and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him…”		God is the source of reason and inspiration in every part of our lives. Ultimately, this means we can only get to know God by searching constantly, by trying to understand what God is and how He must be the touch-point for everything we do.
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	GOD IS ?		Albert Einstein said 'I do not believe in a personal god..... If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.'

	__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Bible Top Ten: Bad Women, Buildings, Films, Heroes, Heroines, Murders, Perversions, Plagues, Paintings, Slavery, Warriors, Ways to Heaven and Hell, Ideas about God, Young People, Kings and Queens, and Villains; Bible Resource for Old and New Testament Studies